somber fog
I'll keep the intro short. Lately, I've tried some leaders I've never played in Civ7, hoping to find something interesting or unique I had been overlooking until now. When I had a test run playing as Friedrich Oblique, I was expecting him to be, more or less, like their Baroque counterpart, a bit boring and weak but mostly ok. Boy, how wrong I was.
Let's start from what makes a militaristic leader effective. Personally, I would say it mostly depends on two things:
- having extra combat strenght (which can also come in the form of War Support);
- having some kind of bonus that helps you even outside of war times.
Out of all the militaristic leaders in the game, Friedrich Oblique is the only one who lacks both.
This means that he is forced to go to war to make use of his bonuses, but lacks ways to leverage military aggression effectively.
Let's now analyze their bonuses, starting from "Gain an Infantry Unit when you complete a Technology Mastery or construct a Science Building."
While this sounds like a decent bonus, it just doesn't come into play enough. In my testing sessions, I've found that you never have enough resources to get more than 5/6 free units in antiquity, and less than a dozen in exploration. You're much better off spamming Infantry from the production queue than by trying to abuse this ability.
The other ability is "Army Commanders start with the Merit Commendation, granting them +1 Command Radius."
I actually think this is a fantastic ability, it opens for a lot of possibilities and makes your Commanders able to gain a lot more Experience. The thing is, you end up having barely enough troops to make Merit worthwhile, while struggling to mass produce Commanders because your production queues and gold reserve are already strained by your normal militaristic gameplay (chasing high science output and producing tons of units).
My proposed solution in the comments due to character limitation.