I agree wholeheartedly. 

Aggressive stance: that's quite an interesting question. It's relatively easy to fool the AI into regarding you as non-threatening, then launching a massive surprise attack early on. I'm quite a fan of that, though you gotta watch the economy. Or you can be quite passive and get away with an undersized army for ages, putting your efforts into buildings instead. But such tactics won't work against Alpha because, alas, they are not dumb. Aggressive in this game will mean building a powerful military and not being afraid to use it. It will also entail aggressive use of religion - spamming missionaries and relentlessly filling any "cushion" civs with our religion. Our tech choices will be heavily influenced by this stance as well.

How many units you send out on an excursion depends entirely on the circumstances, but to take a city without overwhelming tech superiority I use a rough rule-of-thumb of 2.5:1 minimum (attacker vs defender ratio)

Promotions within a stack: barrage and city raider for cats and the like; at least one good medic (usually a spearman or similar), at least one sentry (horse unit); the rest - combat promotions or city raider.

No hard and fast rules here. I often attack without siege units at all. However, I would say 40% siege, 10% defense, 50% attack but that's just my opinion.

Must disagree there. It is essential to preserve your top units. Siege units are the cannon fodder, if you'll escuse the pun. Heavily promoted units are indispensible on the battlefield and also affect military production Wonders (West Point, Heroic Epic) I often end up with units with XP's in the +30's

It's about tipping the balance, yes.

Impossible to say until we see the circumstances. However, the ideal is to target the core cities whilst making them think we're not. Tricky, that. But burning a Capital would even be worth the sacrifice of a whole army. The outer cities will be rather harder than cushions So many strategies.......

Finally, I'd like to say that, although Korea seems a popular choice, I'd like folks to consider Spain and Carthaginia and maybe express their thoughts. I have also been pleasantly surprised with Ethiopia.

I'm not disagreeing with Korea, just want to make sure. If Mongoose lets us know what sort of map we'll be playing, that will certainly affect our decision. Alas, the crystal ball is cloudy.

Everything else being equal, I think we have one advantage with our system. No matter how they organise things, Alpha is bound to be a bit of a committee decision. We, on the other hand, will have different personalities taking over at regular intervals. That makes us unpredictable. And that's good for us and a worry for them.

I am no expert on combat but it seems to me we should try to rush for construction get our UU and start a war. Don't forget about spearman/pikies. We have to check what kind of units our enemy is using anyway. Flanking can be a ***!

Since the AI tends to build lots of longbowmen the +25% against archers may not be a bad upgrade. I always try to have a few units inside the stack that have defensive value as well. When you only have city attack your units will die against counter attacks.

I think it would be a good strategy to try and start an early war just after the invention of construction. The AI doesn't seem to appreciate artillery units like humans do. Seems like a decent strategy to me. But of course we have to see if we have a decent start.