Just thought I’d describe a strategy for a Mongolian deity domination game which you should win anywhere from about 100 AD to about 1500 AD. Settings are small, Pangea, epic speed, for patch .275. I’ll be doing whatever the game allows except for restarting from a save due to a bad military outcome: therefore I’ll be using what some would consider exploits.

We are going to use a National College (NC) start and direct our efforts towards building an experienced Keshik army as quickly as possible and use it to go pound on our neighbors. We will use two research agreements (RA) and tech blocking to reach Civil Service and Chivalry. Our early happiness will come from puppeted luxury cities and our late science will come from the patronage line of social policies to Scholasticism. We will settle no cities in this game.

We are going to select a mining start. Initial research will be Mining, Pottery, Writing, and Philosophy. Initial build will be scout, worker, granary, and then the National College after buying a second scout and library using gold from ruins, right of passage agreements, and selling our first mined luxury. After initial explorations bring your warrior home to protect your first worker and continue exploring with your scouts with an emphasis on meeting other civilizations and capturing a worker without starting a war. You get one declaration of war (DOW) without incurring significant negative diplomatic relations. We don’t want to burn that for a worker as it greatly reduces your income from selling luxuries later on in a domination game.

About this time, if you are lucky, a barbarian will invade your capital. Reduce him to red health but do not kill him. This is your barbarian pet and he will allow you to resell luxuries over and over as he first pillages and you then repair your mines. This early in the game you may find that your opponents don’t have the full 450 gold that luxuries sell for at epic game pace. To handle this you sell them gold in exchange for gold per turn (GPT) and then sell the luxury for the full price. This way you still get the GPT even though the resource will be pillaged and so you get money for needful things and your opponents are hindered. It is not necessary to use barbarian pets to get this victory but you will get a much earlier victory if you do.

After Philosophy you will research through Iron Working first, so you can buy a barracks and construct the Heroic Epic, followed by Animal Husbandry, The Wheel, and the prerequisite techs for Civil Service and Chivalry. You will block unneeded techs by researching 1/3 of the way through them. This will include Sailing, Calendar, Masonry, and Metal Casting. You should have no problem with your blocks and prereqs if you wait till around turn 80 to enter into two research agreements which will get you Civil Service and Chivalry 45 turns later. Once again you sell them gold in exchange for GPT if they don’t have enough gold and then enter into the RA.

You’ll note that there have been no settlers built and this serves two purposes. First, it allows you to quickly build your social policies. Secondly, it allows you to field your army much more quickly and the units you are fielding are significantly stronger due to the Heroic Epic and barracks. Building an armory is problematic but maybe your best bet if you do not have horses hooked up yet. It costs three GPT which will add to your mid game monetary problems but it furthers your main goal of getting your Keshiks experience. We’re also going to further our Keshiks experience by selecting the Honor Tree of social policies first and taking the left side to the 1.5 experience gain policy .i.e. Military Tradition. Your culture for unlocking these policies will need to come from city states. You may also find that you do not have horses or iron within your capital city. Therefore, you will need to ally yourself with a cultural city state that can provide you horses or multiple city states to provide these needs. As a last resort you can buy them from other civs. Getting your own sources of iron and horses is a prime consideration in early target selection. Now on to military matters.

Your military campaign will be divided into two phases for each civilization you engage. Phase one involves reducing your opponent’s military. Upon declaration of war your opponent may invade and this is easily handled by hit and run Keshik attacks. Following this, your army will move forward with heavy melee units in front absorbing damage and using your Keshiks to eliminate enemy units. Thus, you will need to build three or four warriors in your early build up phase and advance them through long swords and eventually to rifleman. Therefore, after Chivalry you will need to set your research path accordingly: using research agreements with remote civs in combination with science from city states and scholasticism to reach Steel and Rifling. Often, the game will be won with no need for more advanced units. Your warriors will be built first and then chariot archers which will be upgraded to Keshiks. The upgraded warriors will be taking the enemy cities early on with horsemen and lancers being added to the mix later. I recommend getting 4-6 keshiks by upgrading/buying/building before buying/building your first horseman. Your keshiks need time earn promotions so don’t delay.

In phase two, after your opponents units are depleted, you can advance your Keshik army along captured roads, rotating Keshiks to fire on enemy cities until they reach one hit point and then using a horseman or lancer to take the city. Even a badly damaged unit will take a one hit point city. During this phase it should take only a turn or two to take each city as you follow enemy road networks. If melee units are wounded send them to the rear to be healed in cities with a great general (Khan) next to it or leave them in place if they’re lightly damaged and place a protected Khan next to them. Your Keshiks should not be getting wounded at all if your reconnaissance and tactics are appropriate. Do not allow enemy knights to pop out of the fog and kill your Keshiks. Captured workers can be used to provide a screening presence on your flanks. As your Keshiks gain experience I suggest sending half down the accuracy line and the other half down the barrage line. After three promotions you get logistics i.e. two attacks per turn. This is the dividing line. After logistics your tame little Keshiks become beasts, gaining experience rapidly and allowing you to promote them with range and indirect fire. At this point they can fire two times, three tiles, over obstructions and still have nine movement points along roads: they are awesome.

You’ll get all the pieces into place and start your campaign sometime around turn 140 or perhaps earlier if you can goad your selected target into a DOW. The longer you can play the innocent victim the longer you can keep friendly relations with other civs and have a robust market for your goods and partners for RA’s. Entering declarations of friendships usually does more harm than good IMO but can be used in the right circumstances. You will probably find that you are short on gold and happiness after puppeting several cities. For gold you need to use captured workers to build a trade network, you may be able to get a good bit of GPT from your victims, you may need to burn a Khan for a golden age. Just do what you need to do to get through this: it gets better after a bit. Happiness does not. It just gets worse and worse as you take more and more cities and puppet them. Therefore, you may need to hold up before your next DOW to raze some cities, get luxuries from new city state allies, build a happiness building, and the like. You may find that you can sell a city to another civ to get it off your hands in a hurry. If your game goes on long enough you may be able to take the Piety policy line to Meritocracy. You can of course choose to substitute that line for Honor or Patronage. There are arguments for each path.

Hope this helps some of you trying to get going on deity. Enjoy!

If I have to do that to play Deity ... I ain't playing Deity. I admire your dedication to mining the game's weird little nuances to find exploits, but it isn't for me. Well done though on finding a way to make it work for you.

FYI, your wall-o-text is hard to get through.

Wall-o-text is funny and fair. I’ve edited it to separate the paragraphs and hopefully that makes it a bit less of a slog to read through. As to exploits there are pretty much just two: the pretty standard tech blocking RA’s and the barbarian pets. The barbarian pets were noted to be helpful but not really needed. I just added it because I’ve not seen it discussed at length and it fit well with the idea of feeding gold to AI’s to get full value for trades.

If I have to do that to play Deity ... I ain't playing Deity. I admire your dedication to mining the game's weird little nuances to find exploits, but it isn't for me. Well done though on finding a way to make it work for you.

FYI, your wall-o-text is hard to get through.

I will have to say, I don't know if it's the AI changes to the last patch that has turned Deity AI waaaaay more agressive than my feeling of before (I had only a few deity games experience prepatch) but I struggle way more than before at getting a decent rush opener (regardless of civ). It seems as no matter how I open (one city NC+HE, NC+REX, etc) I end up with 2-4 AIs(standard size and speed) running a DoW on me before I even get steel teched.

So as is, even though I'm sure there are still ways to win deity dom without exploting the barb/lux resale, it is very appealing.

True story : Augustus swarmed me with 5 warriors and more archers than what could fit in my city scout range somewhere between turns 35 and 40 on a one-city opener...the "least REX angryness" opener...oh and he was not even a close neighbor. like ~20-25 tiles travel between the 2 capitals. O he also broke a lux trade doing so and was friendly prior to.

I'm affraid that change where they made AIs more responsive to the army size superiority significantly inclining DoWs is currently really affecting deity play...

Guess I'm going to go back to marathons for deity dom. At least now when I live through my opener what comes after will be much easier.

I may need to go back and do some testing. I played several Keshik rush games prior to patch .275 trying to decide which path suited me best but only one game post patch and I happened to get an isolated start. Getting attacked by a close neighbor was possible pre-patch but often avoided. Guess I’ll go fire up another game.

Well I might have been awfully badlucky but I was attacked 8 times out of 7 starts. More often by more than a civ.

Another game I got attacked by 2 friendly AIs a couple turns before my 2 RAs WITH THEM poped. That one I was really angry...as if friendly + ongoing trades had absolutely no weight in their decision process.

I kinda like UU rushes, but I would really like for firaxis to toss a late-game ranged unit line because a keshik, chu-ko-nu or longbowman rush turns out really bad as soon as tech runs out. At least with the keshik one, you can hope to clear the map fast enough due to their awesome movement rate.

Haven't done any ranged UU rush since I got pissed at promoting 350 exp Chus into riflemans with all useless promotions -_-

Sigh, tell me if you feel what I have mentionned, got decimated on turn 71 (on a great plains map) I was right in the middle so kinda open to be DoW by everyone but still, even beyond myself being attacked, I keep seeing AIs going at war with one another much earlier than what it felt like before.

Yes and no. I started a game with 3 silver and 1 gold but was attacked by Japan on turn 24. I managed to turn him back but there was no food to speak of and with my luxuries badly delayed I decided to reroll. My current game is going a bit better. Babylon has been neutral/coveting since I first discovered his 2nd city within a few tiles from my capital, but at turn 85 or so I’m about to finish the Heroic Epic. I have 4 horses and 2 iron in my Capital so we’ll see. Good news is he built the great wall. Not a bad first target I’d say.

Mind me asking how you turned the first agression away when you got DoWed on turn 24? In my standard NC+heroic epic rush, I lie with 1-2 warriors for all units till i after heroic epic is built and unless I settled on a hill for the bonus to defense, 6 warrior + 6 range and a horseman or 2 is a rape

I survived mostly because it was so early. He came at me with about 5 warriors perhaps 4 turns after he DOW’d me. I had built my capital on a silver hill and was able to sell it and buy a warrior to add to my first one who had returned by that time. I finished a warrior build shortly thereafter and just let him wreck himself against fortified units and my city. My scout managed to kill a great general as it left a city unescorted. Scout almost died but it was worth it just to stick it to the %$#$%$%. All in all I was just lucky.

I spent some time trying to perfect a mongolia keshik rush, the major drawback is the AI DOW on you early. My advice is that if you end up next to Alexander or Bismark or any agressive civ, just assume that they are going to DOW and try and steal 1-2 of their workers early on. Don't even bother with a peace treaty unless you have to and keep the war going until you get keshiks.

Keshik attack is my most confident way to win a game on the hardest levels. If I have a 4 horse in the capital then I stay one city, two if not, and I build 4 horseman and upgrade 3 of them on turn 75 (standard speed) after 2 RA's come in for Currency and Chivalry. I use meritocracy for Civil Service to make that possible. Then I attack and look to pick up more horse in the first city or two so I can add more keshiks to the horde.

I used to take Honor policies because of all the warring, but I don't anymore as I've found that it just isn't necessary. Nothing can stand in their way so I try to sense what kind of empire I'll have in the aftermath of the series of wars, which lasts till usually about turn 160 - 180, and what VC I'll go for and take policies accordingly.

For me it's the single strongest aspect of any civ.

Okkk… Deau; I see your point. I just started a game to revisit some of the things I used to do as suggested by Snarzberry below and got a central start in grasslands. The AI’s were all over me. I think we should call this the Clockwork Orange patch. A long buildup is very powerful if you survive but it seems that is going to be happening less often with this patch. We’ll need to get an adequate military presence up earlier or just be willing to restart when we get thug rushed.

Yeah currently it just feels as if the superior initial start litterally inclines every AI to build and buy more units for an early push...now it's one thing to change our opener to survive the initial attacks, but it is another to come out of that early DoW with a game you can still win.

Can't stress enough how important a good beginning is to catching up AIs in higher difficulties, now it just feels like good opener is purely relying on random DoWs


On a plus side, it feels as though Declaration of Friendship now plays a very significant role in countering agressions. currently at turn 200 on a science game I will lose as babylon...but I was DoWed only once, by hiwatha and have been keeping civs not only friendly but also into DoFs. I was generally a friend or a friend of a friend to every civ. I traded my weak 2nd city to hiwatha for a peace treaty expecting he'd come back after me 10 turns later. Seeing as he was still friendly, I asked for a DoF from him and he agreed. Never came back to take my capital even though it would take him 3~4 turns at most with my bowman and nothing else to defend when we are at infantry/artillery.

The only explanation other than DoF to having not been DoWed is I built walls/castle and even that one wonder for +50% from D buildings but regardless of the city defense number, my city is weak as f.

I’ve changed my mind about some of my recommendations since patch .275. I now research Mining, to Writing, to Iron Working…before Animal husbandry or Philosophy. This allows me to buy barracks and build Heroic Epic earlier than before which helps with the early DOWs we’re getting post patch. I also accept most DoF and use those friends to form RAs. I now enter into 3 RAs to be more likely to get Civil Service and Chivalry…just in case one gets broken by DOW.

I spent some time trying to perfect a mongolia keshik rush, the major drawback is the AI DOW on you early. My advice is that if you end up next to Alexander or Bismark or any agressive civ, just assume that they are going to DOW and try and steal 1-2 of their workers early on. Don't even bother with a peace treaty unless you have to and keep the war going until you get keshiks.
The AI is now far better at comparing military strength. If you do not build an army early they will see you are weak and declare war. Even if you have a strong military, there's always the possibility of them doing a sneak attack.

Did a few deity games post patch and the games I didn't win were usually the games where I postponed building troops too long.

I did win a game with the mongols by building a lot of horsemen and chariot archers very soon and just declaring war on an enemy early to weaken his army. This way, my horsemen got pretty elite soon and my military strength got up quickly. I wasn't able to take big cities very early but once I was able to upgrade my chariot archers to keshiks, it was pretty easy. Never upgraded my horsemen though, still needed them to take off siege weapons, wounded units and the last Hp of a city.

Won a game with the Germans by farming a lot of barbarians early on. I got a decent landsknecht army which I reinforced with a couple of catapults. It wasn't hard to take down much bigger armies with my quickly improved catapults. Never even built longswordsmen as I used all my iron for siege. Did have a hard time when the AI got longswordsmen and musketmen, but then your advance is just slower. It got a lot better again when I could upgrade my landsknecht to riflemen (expensive!!!).

Thinking about doing a game with the Danes now... Still thinking about my tactics.

Deity play is like judo: you turn an opponent’s strength into a liability. These early DOWs have benefits for those seeking a domination victory in that it allows you to avoid your own DOW and the subsequent reputation hit. As mentioned it also provides experience for your units. The downside is that you need to survive long enough to develop your military. The AI has a window where you are vulnerable if you build the Heroic Epic but I find that it’s usually not an issue.

So anyway after over a week discussing it I finally challenged myself to run a keshik rush. Was on time w the size army, DoW france on turn 79 w 3 keshiks and a horseman, after getting pissed of having forgotten to throw quick combat on, I take the city on turn 82 only to find out I had checked OCC instead... gonna have to go for it another day, didn't feel like playing an OCC dom challenge, I'm definitely not there yet after patch.

Deity play is like judo: you turn an opponent’s strength into a liability. These early DOWs have benefits for those seeking a domination victory in that it allows you to avoid your own DOW and the subsequent reputation hit. As mentioned it also provides experience for your units. The downside is that you need to survive long enough to develop your military. The AI has a window where you are vulnerable if you build the Heroic Epic but I find that it’s usually not an issue.

Exactly... Playing a deity game with Montezuma and just kept my starting city. The first declaration of war came from France's warrior rush who was far to the north. I managed to keep them off with city fire and the occasional attack by a jaguar warrior. When this war was almost over (France stopped sending new troops) Russia declared war. At that time, I managed to upgrade my 3 jaguar warriors (which already had 2-3 promotions) to swordsmen and at the time I defeated the russian horsemen and archers, the Danish to the east declared war. I was able to send my swordsmen (all around 4-5 promotions) to the first Danish city. Couldn't take it, but kept my swordsmen around to hunt down any troops he send at me. At the time I had my two first catapults out, the Danes wanted peace. I regrouped and then quickly when the truce was over, launched a new assault on him (my first declaration of war, so all this time I sold resources for 900 gold a piece) and quickly took all his three cities. From that point on, my super improved swordsmen with my quickly improving catapults started rolling over my neighbours. Right now, I have 5 longswordsmen with march and heal, two cannons near my capital in case of a sneak attack with 2-3 promotions and two cannons with range and logistics near my frontline. There's only four enemies left and it won't be hard to kill them off too.

At a certain point, I sold my pearls and whales to the Chinese... They declared war two turns later, so I sold the luxuries to the French who declared war one turn later :) I was rich at that point.