Deity OCC: Strategy and Tips

I usually play OCC deity pangea normal speed games.

You can go for culture and science victories, being science the easiest and fastest one.

Actually it is easier the bigger the map is so you have more AIs to do RAs, more open borders and meet CS cash.

I usually ignore CS in OCC because the money is much more useful thrown in RAs and buying units. Sometimes if I did some CS quest I gift 250 to ally that one.

The most important things about OCC are:
- Starting location: you need a river and a good starting location, because you'll spend 200+ turns there, so If you appear in the middle of the tundra, just reroll.
- Growth. Your income, science and even production mainly depends on your population, so you should never stop growing and you should complete the tradition tree. +4 food and +25% food is huge. Sometimes you can be tempted to finish a wonder 3 turns earlier stopping growth but that's a bad idea.
- Avoid early wars and even wars at all. Your build order will be Granary-Library-(Maybe Oracle) - National College - Santa Sophia - Production buildings - University - Workshop - Steelworks. As you see there is no room for "an army". You can build 1 or 2 archers but that's it, if you delay your build order building 6 units you will slow yourself 30 turns.
- Choose a good civ. OCC is all about perfection, you got to have an edge to be able to win.
- Win before AI nukes you. There is no way in this game to stop the nukes no matter what you do, you can raze near cities and control the seas to avoid nukes be in range, but with your small army you won't be able to raze all of them and avoid settlers to found new ones. So the only solution is to win before nukes. Nukes (and AI spaceship victory in the next 20 turns) come around turn 240-260, so that's your deadline.

About the civs:
- Egypt is nice because you can shave off turns with its 20% production on wonders, and you build many many wonders as egypt (almost all nationals and a few world ones.
- Persia. If you manage to get Chichen Itza and maybe Taj Majal, you'll be much much better than Egypt. 20% more production to everything and close to 2x gold is huge.
- Korea. Free RAs and +2 beakers for each specialist (you'll run plenty of them) is wonderful. Hwacha is a bit useless because once you research its tech you're going for chemistry.
- Babylon. Huge science advantage with the early academy. +50% for scientists is crazy. The UB and UU are perfect for the peaceful start OCC proposes. My favorite OCC civ. Just be careful with your GS parking lot ;)
- Arabia. Cash madness if you have different luxury resources in your city radius (arabia is useless in the common 4x cotton city radius.
- Siam. CS are a nice investment with Siam, the Wat rocks and Nasserun are excellent defenders (and resource free).

I don't find any advantages in the other CIVs for OCC. Maybe Greece if you like to invest in CS.

Thanks Sadato, I just won my first deity game using your basic strategy. I did it with France, small map, archipelago, no barbarians and policy saving.
 
Sadato's advice is great. However, when I do OCC Deity for a culture win, I build very little military, instead building up walls, castle, and all bonuses from policies/wonders that boost defence. That plus a high population can give you a city defence of more than 100 by the end of the game. The AI just crashes against it, and bombardment from the city demolishes units.

Also, I've found being on the coast helpful. That restricts the AI's land units to one side, and a ship also can fire from the city. A few other ships along your coastline can bombard in safety. This works for me. When I've tried to build land units I just get dog-piled.

Any harassment of your enemy by bringing in other CS or AIs to fight also helps.

Also, I don't sell open borders to neighbors on the same continent. It hurts cashflow, but seems to stop or slow attacks because the AI can't scout out your territory. Could just be my impression, though.
 
Also, I've found being on the coast helpful. That restricts the AI's land units to one side, and a ship also can fire from the city. A few other ships along your coastline can bombard in safety. This works for me. When I've tried to build land units I just get dog-piled.


That could be my problem. I tried a game last night, and got a land-centered start spot, but it was along a river with grassland, and wheat and marble resources, so I decided to roll with it. However, within just a couple turns, I had Rome DoW'ing me, and Persia just behind. A few turns later I had the Dutch piling on too. I managed to build an Archer, and get a wall built just in time ... so I've made quite the meat grinder. But my worker is holed up in the city, and I can't really improve tiles.
 
Well, I lost my Korea OCC game (on Immortal) by 2 policies plus Utopia. I just couldn't quite get enough culture. I built everything possible culturally except the Louvre but there were only 4 cultural city-states in the game and two got captured fairly early (I kept the other two as best as possible). I guess the best thing about playing OCC was that I learned how to defend better.
 
I assume that:
...
• Victory – Cultural only? Anything else doable?

I haven't seen anyone mention a Deity OCC Military victory here so I thought I'd chime in, it's really not as hard as many people assume. My most recent such victory was on a normal, fractal map with 10 Civs (including mine) and 10 City States. There are a couple of things I think are important to bear in mind.

The first is that you have a very severe army size limit as a result of only having one city. Which means you have to use Guerilla tactics rather than straight up warfare to win. This generally boils down to killing your immediate neighbours off entirely as early as possible so that no AI is closer to you than a fellow AI. Once this is accomplished you then attack only the capitals of the remaining civs. This is made vastly easier to accomplish by the fact that in OCC as soon as you capture a city it is deleted from the map and as such can never be retaken. So you kill a capital and move on to the next, making peace as soon as practical. This generally isn't too hard since the AI will have more immediate concerns with their neighbours and won't want to travel half way across the map to deal with you. So the theory goes anyway.

Secondly, nearby Military citystates become useful for the first time since they will create your early defensive units allowing you to get Science buildings out as fast as possible. There is a tipping point where you will gain parity with your neighbours in technology (or maybe even a slight edge in a key area) at which time you attack with your max size (though still not very big) army and take their most defensible city (from the perspective of them as the attacker) so as to turn the terrain around to blunt their rabid counter attack with minimal losses, which is the key to victory. Then you roll them up once their standing army is depleted. You have to move quickly though as they'll replace those units like lightning. You then kill the other nearby civ or two in the same way before moving on to capital stalking only. All of this assumes that no neighbouring AI has become a runaway leader in which case I tend to lose the game or switch to a backup victory condition if I feel in the mood to turtle.

I could go on and on I guess but I doubt anyone wants to read an entire wall of text. I really just wanted to point out that military victories are also possible with a little luck and persistence.
 
Thanks callan, that was interesting. I had thought about the possibility of going on an offensive but didn't think I would ever be strong enough for a sustained attacks against many capitals. The key point for me was to use my five GS to go from Military Science to Mass Media in order to build the remaining cultural buildings. That really put me behind on the military line. I guess since I had decided early on to go cultural, there was no turning back.
 
I've won a space victory at Deity level using the OOC playing as Korea.

It helped that my starting location was amazing, being next to a mountain, protected on all but on side by forests, hills or a river one square away from the city.

By the end of the game I was generating over 1000 science in Seoul and had dominated the tech tree.

Defence is the hard part when playing the OOC, particularly as I tried to get as much science as possible early going for the GL, Harbour as my free tech to maximise the benefit of the GL and then made a beeline straight for Astronomy to maximise the benefit from RAs and to open the freedom (double great specialists = 18 science per tile) and rationality trees.
 
I'm trying a OCC as Korea as my second Deity game, but I can't even get any wonders up realibly if I try to grow at the same time. I guess it's VERY luck dependent, because if I try to build GL or stonehenge while growing, it's scheduled to finish around turn 37-39? But the AIs sometimes finish those wonders on turn 32 or so, sometimes even 28. I don't think it's possible for human players to build it that quickly even if they focus on production only, unless you get reeeeally lucky with ruins and steal workers? Having to keep restarting just to get this up while growing while depending on pure luck...I know it's Deity but come on lol.
I suppose it's one of the major flaws of this kind of game.
 
So far my only OCC victory was with Hiawatha, and it was only on immortal. Standard speed though. Tiny Pangeea... Not the best choice for OCC Hiawatha, but not bad either. Had a thickly forested start, with two rivers, which meant mad production (each forest tile gave 4 production one I got scientific theory).
Also a big help were the uu and the fact that I was very mobile in my territory. Those Mohawks were insanely upgraded (25% uu forest bonus, 15% heroic epic, 15% Himenji plus Drill III 65%) and very mobile, managing to hold of 3 invasions at a time, just 3 of them. It also helps that they keep the upgrades up to mechs.

I'll probably try a deity epic speed... but I don't think I have time for the marathon.
 
Looking for clarification - is it considered acceptable to have puppets in an OCC? The game doesn't think so...I'm playing a prince/science with the OCC option selected and it's auto-razing any city I capture.
 
Only one thing was a bit strange - the Arabs had the Apollo for like 80 turns but did not build a single part..... i came like 20 turns after them. A bit strange...



Yeah, that is strange.
 
Looking for clarification - is it considered acceptable to have puppets in an OCC? The game doesn't think so...I'm playing a prince/science with the OCC option selected and it's auto-razing any city I capture.

That can be a very useful feature of OCC (the insta-razing) - that's the way it works BTW. You can't even liberate City States. If you invest a little in an army, it can be useful to keep other players from getting their cities within nuke range of you.
 
Well, I think I'm on my way to a possible science Victory on Diety/Standard Map/22 Civs/Normal Speed/Pangea. Actually, I think it might be a large map, I'm not sure. I haven't finished though, so I suppose there is still a chance of a nuke invasion, but I look to be in good shape. As far as I could tell, I have a tech advantage. Nobody would give me a RA without a 100G tip, and that was BEFORE I bulbed 5 GS's in a row to put me three technologies away from the last SS part.

I got pretty lucky with starting position ... on the coast, with mostly grassland and trees, and a river sandwiching me between the coast which provides a nice wall of defense. I also got a marble quarry, which helped me pop out the Hag Soph, which gave me the Porcelin Tower. I actually got a second river to the north as well, which let me throw down quite a bit of farmland for a pretty good food/gold bonus.

Although I did get the disadvantage of starting up next to Aztecs, Germany, Mongolia and Japan ... 4 of the bigger war-mongers. I actually restarted the scenerio a few times because I would get piled on by multiple civs. I finally got lucky on one restart. I hit a ruin which gave me archery, and I was able to buy three archers pretty early. Monty, DoW'ed me pretty early, and he's yet to let up, but I've been able to hold him off pretty well with my now-well-promoted double-attack-per-turn crossbowmen. The three archers seemed to disuade the other Civs from attacking. Either that, or they couldn't stop attacking themselves.

With 22 Civs, I've been able to sell Open Borders constantly throughout the game, and use the to buy continuous research agreements. I seemed to just barely be keeping up, but somewhere around the industrial age, I seemed to hit a string of RA's just right, and also got the Rationalism 2-tech bonus, which really helped catapult me infront. The funny thing was I had my original warrior still hanging around, and no iron to upgrade him. I finally looked to "rent" some iron for a few turns to get him through the upgrades, and Darius just gave me the iron for free. :D

So now my warrior's been upgrade to Mech Inf, and I'm still keeping my three-range, double attack crossbowmen around, just because they are still shredding through Monty's troups. I think I'm in good shape for a science victory, but we'll see. Gengis just took over Germany's cities, and seems to be sniffing around my borders ...
 
The current GOTM, TSG35, is an OCC Emperor Songhai Domination game. Any thoughts on approaches? Discussion in other forums seems to center on going Liberty for a GS bulb to Chivalry but I'm thinking that ignoring Tradition will end up in a stunted city.
 
The current GOTM, TSG35, is an OCC Emperor Songhai Domination game. Any thoughts on approaches? Discussion in other forums seems to center on going Liberty for a GS bulb to Chivalry but I'm thinking that ignoring Tradition will end up in a stunted city.

I think liberty is the last choice in any OCC. it's just not worth it. so you get an early chivalry, and you destroy 3-4 civs (best case scenario - you still need production and gold to build the mandekalu). but then you wind up really stunted. I think Heroism is the way to go (along with tradition ofc). Especially with the mud pyramid, it makes sense to max out tradition (get the free temple asap). You get a lot of culture and pop growth which will help a lot. then max out heroism and you are good to go.
 
In my Immortal OCC cultural game, I did the first three in Tradition, then Honor starter, finished Tradition (after Philosophy), Patronage starter, then all of Piety and then into Freedom. Went back into Honor during later wars to finish that up and finally back to finish Patronage. Couldn't quite finish Patronage before losing to a spaceship; losing the Louvre apparently was the difference.
 
- what about Aztec - from my other games i see that they are culture cow. With armies piling infront of the city - they can double the culture / turn at some point.

So I gave this a try in Diety. I'm in decent shape, but I think I messed it up for the Culture win. I went with the Honor tree before Tradition. My hope was that my landlocked city would turn into a meat-grinder with the strategic location of some nearby mountains. With the full Honor tree full, I could generate some good cash to go with my culture per-kill. For the most part, it's worked. I can get 15-50 gold/culture per turn based on what I can pick-off. I've been able to generate a steady stream of research agreements from the added cash. But where I think I messed up was going back to the Tradition tree before dipping into Piety. Now I'm pretty behind in the Culture race. Scientifically, I'm doing okay. I can go toe to toe with my invader's units, but I'm not sure I'm going to churn out enough culture to get the Utopia project built in time.

I've noticed two key components to getting a good start in OCC/diety. One, you need to get a scout out early, and get him to sprint across the map. The more Civs you meet, the more +50 gold per open borders you can generate, and that's pretty much your main source of income/RAs. The other is getting an army of archers up ASAP. It seems you get DoW'ed around 30 turns, and a few more might pile on a few turns after that. If you can hold off that initial barrage, you should be in good shape.
 
I've been fooling around with OCC for the first time in forever, and I was wondering; which wonders can you "miss" and still win via culture(I'd imagine The Oracle or the Louvre would be pretty devastating)? And is Stonehenge still worthwhile or is it better to just ignore it and go for something else? I was playing as Korea earlier but got beat to the Louvre and I'm not sure if that's really good game right there or if I should continue on.

Also I have a horrible tendency to type OOC instead of OCC, the dreaded Out of Character game. :p
 
You can definitely skip SH, and if it's a choice between the Oracle and the HG I actually prefer the HG. Obviously both if possible (easier on non-OCC where you can try to build the Oracle in another city). Other must-haves IMO are HS-PT (for the increased GA production, better RA's [since you won't have Rationalism] and GS to bulb to Acoustics ASAP), Sistine and Louvre. CR and SOH (if you are coastal of course) both come too late to really do much other than shave off a few turns. SoL is nice for a faster Utopia build, but not a must-have.
 
I was under the impression Hanging Gardens was insanely hard to get on Deity.

I'll probably scrap this game anyway given that Cathy(who beat me to the Louvre) just backstabbed me and is about to run me over anyway :lol:. I had even paid Bismark(my neighbor) to attack and help me out but he's not really using his army well. I'll try out Sadato's build order from earlier in the thread and see how it goes
 
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