Winning in Civ 5

For me it seems that the only and perhaps easiest way to win in the game is through conquest. I have moved up to King difficulty and in my current game as the Turks, I had Genghis north of me and other people on the continent. They were taking a huge tech lead and I got closed off from much of the land by Genghis. My score was about 200 points less than them and they had all reached the medieval age by about 300 BC. But then I invaded Genghis and jumped out in front with score and everything, leaving all of my units still alive. I feel that if I wanted to I could easily invade the rest of the civs on my continent because of the way battles work in the game but if I do that then I will only be getting domination victories (my last two games both being domination victories). Do you guys experience this and any suggestions to not just limit yourself to domination?

What map do you play on? Continents make conquest harder.

civnoob13 said:

What map do you play on? Continents make conquest harder.

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My first one that I won through domination was continents. The second pangea, and now I am playing another continents. Continents in Civ 5 do not make it harder to conquer the other civs because you don't need boats for your units and after the tech that lets you go over oceans gets discovered its just as if your crossing normal land...

Easiest way to win is diplomacy. It's easy to take City States from the AI, and they'll usually build the UN for you. I often accidentally win that way.

Well the game I was playing turned out very terribly. I pushed out way ahead in score and everything but when I met Ghandi he was one policy away from getting a victory. 30 turns to go before I get a time victory and Askia declares war on me...Terrible :/

I don't know how people win diplomacy. So far I haven't come close to globalization tech yet. I usually get a conquest victory in the industrial age. Only one game has there been a chance of a diplo victory, and that was only because a couple of the AIs were an era ahead of me.

I don't find map type makes much difference. Whether I'm hiking across land or island hopping, conquest is trivial.

Winning any other way requires the same size army. Any army capably of withstanding the inital surprise attack when the AI DoWs you is capable of subsequently annihilating the attacking civ.

At least if you're out conquering, you're doing something other than pressing 'next turn'.

Creepy Old Man said:

Any army capably of withstanding the inital surprise attack when the AI DoWs you is capable of subsequently annihilating the attacking civ.

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I don't necessarily agree with the rest of the post. I have been in many situations where diplomatic victory is easier than conquest, but I think this quote has a very important point. This is a major problem in Civ and is one of the reasons why snowballing for the AI happens so easily and also one of the reasons why victories often become a landslide. They have to make the AI more capable of defending to stop this kind of behaviour.

Creepy Old Man said:

I don't know how people win diplomacy.

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I don't know how people don't know how to make their games last. You can deliberately avoid taking enemy capitals. You can stop your war effort and disband excess units when you have taken enough cities. It is entirely within your control how fast you want the game to end.

Creepy Old Man said:

I don't know how people win diplomacy. So far I haven't come close to globalization tech yet. I usually get a conquest victory in the industrial age. Only one game has there been a chance of a diplo victory, and that was only because a couple of the AIs were an era ahead of me.

I don't find map type makes much difference. Whether I'm hiking across land or island hopping, conquest is trivial.

Winning any other way requires the same size army. Any army capably of withstanding the inital surprise attack when the AI DoWs you is capable of subsequently annihilating the attacking civ.

At least if you're out conquering, you're doing something other than pressing 'next turn'.

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Don't open your borders.

The AI is much less likely to declare war on you if they don't know what kind of army your fielding. I'll often trade open borders for quick cash in the early game when I only have 1-2 cities, but after that I never open them up. There's no incentive to in Civ5, at least AFAIK. No trade bonuses, etc.

I survived until the the Industrial age with just 3 units in my last Deity game. (Granted, it was archipelago. So that helped).

It is boring to do anything but conquest, though. There is some challenge to culture, but it's mostly getting the right wonders (Sistine Chapel, Cristo Redentor, Sydney Opera House) before the AI does. The problem with culture however, is that you'll usually get 50+% of your culture from City States, so getting an accidental Diplo victory is fairly common.

I feel that with the right Civ culture is also a piece of cake. Take Gandhi for example, Create a very few amount of cities but you can get them to huge populations and your culture wont scale negatively because you will have very few cities. Also your happiness will be tremendous.

But another thing that annoys me about the game is how all of the ai's treat you if you invade a civ, even if those ai had problems with that civ as well. I have signed pacts of secrecy to "undermine ___" and then after killing that AI, the person I signed the pact with treats me like the devil and will not trade for anything.

DivljaJagoda said:

I feel that with the right Civ culture is also a piece of cake. Take Gandhi for example, Create a very few amount of cities but you can get them to huge populations and your culture wont scale negatively because you will have very few cities. Also your happiness will be tremendous.

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Having gotten the Bollywood achievement, and playing a number of other culture games, I can say that Gandhi isn't the best. Unless you really concentrate on farms, granaries, hospitals, et cetera you won't get HUGE cities. Usually one city next to a river with several farms will get size 17-18 by end game.

Alexander, like in most aspects of the game, is by far the best for cultural wins. During my most recent culture win I was getting around 300 culture a turn, and 140 of that was from City States. Only 8 or so was from excess happiness (Mandate of Heaven).

Besides, Gandhi's UA actually hurts you in the early game when you actually need happiness. Once the benefits of his UA kick in, you'll usually never have to worry about happiness again with any Civ (if you're going for a Culture win).

My strategy is to try to keep happiness positive, advance in education as fast as I can and choose options to give me a maximum number of great people. If I get a choice of Great People I always choose an Engineer and use it to hurry production of a Wonder. If I get a Scientist, I look at the tech board and keep it if necessary to get a tech requiring a maximum number of turns. In battle I always use distance units to fight with melee units in front to protect and occupy . I build only enough military units to defeat the inevidable attacks until I have a strong technology advantage. Then I go on attack.