Poland strategy guide

I wanted to post a bit of an update. I was able to replicate a game close to the OP's at a friend's the other night. Having never played-out many Salt starts in my day I don't think I ever appreciated how brutally overpowered the resource is. I had 3 Salts in my main and 3 in my first expansion and even settled on 2 natural wonders and got the +4 faith from natural wonders pantheon. One of the natural wonders produced pure faith (+6 or something) and the other one was a mountain that provided culture, gold and I think 2 faith. As such my first 2 cities has a kajillion food + production in addition to some insane faith output. I was basically able to hard build any Wonder that I wanted so I was easily able to get Pyramids, Oracle, CI, Cistine, etc. Never tried for Hagia but it was gone way too fast anyways. Anyways, I was even able to produce CI in my EXPANSION, not even my Cap, given how many hammers it had from working 3 Salts, 2 Sheep (+ Durakhal Stables) and a Stone.

Anyways, all I can say is that Salt is the key to the OP's success in the first screenshot. You literally cannot lose if you start with an abundance of it. The fact that it grants high levels of production and food at the early stages of the game is absurd and it needs to be nerfed asap. I had my Universities building or bought pre-turn 100 and public schools were not far behind. My NY came in around turn 80 and it took less than 10 turns to build (I think it was 7). I never really appreciated how stupidly OP Salt is but I mean it accelerates your entire game by 15-20 turns or something ridiculous.

Anyways, we never finished the game because it was a foregone conclusion that I would win. It was 2 of us + Deity comps on a Standard sized Continents map at Standard speed. No teams or anything and we didn't do any trading pre-turn 150 or something (I was on a different Continent than him). All I'm saying here is that I didn't use the human player to cheese the game or somehow influence my early game success. With any luck I I can load up a save/autosave and post an SS around turn 150 to provide a comparison. Not sure though since I don't know what autosave options my friend uses.

If I ever get a Salt start in my solo games that I'll do in a bit I'll try and post a comparison SS.
 
Salt's been OP since its introduction.

The only reason people haven't kicked up more of a fuss is Petra coupled with Desert Folklore. A hilly Desert start with rivers or Oases makes Salt look tame.

That said, Poland's bias for Plains is just another of the things the civ has going for it. Plains starts tend to yield lots of Salt, Wheat and Deer.
 
thanks for all the positive critisism!

Gives good feeling that my time at this forum isnt totaly wasted - even when some "guys" try to be anoying.

These seem to be the main problems people have:

i tried this and had a really hard time getting close to the screenshot. Here are some of the problems I encountered;

- Other aggressive civs.
- Barbarians surrounding me.
- No free available luxuries.
- No shot at getting haga sophia before AI

It looks like a great strat if you have the right map, I just don't see how you can make it to almost 30 people in your city that fast tho.

The short answer is obviously that thats not a problem with this strategy but just the overal "challange" civ offers.
the longer one:

- Other aggressive civs.

civs in bnw USUALLY seem to be way more peaceful as in G+K, this fact is a main part of a guide to a PEACEFUL Victory. I do however have the feeling that getting few archers to boost military size isnt really making the ai change its mind about a potential attack.

With this strategy you have like 35-40 turns of playing occ - in this time you should get a pretty good idea about the "love of your nieghtbours" to you. Obviously you should not settle now unprotected cities towards an agressive neighbour.

AND it looks to me like you "have to play diplomacy" - f.e. denounce 1 civ and get therefore a pretty good modifier from all civs who like you more as they do like this civ. This seem to be also a very good way to get a DOF.

If you really get attacked just get instead of libraries and NC few archers - together with oligarchy and your cap as only target for quite some time a good enough defense - you delay science boost for 10-15 turns - so what - stick to the guide apart that ..

And main way to get a decent military isnt building units but alying a military CS, thats why a huge focus of this guide is finding all CS as soon as possible to not miss quests and having enough units spread on map to do possible barb camp quests, there WILL be quests which you can fullfill (easy)

- Barbarians surrounding me.

Same as above - you should have for quite some time only a cap and 1-2 workers to protect. With 4 units moving around map and going for barb camps for possible quests.
And same as above again - if barbs are really THAT anoying or non of your scouts did get an upgrade - just add 2 archers and stick to guide apart that.

- No free available luxuries.

It doesnt really matter to get lot of different lux just settle spots with SOME lux in SOME ring. If you tell me that there are maps where you cant find spots to settle with 2 lux or horse in like a like 30 tile ring - I will just not believe you ..

- No shot at getting haga sophia before AI

Religion isnt a big part of this strategy, even without hagia you should be able to generate 200+200 faith for a prophet and a missionar in 1. 100 turns and thats kind of all you need. Alying CS, getting a pantheon and so on IS big part of this strat - if you fail to do well in this part - you can win without religion aswell ..
 
Like you said I was actually saved by a military CS that gave me a horseman just as I was about to lose one of my cities :)

Problem is that while I'm in good shape, I'm still nowhere near your level by turn 150.
 
well deity is the new emperor, not my fault.

Hope they introduce a Sid and Tommynt difficulty ..

Do you have any custom mods? I beginning to wonder if this is causing issues with aggression/expansion.

I have vanilla G+K and BNW and every one of my emp and immortal games in BNW has seen civs expand like cockroaches and be very aggressive. Yet there are other people who never see this.

I just started a deity game for kicks and this is my neighborhood. Already 3 cities for England, Rome and Ethopia. Suffice to say I'm restarting lol

Spoiler :
 
The AI has been hit and miss in my experience so far. Sometimes they are quite peaceful and stuff, but sometimes they're still the normal G&K psychos like before. There's quite a big variance between game to game.

Problem is that while I'm in good shape, I'm still nowhere near your level by turn 150.

It's very difficult to try and replicate the OP's screenshot if you don't have Fountain of Youth and a ton of Salt scattered all over your starting location. :p This is a very powerful strategy, but trying to duplicate those exact numbers isn't going to happen easily.
 
Re: Salt.

Many ancient wars were fought over control of this resource. There are rich salt deposits in the region that is now Poland.

Before you complain about it being OP, consider that this is a design decision. As such it requires a special strategy by the player to overcome.

This is a good thing.
 
Before you complain about it being OP, consider that this is a design decision. As such it requires a special strategy by the player to overcome.

This is a good thing.

Not necessarily. The fact that it's a design decision in no way insulates the developer from criticism. I think we can all agree that Great Scientist light bulbs and Research Agreements were insanely OP at vanilla release.

I'm sure that Salt was introduced in G&K to offset the fact that Plains, well, kind of suck otherwise. You'd think that a tile with balanced :c5food: and :c5production: output would be ideal, but in practice the ability to switch between heavy :c5food: and :c5production: focus at will outperforms balance due to the graininess of the tech tree. We only want to build certain things when we have the technology to build them, and when that occurs we want those builds done right now; the rest of the time we want to max out on population growth.

The trouble with the solution, in my mind, is that Salt provides too much of a kick start due to the way it clusters and its association with Granary resources. If you land a bunch of Salt, Plains Wheat and Deer at the start, you're looking at a high growth production powerhouse in the early game, with consequence-free chops to boot. If the Salt were a little more spread out, such that we only got one copy of the resource in the early game, there would be much less of an issue.

In short, the design problem isn't so much the resource itself as the potential for having too much of a good thing in a lot of starts.
 
Well, I now believe the release versions are dumbed down on purpose so ordinary players can enjoy the game. They will make it harder when the patch comes out.

Balanced food and hammers is only ideal at the beginning because you only have a few pop points to work with and this allows you to get things out faster. Its true, after awhile the bonus fades, much like Babylon's first academy.

In Civ IV, many people complained about marble starts. I admit, I enjoy salt starts and am perhaps a little too reliant on them. But, I don't take them every time.

If it were spread out, like you say, it would not create any envy in the eyes of the AI or the player, which I believe was intended. Yes, I am saying if you see that your neighbor has salt, you must take it. If you have salt, you must defend it.
 
Well, I now believe the release versions are dumbed down on purpose so ordinary players can enjoy the game. They will make it harder when the patch comes out.

Now there's an interesting conspiracy theory that probably has a lot of merit to it.

Balanced food and hammers is only ideal at the beginning because you only have a few pop points to work with and this allows you to get things out faster. Its true, after awhile the bonus fades, much like Babylon's first academy.

OK, but the whole reason that early-game bonuses are so sought after is that not all turns are created equal. The AI is best conceptualized as a time bomb that explodes within a known range of turns (by producing a win condition), and that tests your military at semi-random intervals. Winning requires surviving the tests and producing a win condition before the time bomb explodes.

Whether you gain a march on the AI early or late is immaterial, but it's clear that it takes a lot less :c5food:, :c5production:, :c5gold: or :c5science: to save an entire turn in the early game when compared to the late game. All else equal, Education landing a turn earlier should yield Scientific Theory a turn earlier, which should yield Plastics a turn earlier. Making up that ground later on requires a much larger surplus of resources.
 
Compounding your bonuses is the name of the game.

The time bomb will go off eventually, but the player has the ability to delay it through interaction with the AI.

The known range is the AI in a vacuum. However, its not a straight sprint. The player controls the tech pace, and his actions shape the game, not the AI's. We tend to sprint only to reduce real life play times.
 
The time bomb will go off eventually, but the player has the ability to delay it through interaction with the AI. The known range is the AI in a vacuum. However, its not a straight sprint. The player controls the tech pace, and his actions shape the game, not the AI's.

The known range is not the AI in a vacuum - no one has any idea how the AI would perform in a vacuum. The range is established by the AI's performance over many games (obviously affected by human interaction). For example, on G&K the AI would win a SV somewhere between t275 and t325 on Immortal. That (more or less) was its range at that level, for that VC. Other than eliminating the AI militarily - something that's always an option - you could count on the time bomb going off within those 50 turns.
 
Txurce - Yes, that's what I am saying. As players, if we choose not to use our military option (often in the interest of time), we are allowing the bomb to go off t275 to t325. The constraint is self imposed.
 
If it were spread out, like you say, it would not create any envy in the eyes of the AI or the player, which I believe was intended. Yes, I am saying if you see that your neighbor has salt, you must take it. If you have salt, you must defend it.

I'm not convinced that this is the case. Salt obviously provides enormous benefits in the early game, when the player needs both :c5food: and :c5production: in quantity to stay on the optimal output curve. The marginal benefits of :c5production: reinvestment are huge in the first fifty turns. Even though the scalar benefits of late game buildings are greater, they almost never come close to approaching the margins that early game investments (Settlers, Workers, first-tier buildings) provide.

To put it another way: you can't even begin to replicate the results of having strong early game dirt by taking that dirt away from someone else. Forcibly taking that dirt may (or may not) be worthwhile as a result. It takes a ton of :c5production: to conquer dirt on Deity, and it's entirely possible that the player would be better off using those resources for peaceful development. Unless I'm misreading the general sense of the forums, 'likely' is probably a better descriptor than 'entirely possible' right now.

Txurce - Yes, that's what I am saying. As players, if we choose not to use our military option (often in the interest of time), we are allowing the bomb to go off t275 to t325. The constraint is self imposed.

All you're doing through those actions is adjusting the known range. The model still holds. We can say the same for diplomacy and the like; assume optimal human play, and a (later) known range will emerge.

It's not a self-imposed constraint because theoretically optimal human play exists. The constraint is ultimately imposed by the developer.
 
OK as there are now some people acting that this start was so great I ll add starting and final save in in this post - you are very welcome to do better.

To me its pretty obvious that a start with Mountain and Desert would do much better in long run - both are kind of totaly op - at least not balanced.
Edit: I did My record sub t180 science win with Maya game with 4 core cities where 3 had Mountains and 1 was all jungle. Thats the land you are looking for if u want do REALLY good.

Fountain helped midgame - from like turn 50-100. Afterwards I was allways kind of +20 Happynes - espacially these idiologies give loads of happynes.
 

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Oh ya and i ll to some testing but I think that something similar to this strat is kind of optimal for every civ.

At least its pretty easy to do. You dont have to get much gold from trade partners and the buildup still works. Finishing Tradidion 20 turns later with another civ as Poland wont brake the game
 
I'm just going to cut and paste from the other thread, tommy:

I seriously doubt it. If you're not Poland, mixing Liberty and Tradition requires delaying Aqueducts by quite some time. I suspect you're going to find that hurts worse than passing on an early Worker or Settler in the vast majority of cases. The :c5happy: constraint binds more strongly on empire size than the :c5food: constraint, and that problem is best managed through vertical growth (Monarchy, per-city unhappy penalty) rather than horizontal.

If there were a good reason to go into the bottom of the tree pre-Education for Engineering, things might be different. As it stands, you pass up too much growth waiting for the technology to hard build the Aqueducts where you need them.

I think that 20 turns is a dramatic underestimation for the time required to pick up policies 6 through 8 in Tradition, assuming an Oracle build. To say nothing of how your approach sets back progression through Rationalism when you aren't getting a policy per era.

Let's face it: Poland is a special case right now.
 
I'm just going to cut and paste from the other thread, tommy:



I think that 20 turns is a dramatic underestimation for the time required to pick up policies 6 through 8 in Tradition, assuming an Oracle build. To say nothing of how your approach sets back progression through Rationalism when you aren't getting a policy per era.

Let's face it: Poland is a special case right now.

I confirm this, i experimented quite a lot lately with mixing the trees and it not as strong as on GnK, as cpt is kinda slow after a few policies (amphi nerf being part of this) so you lose time compared to full start. Just for the record, mixed strategy was subpar in GnK too, but it worked better than in BNW. You need Polands specials to make this work.
 
Oh ya and i ll to some testing but I think that something similar to this strat is kind of optimal for every civ.

At least its pretty easy to do. You dont have to get much gold from trade partners and the buildup still works. Finishing Tradidion 20 turns later with another civ as Poland wont brake the game

I would agree that 3 salts and 2 wheats is optimal for every civ. The way you played it was good too.
 
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