Is Playing As Austria Always Pretty Much Nothing?

I've been trying it the last few days and it seems a bit "day at the beach". Coffee House is good but the UU isn't anything for me and marrying city states seems counter productive- with my style anyway. I'd prefer to ally them rather than gain a sometimes hard to defend CS and lose the bonuses.

So, is there any particular setting or map that you could recommend to make things have a bit more zing?

Play a game where the only city you found will be your capital. If you want to expand you will have to use the UA. Will be similar to Venice but harder without the extra trade routes.

Well for the coffee house you can find a city where you can get a lot of food and farms. On a river you'll get the garden which gives a GP bonus with the coffee house providing some more GP bonus percentage increase and th3 national epic will also add to the GP farm city to make great scientists, great engineers or any other GP of choice. Have your city focus on GP and you could end up with more GP than the default civilization. As for the diplomatic marriage, allying a city state with luxurious resources would be a lot better to get the diplomatic marriage so that you won't get the unhappiness penalty.

I did annex (rather than puppet) Samarkand, and I took a huge happiness hit in my latest game. Unfortunately you can't build a courthouse either. Plus I was stuck on a pretty barren island so there was little in the way of extra food.

To really cap the experience Venice was in the game as well stealing CS's.

I think the best CSs to annex would be faith ones. Annexing mercantiles pretty much guarantee a happiness hit

Cicerosaurus said:

I've been trying it the last few days and it seems a bit "day at the beach". Coffee House is good but the UU isn't anything for me and marrying city states seems counter productive- with my style anyway. I'd prefer to ally them rather than gain a sometimes hard to defend CS and lose the bonuses.

So, is there any particular setting or map that you could recommend to make things have a bit more zing?

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Howdie sandgroper

1. I guess its a little hard given I am not familiar with your playstyle, but am assuming it is CS heavy. SO same as you normally would if I read your playstyle correctly.

What I would suggest is MARRYING the CS that you would not normally use. I am guessing MILITARY CS may fit the bill here, perhaps Mercantile if you are not going wide etc.

CS Cities are generally pretty decent so are worth the investment. You do not need to go beserk, just pick ones whose abilities you do not require, or are in a strategically defensive/offensive position, or are being utilised heavily by a rival.

2. I respectfully disagree with your appraisal of the HUSSAR. Apart from the minor benefits of the unit, it gives a whopping +50% FLANK attack bonus. That is huge IMO.
I am unsure but think this then passes on upon upgrade (probably the +1 sight too).

3. The Coffee House isn't so bad, it just requires a stronger GP strategy. The extra 25% allows you to get more then you might think. If you have NE (+25%), Garden (+25%, need lake or river), and one other GPP modifier (ie World Congress Arts Funding, The religion one IIRC, One of several Wonders, Aesthtic Opener etc) then you will have approximately 75% bonus. Civ V doesn't keep the remainder of GPP each turn (it truncates IIRC), so getting the GPP modifiers up to an even amount grants more benefit (or perhaps put more succinctly a non integer number grants less benefit). Sure this won't save you that much, but the compounding affects of getting GP earlier will add up, even it only gets you things a turn or two earlier.

Additionally in cities where you have a significant GPP production, the extra 25% can result in a significant bonus (especially as it comes midish game).

REMEBER : It is a WINDMILL replacement, don't build your capital on a hill, regardless of the extra defence and production bonus.

I would suggest go for a CV (exploit the CS), with a big Military push come Cavalry (use it to destroy any strong cultural civs that weill be difficult to overwhelm,). Only settle at most 1 extra city (none if you can, depending on difficulty), and MARRY the other 3ish).

Policies, go full Patronage and ALLY every CS (use religion if you think you can swing it possibly open up PIETY 1 and 2 if you need it, or take a faith generating PANTHEON and/or ALLY Religious CS).

Get Aesthetics as soon as you can. If you go Tradition, and don't mind a little exploit, remember to sell of any Aqueducts your MARRIED CS may have before you complete the tree. You may want to delay Tradition to get further into the Patronage/Aesthetics trees earlier (might not be a bad idea). If you do this, perhaps delay LEGALISM (IIRC) until you have Amphitheatres, for greater PRODUCTION efficiency, although don't put off building them of course. Go rationalism if you need (you don't really need to unless the difficulty is extreme, as you will get plenty of since from your own tall cities, allied CS (via patronage) and trade routes (unless you are tech leader, and if that's the case you don't need rationalism anyway).

Consider COMMERCE (if you have policies to burn before IDELOGIES).

As far as IDEOLOGIES go, I would wait until the AI civs choose their IDEOLOGIES and then choose the one that the strongest cultural civs choose. This will ensure you do not get the -33% DIFFERENT IDEOLOGIES TOURISM penalty.

REMEBER : For the greatest IDEOLOGICAL influence get OPEN BORDERS, TRADE ROUTES, SAME RELIGION, SAME IDEOLOGY,DIPLOMAT. With all these bonus' your INFLUENCE will rise fairly quickly.

Anyway that's my take.

Hope it helps

BTW Freo is doing rather well this year.

Marry the city states that end up having resources you want to keep out of enemy hands. Plutonium, mainly. You can also use it for rebasing aircraft.

Gabriel Pyyrhic said:

REMEBER : It is a WINDMILL replacement, don't build your capital on a hill, regardless of the extra defence and production bonus.

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Wrong. Actually the best thing about the Coffee House is, that you get to build your "Windmills" even though you settled on hills!

Also I think you're misunderstanding the +50% flanking bonus. Normally the flanking bonus is 10%. With Hussars it is NOT 60%, but 15%. It's still pretty awesome (because flanking with several units multiplies the bonus), just not as OP as it may sound to most people at first.

@OP: I feel you. I never understood/liked the CS Marriage... it rather seems like a disadvantage to do so. Why would I pay 500-1000 gold for a mediocre city? Most of the time half of the CS are on really bad terrain (in all flat desert/tundra/snow/sea) and/or have only resources that I already have more than enough of. And the rest is just mediocre (no river, too much plains, not on a hill, not next to mountain, not on the coast). Sure once in a while you'll get really nice CSs - maybe with a NW too. But here's the real reason why you marry a CS: You do it later in the game on high difficulties to get a huge badass army in an instant for little money.

FeiLing said:

But here's the real reason why you marry a CS: You do it later in the game on high difficulties to get a huge badass army in an instant for little money.

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Bingo. Marry a couple city-states that haven't been in a war all game long and you might get 10-15 units from each. It's effective as early as the Medieval era—in fact, it's a particularly nice way to get a huge pile of Galleasses if you've been neglecting your navy, don't have big coastal cities, etc.

Austria has amazing teleportation capabilities!

Ally a city state on another continent, ideally, next to the capital of the bad guys, especially one with lots of units of its own.

Gift it all your units.

Wait for them to appear.

Marry the city state, get your units back.

Declare war.

Happiness is the only limiting factor for Austria, cause 1k-2k gold [say 1000 to ally and 700 to buy] is not that much.
The higher difficulty is, the better. I.e. on deity turn 100 you can buy city with university, aqueduc, etc.

Xiao Xiong said:

Austria has amazing teleportation capabilities!

Ally a city state on another continent, ideally, next to the capital of the bad guys, especially one with lots of units of its own.

Gift it all your units.

Wait for them to appear.

Marry the city state, get your units back.

Declare war.

Click to expand...

I LOVE the gift trick

Wooo- that is sneaky- I love it.

Thanks Fei Ling- makes sense. Actually thanks everyone- some great ideas.

Gabriel Pyrrhic- I am actually originally from Brisbane and loathe Fremantle with a passion. If they win the premiership I will not be game to venture out for a year.

Austria is quite strong in the mid-late game IMO. The coffee house is actually quite good. Despite some other suggestions in this thread, I suggest building your early frontier cities on hills when it is strategically prudent to do so, as although it is a windmill replacement, it DOES NOT have the no-hill requirement. It is only 5% production, but that's to everything, including units, wonders, projects, etc, unlike the windmill. This means by mid game ANY city can be a good GP farm, so I suggest building tall and wide, pushing growth hard, lots of aqueducts and farms at first.

Get tower of pisa if you can for plus 50% in all cities with coffee house. Do anything you can to prevent arts funding. Only 3 buildings can make art GPs, that sucks for Austria of you go wide-tall.

Marriage is kind of situational, but can be handy. If you are ignoring religion, take religious ones. Many civs will ignore the hostile ones, so they can be taken without annoying other civs too much. Don't just use it for the heck of it, make sure you have good happiness already, so its generally a no-no till mid-late game.

One situation I found it useful was for a cross-continental invasion. In my last Austria game, Persia was on the other continent picking fights with my friends, and I had just teched radar. I married a CS right next to him, bought an airport and flew in an army just like that. No tedious crossing needed, and I now had a base to push from.

In my experience I would suggest Liberty (maybe Tradition opener too for borders), Commerce (NOT patronage in this case, you need gold to buy the CS, you don't really need the influence perks IMO), and Freedom for the -food and -unhappy from specialists and +25% GP rate, though order can work too.

Hussars are pretty good, not a core unit of course but the flank damage and sight are quite good. Unfortunately, they lose the extra move and sight when upgraded, but the flank stays which is nice.

Overall, I put them in my top 5 fav civs, but I like to play relatively peaceful expansion, only really warring to knock down bullies, so if you are in it for the long haul, you can make an insane amount of great people with Austria by late game, that's the main advantage IMO.

edit:
saw the note on teleporting, that can work but be warned, if you gifted them awesome lvl5+ units with march. morale or other good stuff, you will be disappointed to get them back with zero xp

Although I cannot offer any pros or cons for Austria, I can say this: my Hall Of Fame contains the scores of approximately 100 different games of Civ5 that I have completed and Austria have the two highest scores.

I don't know why, but they seem to massively outscore other civs when I pay as them.

Many of my HoF scores are with Austria as well. You just have to be choosy with what city-states you marry.

Don't take the ones that are providing you with something you want, like culture for a cultural victory.

Don't take city-states on crappy terrain. Most aren't but sometimes you find the ones on tundra.

City-states often have a nice sized army for just one city. Adding them to your empire increases your army size just in time for a big push.

Don't do it if you don't have the happiness.

Try to avoid the ones with luxuries you already have.

Marrying a city-state on the other side of the planet may give you trade route access to civs you can't reach from your home lands. This can be helpful for a cultural victory.

Also, Austria is one of the three civs with a bonus to GWAM generation with their Coffee House. The other two are Sweden and Brazil.

You think that's boring try Brazil. If you have enough of a military nobody will ever go to war with you for some reason.