Culture with Honor: An Immortal Songhai Strategy.

The unique bonus of getting triple gold from camps is maximised at marathon game speed. Though everything else takes much longer at longer game speeds destroying barbs and camps does not. Many more will spawn in 'the same' time if you are rapidly dispatching them during the era lands are not fully settled.

At marathon speed razing 5 x barbarian camp = 5 x 225 gold = 1100 gold. A settler in marathon cost 1160 gold. You see where I’m going here right?

Two or three free settlers is entirely repeatable, and once you get good at this, 3 free settlers and a free building or two is also possible with a good run on a standard Pangea map.

So where do you start?

Build a monument not a scout. You can’t gamble on a culture ruin. Research archery. Then build archers.

Policy 1 Tradition opener for culture then honor opener you want to locate camps. If you already located a handy camp or two you think you can take down take honor first and get the gold moving. As soon as you have honor opener you can take down camps with the warrior alone – do it. Buy a scout. Your scout can take down archers in barb camps by itself and back up your warrior against melee or multiple barbs till the first archer is out. Get the scout involved in scrapes and upgrade survivalism you’ll be amazed how much damage it can tank with honor and a decent gold bounty incentive.

Make a wide circle around your starting location, don’t get lost early on a ruins quest you are on a gold quest, scout within striking distance, wait for the call and cash in. As units come out the circle widens. Don’t make the mistake of claiming line of sight, stay within areas you already claim line of sight to or if parked further out sit behind hills etc - so your vision is obscured giving the barbs maximum chances/area to spawn in. You hit them so fast they’ll rarely ever spawn a second unit to back themselves. Move in, take camps down, move onto the next if you know a location or just hide and heal.

Get up to three teams working (a pair of military units in each team) to enable rapid claiming of any potential goldmines aka barb camps over a large area. Hard build the units and keep focus on food and growth, save the gold, buy settlers.

While all this goes on – as always it helps to find another civ and steal worker/s ASAP. I can’t stress how much faster this makes a start than waiting on city states. Also, declare war on a city state early and stay at war and mine their villagers. I like to get at least three workers off a city state then make peace by that time diplomacy is typically set back to zero with them despite the ongoing ‘war’.

Third policy is the piety opener. The slowdown in the next policies of tradition can be made up for by claiming 4 x free mud pyramid mosques when you research Education (the requisite tradition policy will be filled by then). As your cities go up build monuments before the Legalism policy and shrines before the Education research. This way you immediately claim your 4 x free mud pyramid mosques as Education finishes.

Research for all your luxuries even up to construction if you feel threatened before bothering with writing. Prioritise monuments and shrines in all cities then libraries – buy a monument or library or two if you got the gold still coming after you have the cities up. Don’t buy a double speed shrine that’d be a waste.

You want a faith generating pantheon and religion. You do not care to spread your religion unless you have lots of faith. It is enough to merely generate as much faith as possible for end game and to spam a bit of early happiness if you need it. Getting the early drop on faith makes most paths to victory in the mid to late game a lot easier if you have access to purchasing the correct great people.

This opening should set you up with 4 fast cities while going ‘tradition’. If you only have three cities up and are running out of room make the call on whether to switch to building the 4th. The two early tradition policies lost to honor and piety are made up in culture for kills, a very early extra 8 x culture and 8 x faith for 4 x free mud pyramid mosques, and a LOT of early gold if you play your cards right.

From the rather warlike hectic opening the game gets boring… just make nice with everyone and follow a culture path to victory. There’s been plenty already written about culture victories so I’ll not bore you with that – open borders, trade with everyone, guilds, Aesthetics policy line, certain wonders, buildings, theming bonuses etc.

Remember not to spam any musicians with faith till you have generated enough tourism already to have most nations under your influence and save the musician spam for the resistant one or two nations as the more military powers become agitated at your antics.

First time I tried this I had America building spaceship parts with 5 x the science and 4 x the military I had, I didn’t care I took him out with 1 musician in the end. Russia underwent an internal revolution and had to change idealogy because of me and got rather stroppy – threatened me with nukes for performing a concert tour – which is entirely reasonable considering one of the acts was Kanye.

I hope this gives some inspiration to rethink the Songhai nation as a solely warlike civ. This start will of course complement other victory paths with a few tweaks here and there I just enjoyed getting a ‘military’ civ and making nice with it.

This was also how I got my first Immortal victory.

My first Deity victory was a military victory in a 1 vs 1 as Polynesia. But that’s another strategy.

I like this idea. Welcome to the forum

Could it be extended to or tweaked for any other civs/leaders?

The Germans seem logical. Conscripted barbs can snowball the effect, and the bonus 25 doesn't hurt. I think this is unaffected by game speed, so probably not great on marathon speed but might seem quite good for quick speed.

Maybe the Shoshone? No need to 'gamble' on the cultural ruin, so skip the monument. Upgrade a couple of Pathfinders to Bowfinders for a very effective barb killer.

I guess the signature piece of the puzzle is Songhai's triple barb camp gold - hard to replicate that, especially on marathon speed.

It's probably the best strategy (Shoshone might be better depending on your settler ruin luck) on settler because then you get 675 gold from a barbarian camp. Combine this with the fact that settler costs scale weirdly (it's like 370/500/670/1160) means that you can get a settler every other barb camp.

The German's unique ability to unit spam is definitely helped by the honor opener but trying to use the camp gold for settlers would fail miserably on immortal - would just take too long to amass enough gold - but!....

If you have a fast spammed German/barb conscript army you can just demand gold as tribute from all the city states. After a while demand more, and even workers. This is how Germany pulls ahead very quickly if there's enough city states around and you don't care about annoying the neighbors.

Likewise the Shoshone ability will not work for this. It's about ruins for them not camps. Get a few early composite bows with Shoshone you can go take some wonder spammers capital or like Germany stand over the city states for gold.

Building settlers stops growth so I opt for other means if I can. There's probably gold amassing exploits for many civs I've just not looked into many.