The Deity Challenge Line-up #39 - Austria

Turn 100 might be too soon. Maybe go to war pillage a few cities (and units if honor) and then marry if conditions met (happy reserve, gold reserve, big army in good spot). Honor finisher leads to snowball (more units to kill/pillage more to buy even more units) - injecting a significant number of units at the right time might accelerate the process ..

Guess the dirtiest way to do it would be to sell crap captured cities and use the gold to marry :) .

I feel like if the above was happening I'd be on the road to victory regardless, which I suppose is part of the problem with this UA in the first place and a key difference from Venice. I was thinking peaceful for 80-100(?) turns then get polygamous and warmongery.

Wait, I thought marrying was free :lol:

(I never played Austria obviously)

Nope! Not in civ v either.

Lowest I saw when scrolling over the option was 500 gold, keeping in mind you must be allies. Obviously early CS barb quests should be a focus. Assuming no El D, I wonder how early you can, reliably, marry...
 
the sooner you do it
-less infrastructure in the city..
-less time to have the economy capable to support the new army..
-less money surplus to upgrade units..

My current opinion is the you must give it time to build the stuff for you without you having to endure the happiness and maintenance costs until the "right" moment .

Other thoughts - spy coups ? (risky to lose the one potential "perfect candidate", few drops of patronage ? (more influence on gold gift), great merchants ? (natural / liberty finisher? /with commerce finisher .. and faith ?) ..
 
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162
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Feeling crowded in now. Not sure how to play the second half. Saved it at 166.

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Lowest I saw when scrolling over the option was 500 gold, keeping in mind you must be allies. Obviously early CS barb quests should be a focus. Assuming no El D, I wonder how early you can, reliably, marry...

Why not marry, sell to rich AI for lots more than 500 gold, rinse repeat?
 
freedom science victory turn 321 and I think thats pretty much how you use the UA.

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Wow you really spiked your science up some, budweiser. Nice win :)
 
That loses you the main benefit of the UA, getting the actual city

Sure, but the argument is that puppet cities are not worth much. Buy and sell at profit pretty much demonstrates that the UA is working for you. But I agree with you, because I think keeping the city is even more profitable!
 
Sure, but the argument is that puppet cities are not worth much. Buy and sell at profit pretty much demonstrates that the UA is working for you. But I agree with you, because I think keeping the city is even more profitable!

You want to annex them, but you have to have high happiness first. A decent religion would be good. I didnt get one. The troops that the CS come with will protect you or even let you attack the AI. You have to be careful with them though. I was taking losses against Walls of Babylon so I just turtled second half. But since you dont need to spend hammers on troops, you can build other nice things in your cities.
 
Trying to conceptualise how the UA works.
Is it better to just focus on your capital and try and get early wonders - thus ignoring settlers and use gold to buy citystates later (say around turn 100 when they have all their terrain improved and a good army?).
Assuming you do this you'll get your NC early and the chance to score some early wonders?


Also someone mentioned about buying a CS and selling it to an AI for a gold markup. I could see that possibly being useful if you have 2 civs close together and you want to get them to fight each other. Once one AI gets the new city it's usually counted as a forward settle by the other and it could start a war.
 
Trying to conceptualise how the UA works.
Is it better to just focus on your capital and try and get early wonders - thus ignoring settlers and use gold to buy citystates later (say around turn 100 when they have all their terrain improved and a good army?).

No, as a rule, I think you want to set up a small Tradition trade network and use the first 100-150 turns building gold & alliances that you can purchase later.

If you have the happiness, I think you can buy one or two during the build up phase. But every map is different so you have to adjust accordingly.
 
No, as a rule, I think you want to set up a small Tradition trade network and use the first 100-150 turns building gold & alliances that you can purchase later.

If you have the happiness, I think you can buy one or two during the build up phase. But every map is different so you have to adjust accordingly.

Yeah unless of course you increase the number of CSs by 50% but even then you still probably want at least 1 early expo.
 
So far I have found 2 legit cases when to use austrians UA:
- Boxed in at start, no room to settle, nearby land sucks, aggresive forward AI settlening. When even not-perfect site is better then nothing. Sometimes CS land sucks, but sometimes it's not so bad. It's not uncommon that natural wonders are near a CS. CS with LV or GBR ain't so bad.

- Safe landing site on another continent, late game capitol sniping. Tradition/bombers/paratroppers/XCom style DomV or just to knock down AI runaway.

Very very map dependant. A bit like inversed Byzantium. Byzantium needs a special (and good) map to use UA, Austria needs specialy bad map to use it, but you don't want a map like that to begin with.
 
Austria's UA is very strong on Deity. It does require careful thought to leverage, but in my opinion it's one of the strongest UAs in the game.

Cities are incredibly valuable, and you basically always want more IF you have the happiness to support them and time to develop them. The latter constraint is the biggest reason why you usually aren't constantly settling/capturing new cities, but Austria's UA totally gets around that. Happiness is a real constraint, but you can plan for that from the start by pre-building Coliseums and taking +happiness beliefs. Also, a fast game will have nearly unlimited happiness post-Ideologies (since a strong player will often win before ideology pressure is relevant), so that constraint goes out the window late-game and you can freely spam marriages to get late-game hammers/science up.

Obviously, you have to be careful about how you use the UA. Only one Cultural CS on the map? Don't marry it. Seven Cultural CS? Sure, take one out. Only one source of Porcelain? Maybe look elsewhere. With 16 CS on the map, there will always be some that are expendable. You don't want to use the UA every single chance you get, but you don't need to.

I feel that I also have some tangible results to back up my theory. Here are some links to a t209 science victory I got with Austria. This is the 6th fastest recorded SV in the Hall of Fame and a personal best for me, so clearly there's something powerful going on here.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13895319&postcount=4
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13896213&postcount=6

I married three CS this game, one on t95 and two more around t 190. The t95 one gave me a massive army along with a highly-developed city. That allowed me to incorporate conquest into a science game at minimal gold/hammer cost, snowballing into an incredibly powerful empire. Sacrificing the CS was costly, but the immediate return on my gold spendings was simply ridiculous. Try using the UA, then add up the cost of the units and the cost of the buildings. The math works out.
 
Good post Manpanzee. Your first link touched on something I'd already been thinking about - that the CS can have buildings (and units) you cannot currently build. As I'm impatient and looking to 'marry young', I'm trying to figure out how to use this early:
1) beeline Philosophy and get 1-city (Tradition) or 2-city (Liberty) NC up ASAP, then marry CS that has comp bows before I have Construction. However, CS don't build the units you want, ex. they may have 2 comps and 4 melee and I'd prefer the opposite
2) beeline Construction (edit: and then Machinery) while staying illiterate and marry CS that have Libraries. As CS will build all buildings, I'm confident they'll have a library by the time I have enough gold/influence to marry
I'd like to pull off another 'illiterate' attempt, but I doubt this map is strong enough to succeed.
 
Say, what happens when a CS captures an AI cap and then you marry it? Do you get two for the price of one?
 
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