An alternative Deity Tier List (a.k.a. 'Don't Forget About Conquest')

To make Byzantium competitive on Deity I recommend that everyone play the "No free AI Pottery" mod.

Giving the AI free techs is ludicrous...especially when it allows them to start a shrine on turn 1 while you can't until turn 12.

Making that simple change turns Byzantium into a Teir 3 Civ I'd say. The extra founding belief is hit or miss...you will still not get the 1st religion...probably 4th or 5th...so depending on what options you choose you can do very well.

Their UUs are both excellent for early conquest but the fact that they both classical era and on different tech trees from each other or anything else important like Combows prevent them from being higher than a tier 3 Civ I'd say.

The good thing about Cataphracts is they are actually comparable to knights so you don't need to upgrade them after unlocking Chivalry.
 
Why would you want to nerf the AI even more? The whole point of deity is to give them insane bonus so that they have a chance of winning. Currently the early mounted units are useless, so I wouldn't rank them much higher. Byzantium has a good early ranged naval unit, so that's good, except there is no way to capture cities unless you melee units. That actually limits them from being a strong early war type of civ.
 
Sclb said:
Why would you want to nerf the AI even more? The whole point of deity is to give them insane bonus so that they have a chance of winning. Currently the early mounted units are useless, so I wouldn't rank them much higher. Byzantium has a good early ranged naval unit, so that's good, except there is no way to capture cities unless you melee units. That actually limits them from being a strong early war type of civ.
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The AI getting structural bonuses is one thing...just giving them the ability to straight up negate an entire Civs UA is pretty lame. Giving them the ability to straight up deny any non-faith based civ the ability to found a religion is pretty lame too.

Deity should be tough but players should still retain the ability to vary their playstyle and certainly an entire Civ should not be made unplayable.

Yes the fact that the Dromon can't capture cities is a pretty big kick in the teeth...hence why even when you play with "No free AI pottery" I still rate them as only a Tier 3 civ. Dromons are cool bc if you have a coastal start you can build them to defend against both sea and land going barbarians, allowing for early control of the seas and exploration.

They are a mediocre civ at best but they do have interesting early game options and, if you can found a religion early, they are a decent Civ. There is a cool mod that gives EVERY civ the ability to use two founder bonuses and Byzantium is given the new UA of having every city start with a shrine and purchasing religious units/buildings costs 25% less faith. That is a fun one.
 
Byzantium aren't the only civ that shine on lower difficulty levels that are pretty much 'naff' on Deity. Asking game designers to make a game so balanced that everything remains playable on every difficulty level is a bit of a stretch, really. Rather than playing with a mod that takes part of the AI's starting advantage away from them, why not just develop a mod that changes Byzantium's UA so that it helps them found? Or play on the NQ or Acken mods where Piety gets more love? Or use an editor to give yourself a shrine at the start?

Btw, Deity is tough mostly not because of those early game advantages but because of late-game advantages, where unit spam makes Domination a chore and lifetime culture makes CV a slog.
 
Moderator Action: Please do not be so dismissive. It is not "silly" for someone to advocate for use of a mod that would result in a difficulty that one might refer to as "Deity minus" (all of the Deity challenges, but giving the Deity AI a different starting tech from Pottery). Telling them that their only choices are play Deity straight from the box, as delivered by Firaxis, with no changes, or just play Emperor is neither fair nor helpful.
 
beetle said:
That is silly advice. Just play at Emperor then.
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Why would taking free pottery from the AI be the equivalent of playing two difficulties less?

You realize that on Immortal the AI gets significant bonuses over Emperor difficulty right?

Like somebody else suggested...give the AI free Animal Husbandry or something if you want to maintain the difficulty level.

Giving the AI free pottery on Deity almost totally negates the chances that any non-faith based civ founding a religion. I don't think that was intended by the game designers.
 
Any chance you could stick to the topic, which is my Tier list? I'm not terribly opposed to your speculations about 'what would happen if Byzantium were better?', but they don't belong here. This is a Tier List for unmodded Deity, and Byzantium's UA is NOT great, objectively.

To keep things on-topic, I did recently revise my estimation of Dromons. Although they don't fare well in the Ancient or Classical Eras, they do make for pretty nice upgraded Frigates.
 
I just looked at the list on p1, not sure if this comment already is contained in the 20p:

Do you really think Zulu reduced maintenance is worth 4/5 and faster promo only 2/5? I´ve always felt* that the faster promo is at least as useful, getting range/log sooner for the archers. Its also the only real useful trait later in the game, although game is often over early.

As far as I know, the discount is on melee. I.e. Rifle (or higher) doesn't get discount, since the game doesn't consider it melee.

*I haven´t really studied it, just based on experience from own games. Have played the Zulu quite a lot though.
 
^^That seems like a good catch DF!

The faster promotion is amazing. It takes the form of requiring less XP (as opposed to giving an XP earning bonus), so with a Military Academy, raw units have three promotions when first built.

I only just notice Impi being rated 5/5 and that is much too high. They are only a little stronger than Pikes, have a barely noticeable extra attack, a bonus vs gunpowder units, and upgrade to Rifles instead of Lancer. Maybe 3/5 with all that netted up.

Zulu Longswords are actually stronger than Zulu Impi! It is the UB and UA that make the Impi fierce, but the UB and UA buff other melee units just as much. Player fields and face Impi spam, and misattribute where the strength of the unit is coming from.

Ever been gifted Impi from a militaristic CS? They are quite underwhelming! Not deserving of a 5/5 rating by any stretch.
 
Impi 3 movement is insane - just like Companion Cavalry, the extra movement is worth way more than some smallish percentage combat bonus. It can really help avoid traffic jams, and Shaka AI actually shows up with melee in front, haha. I have been fighting Impi with raw Foreign Legions, and it is surprising how much punishment they can take.
 
^^ Longswords with three movement are even more insane than Impi!

If Shaka had been fielding Ikanda buffed Longswords upgraded into Muskets against your raw Foreign Legions, you would have had even more trouble!
 
Nigel_Tufnel2 said:
Impi 3 movement is insane - just like Companion Cavalry, the extra movement is worth way more than some smallish percentage combat bonus. It can really help avoid traffic jams, and Shaka AI actually shows up with melee in front, haha. I have been fighting Impi with raw Foreign Legions, and it is surprising how much punishment they can take.
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that's also why Persia ranks in top tier, their UA is just that good, combat bonus is perhaps minor but extra movement is insane
 
I'm going to argue that Polynesia is actually a Tier 2 civ. I just wrote a post about it, which I won't duplicate here, but here's the thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=14287452#post14287452

My logic is this: Poland is a top-tier civ (maybe THE best civ) because it can get so many SPs. On the right map, Polynesia can actually out-generate Poland for SPs, and it has an advantage because it gets the culture too, not just the SPs. This doesn't make Poly better than Poland, because it's map-dependent, but I think they deserve a bump up to tier 2.
 
Mrdarklight said:
I'm going to argue that Polynesia is actually a Tier 2 civ...My logic is this: Poland is a top-tier civ (maybe THE best civ) because it can get so many SPs. On the right map, Polynesia can actually out-generate Poland for SPs, and it has an advantage because it gets the culture too, not just the SPs. This doesn't make Poly better than Poland, because it's map-dependent, but I think they deserve a bump up to tier 2.
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You said it yourself...without suitable coastlines for Moais, Polynesia are more or less a neutral civ. Poland will get that extra tree's worth of policies even on the most unfavourable map.

Roll me 20 Continents maps and tell me what proportion of them give Polynesia a significant advantage. ;)
 
The other problem with Polynesia is that they take a long time to catch up to Poland's extra SP. In your example, you used turn 300+ games, but the fast games all end in the 200s or even before so you can't really use that to argue.
 
Sclb said:
The other problem with Polynesia is that they take a long time to catch up to Poland's extra SP. In your example, you used turn 300+ games, but the fast games all end in the 200s or even before so you can't really use that to argue.
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I hear this a lot, but I've never had a Diety game end before turn 200, or even turn 300.

Also, Poland itself takes a long time to get all those extra SP's... the whole game, basically. they are ahead by a couple of SP's until the Industrial era, but it's not a huge benefit.
 
Catch up? With Poland, you can Beeline whatever you want and still have perfect timing. Polynesia is a Neutral civ until after the midgame.
 
Mrdarklight said:
...but it's not a huge benefit.
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Well, one way to think about this is that the buffs from each UA are roughly comparable to the buffs one gets from one of the better SPs. Some of the UA correlate to an SP almost 1:1.

From this perspective, Poland’s UA is six (!) times better than the average civ.

Some of the UAs work all game, but many are turn limited (sometimes explicitly, sometimes just practically). This limitation is very obvious with Poland, but even if you discount their UA by half, it still ends up being stronger than three times the buff the average civ gets. Can you say that the next best UA is even twice as good as what the average civ gets?

Poland’s UA is a huge benefit. It is simply not credible to characterize it as anything less.
 
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