[BNW] ICS Piety Empire (multiplayer edition) guide

What's the earliest you've researched Education using this strat? And how many cities did you have at that turn number?

Going to need facts to compare to my own results.
 
yeah ok. That's a good strategy, but it's not exactly new. I thought you were trying to take advantage of the fact that piety is available at the beginning.

Well you kind of are, usually piety wasn't open turn 35 in, and if it was you had to ignore luxury techs to beeline to medieval. As for it not being new, I suppose so. ICS in vanilla was shrine and temple spam. Right now my build is shrine and temple spam - so in that regard not much has changed.
 
What's the earliest you've researched Education using this strat? And how many cities did you have at that turn number?

Going to need facts to compare to my own results.

Sorry, no clue on either of those. I'll try to screenshot some recent games I have for benchmark though, hopefully that will help.
 
I tried this build out, and worked fairly well. It was mostly due to the fact of a couple early religious city-states giving me the first pantheon (desert folk-lore) and then a 60+ faith goody hut. My question is how much defenses do you build up? 1 archer per city, 2 archer per city, x number per neighbor?

I ran into problems defending a swordsman rush compounded by the fact I was expecting it from Mongolia instead of Sweden.
 
I tried this build out, and worked fairly well. It was mostly due to the fact of a couple early religious city-states giving me the first pantheon (desert folk-lore) and then a 60+ faith goody hut. My question is how much defenses do you build up? 1 archer per city, 2 archer per city, x number per neighbor?

I ran into problems defending a swordsman rush compounded by the fact I was expecting it from Mongolia instead of Sweden.

I build enough to survive. By checking demographics you can roughly gauge how many units your enemy has. You want to have 1-2 units less than him until he attacks you since if you have more you might start a cold war of unit amassing. Note; always check diplomacy to see how much gold your enemy has. If he has 300+ gold saved up and is amassing units, he's probably going to upgrade rush them - in which case you need to have way more units than you do initially. All in all, about 4 comp archers is usually enough to defend the first wave, from which point on you can use your high production to build more.
 
I play on a huge map with 10 players. How would you change this to account for the happiness and other things changed? Most of the time it's 1-2 real people and 8-9 AIs on difficulty 5-7. We still play quick and either continents or shuffle.

What extra belief would you get as Theodora? I've had times where I choose both faith pantheons on a really fast religion start (usually goody huts, wonders and CS.) half to cripple my enemies and half to get a billion pagodas. Cathedrals + Guruship seems like a decent idea too. Your opinion?

Thanks in advance,
-Elliot S
 
What do you do when you get destroyed by two civilizations from both sides? Do you just rage quit?

<3 love you too Cobra. But really, I hate fighting 2 vs 1; usually I try to turtle but when you spawn in the middle of a pangaea map you're fighting an uphill battle.

I play on a huge map with 10 players. How would you change this to account for the happiness and other things changed? Most of the time it's 1-2 real people and 8-9 AIs on difficulty 5-7. We still play quick and either continents or shuffle.

What extra belief would you get as Theodora? I've had times where I choose both faith pantheons on a really fast religion start (usually goody huts, wonders and CS.) half to cripple my enemies and half to get a billion pagodas. Cathedrals + Guruship seems like a decent idea too. Your opinion?

Thanks in advance,
-Elliot S

On a huge map, there's less of a tech cost modifier as well as more land to settle. I wouldn't worry about AIs in BNW, even on diety they are a pushover - so that means settle wherever you like. In short, settle more and don't be afraid to settle. Whereas on small maps you're settling 8-12 cities, and only very rarely can you settle 15+, on huge just follow the formula and keep settling.

As for Theodora, i've had great success getting Padogas, Mosques, and Cathedrals followed by Sacred Relics for +2 tourism, or +6 tourism per city. With 10 cities you can get 60 tourism per turn - that's before turn 100. If you settle fast enough and beeline to reformation (i'd skip right side of liberty if doing this) you can get a culture vic pre turn 120

Also; I don't recommend getting a double pantheon. You can get additional pantheon beliefs from the piety tree, getting 3 is overkill. Not to mention there are better things to get, such as +1 food from shrine and temple for 2 food per city, guruship for 2 production per city, or the usual building spam.

As for the Cathedrals + Guruship combo, you're better off just market spamming and getting padogas + guruship, then working the market specialist until you get workshops up, then working that. You don't want to work too many specialist slots in a wide empire since then your cities wont grow. Cathedrals USED to be good back in BNW so this combo had some potential, but with the culture nerf on them (down to 1 from 3), I would not recommend it. One of the reasons you're getting padogas and mosques is for the +2 culture per city, cathedrals don't provide that.
 
<3 love you too Cobra. But really, I hate fighting 2 vs 1; usually I try to turtle but when you spawn in the middle of a pangaea map you're fighting an uphill battle.



On a huge map, there's less of a tech cost modifier as well as more land to settle. I wouldn't worry about AIs in BNW, even on diety they are a pushover - so that means settle wherever you like. In short, settle more and don't be afraid to settle. Whereas on small maps you're settling 8-12 cities, and only very rarely can you settle 15+, on huge just follow the formula and keep settling.

As for Theodora, i've had great success getting Padogas, Mosques, and Cathedrals followed by Sacred Relics for +2 tourism, or +6 tourism per city. With 10 cities you can get 60 tourism per turn - that's before turn 100. If you settle fast enough and beeline to reformation (i'd skip right side of liberty if doing this) you can get a culture vic pre turn 120

Also; I don't recommend getting a double pantheon. You can get additional pantheon beliefs from the piety tree, getting 3 is overkill. Not to mention there are better things to get, such as +1 food from shrine and temple for 2 food per city, guruship for 2 production per city, or the usual building spam.

As for the Cathedrals + Guruship combo, you're better off just market spamming and getting padogas + guruship, then working the market specialist until you get workshops up, then working that. You don't want to work too many specialist slots in a wide empire since then your cities wont grow. Cathedrals USED to be good back in BNW so this combo had some potential, but with the culture nerf on them (down to 1 from 3), I would not recommend it. One of the reasons you're getting padogas and mosques is for the +2 culture per city, cathedrals don't provide that.
Thanks! I didn't notice the Cathedral nerf yet, so that makes sense.

In a huge map Cities only add 1.6 unhappiness per, so should I consider taking Cerimonial burial and having basically happiness neutral cities? (Combining with the 1 from city connections for net 0.1 unhappiness per city.)

Market spam seems a lot less useful now that most cities produce 0-1 GPT, is that really an effective use of hammers? It seems like it might be better to A) rush workshop or B) Amphitheater for more policies.

Thanks again! -Elliot S
 
Try this strategy with Egypt and you don't have to cap your cities at size 1 or 2. ^^

5% science penalty per city is the biggest nerf to ICS in BNW. Settle 10 cities with zero to no science output and try to reach techs that are suddenly 50% more expensive.
 
with the 5% science nerf wouldn't ICS set your tech way into the stone age while the AI just power tech past you?
 
Thanks! I didn't notice the Cathedral nerf yet, so that makes sense.

In a huge map Cities only add 1.6 unhappiness per, so should I consider taking Cerimonial burial and having basically happiness neutral cities? (Combining with the 1 from city connections for net 0.1 unhappiness per city.)

Market spam seems a lot less useful now that most cities produce 0-1 GPT, is that really an effective use of hammers? It seems like it might be better to A) rush workshop or B) Amphitheater for more policies.

Thanks again! -Elliot S

Cerimonial burial is something I wouldn't bother with to be honest. Even on huge map, you don't want to expand too much (20+ cities). You're still playing on quick settings, and if you're spamming settlers past turn 80, you're actually hurting yourself. I once had a game where I had enough land for 20 cities, and 10 luxuries so I did as I thought I should do and expanded onto all that land. Problem I encountered is 1) it's hard to defend your last cities and 2) your capital suffers from being low population, therefore you don't get your trade connection gold. Without trade connection gold, you can't afford your other nice buildings, and therefore are going to suffer for it.

Another thing is, you do not want an to build amphitheaters or any other cultural buildings aside from the monument unless you're going for a tourism victory. The gold:culture per turn ratio on them is worse than a monument, not to mention that you should be conservative about working specialists since having 10 stagnant cities is not fun.

Try this strategy with Egypt and you don't have to cap your cities at size 1 or 2. ^^

5% science penalty per city is the biggest nerf to ICS in BNW. Settle 10 cities with zero to no science output and try to reach techs that are suddenly 50% more expensive.

Yes, this strategy works to the fullest with Egypt and Askia, since you get your zero gold per turn temples. As for the science penalty, there are currently two solutions I have come up with.

1) don't settle up to your limit, C. Settle at C/2, 1 city per luxury, and then settle onto C once you have your first batch of cities up and running with buildings at least up to a library. If you get a city state ally, you can proceed to settle a bit closer to C. Ideally though, you shouldn't settle more than 7 cities early on. 7 is a good number, since usually people settle up to 4, with tradition. With 7, you get just enough cities to be your "core" so when industrialism comes up and you get that 7 coal spawn, you have enough coal for a factory in every core city. So even if you spawn with 5 luxuries, you should only settle up to 7 cities at least early on.

2) If you spawn isolated or are confident that your neighbor isn't going to invade you (other side of the jungle/mountain/coast etc etc), rush to national college in your capital. Spawn a free worker, grow your capital out, build a grainary and library and then finally a national college. After that rush the Oracle immediatly, and use the free social policy as well as a second city with a monument to finish liberty track pre turn 60. Spawn a great prophet, build a writers guild in one of your cities, and then proceed to sprawl as normal. This build trades off early padogas and early game security for not falling behind in tech.

These two builds considered, it's a trade off between maximizing piety output with maximizing science per turn. If you go for the initial build and get 100 fpt, you can quickly have a university up in every city by time you get Education (which will come 10-20 turns later), where as if you delay your sprawl or limit your sprawl, you can have your universities up faster, but you won't have as much faith per turn (about 60 from my initial tests) to quickly build universities. All in all, the initial build works best for culture victory since having +2 tourism per building up as fast as possible is the difference between winning turn 120 or 180, whereas for any other victory type i'd consider playing some delay or limiter on your sprawl to maximize science.
 
I'll be trying this in my next game. Probably one of the best written guides I've seen for ICS.
 
On the religion side, I would reverse the priority order of the faith bought buildings to cathedrals, mosques, pagodas. There is plenty of happiness to be found all over the social policies.

Cathedrals first because without them you have to wait for museums or build/capture the wonders that have art/artifact slots. Ever if you're not going for a cultural victory you need to slots either for your own digs (from either spamming archeologists or capturing them), the artists you generate or any art/artifacts you capture.

Mosques to generate plenty of faith.

When I can get it I prefer the Jesuit reformation belief. With enough faith generation you could faith buy all your universities while back-filling the pre-Renaissance techs for only 160 faith each. This lets all your cities focus on the other buildings you want and troops. Once they're all bought, beeline for public schools then start back filling while buying them cheap with faith. If you happen to generate some prophets before hitting industrial you could use them to spread, or plant holy sites for the extra 3 gold 3 culture completing piety gives.
 
On the religion side, I would reverse the priority order of the faith bought buildings to cathedrals, mosques, pagodas. There is plenty of happiness to be found all over the social policies.

Cathedrals first because without them you have to wait for museums or build/capture the wonders that have art/artifact slots. Ever if you're not going for a cultural victory you need to slots either for your own digs (from either spamming archeologists or capturing them), the artists you generate or any art/artifacts you capture.

Mosques to generate plenty of faith.
for ICS? there is indeed a good amount of happiness in social policies, but it comes much later, mostly in the ideologies. And you're not likely to have many great works as an ICS either, until archaeology. I don't think you can expect to sit around on a bunch of small cities for that long. I'd probably go pagodas first so my cities can grow.
 
Testing this in a SP game with Maya, seems like you can get a deceptively large amount of science this way. It starts to seem slow around the Medieval period, but really comes into its own later. And I didn't even manage to land Jesuit Education because some AI grabbed it first (had to settle for Glory instead).
 
do you run specialists in the universities?

what other buildings do you run specialists in?

how much pop per city than has a university? or should you be rolling in happiness by then and not need to limit growth?
 
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