Wanna play wide? Here's some civ-specific strategies to try!

inthesomeday said:

Rome is unique in that you can go geographically VERY wide with them due to legion road building. I usually get iron working shortly after or shortly before education, around which time is a good time to road out to far expands.

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Speaking of which, I have a quick Roman Legion tangent. I haven’t played Rome in a long time, but can you stack a Legion with a Worker to create roads faster like how you can stack multiple Workers in previous versions of Civ? I know I could just try it for myself, but I'm mentally theory crafting here at work to pass the time on a slow Friday afternoon.

Interesting idea! I don't know if they could both work at once but I bet I know something that does for the same effect:

1. Start worker action for road
2. Cancel worker action for road
3. start legion action for road

there, 2 turns off. When you cancel after working it retains the 1 turn of working so I'm positive you could do it twice.

Hey guys! I've started a new standard/wide game! I'm looking to add Poland to my list of civs I've played this way and I wanted something to compare tradition times on science too.

To satisfy this I chose to play the GOTM challenge 128 with Poland/Pangaea/Deity. Due to poor starting dirt the fastest finish times were between T231-248. I'm gonna see if I can play well enough to finish around T250 with the dramatically different liberty/wide science approach. I usually play this on immortal so this will be an interesting experiment with Deity AI! I've read nothing of the challenge other then the finish times so I have no idea what's in store this game, it'll be fun to play against tradition times though, I will probably make mistakes and be a bit worse but I'm sure I'll win. It's hard to mess up Poland.

You can follow the game here in the stories/LP write-up section!
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=566459

Ducal stables make Poland one of the best wide civilizations in the game (although of course Poland is already one of the best civilizations in the game); I love love love sheep cows and horses, I settle my cities near them because they make lovely tiles to work and because wide Liberty can be short on gold sometimes the ducal stable becomes your best friend.

Something interesting Poland can do is split liberty and piety better than most civilizations. Obviously on deity a religion is a lot less viable than on typical multiplayer settings, where I usually test things, but if the start has good faith pantheons available I'd certainly try a Liberty/Piety build. What's the victory for the GOTM?

Yeah ducal stable looks fabulous! I was more interested to see the effect of the extra social tenets though. It'll mean a far early liberty finisher and GP (so earlier academy). It will also give me extra points to speed through a secondary tree prior rationalism. My current plan is liberty-->commerce-->rationalism, but I'll probably have to throw a point in another tree prior medieval. We'll see which looks better at the time.

I got links to original GOTM challenge on the story thread. It had two optional win conditions: culture or science. I'm competing in the science bracket. I'm expecting to make some mistakes but I think it'll be a good learning experience for me to play these more dangerous strategies on Deity. Many players have (rightly) commented on my guides that I should do more tests on Deity since the extra settlers and troops make expanding to size 7-8 slightly more difficult. I thought it'd be a nice terrain to test on too because it has some heavy jungle but poor starting dirt. it looks like liberty might be better primed to coax out an advantage from the area. I'm near turn 100 currently and it's a solid win already but I'm not sure if the time will be competitive. We'll see.

Commerce is a good idea if piety is an impossible tree for this challenge. The beaker off of gold buildings is actually pretty nice if you can get there early, when you factor in all the modifiers it can contribute a nice solid ~3 beaker bonus for every city. Not nearly as nice later on but nothing to scoff at pre-public schools. Plus building purchasing can be really helpful for Liberty, especially considering Poland's ducal gold. It gets factories cheap enough to enter industrial through industrialization, which is pretty good for Liberty because you can grab ideology faster than a standard Oxford radio rush. Which with Poland can mean factory science on the turn you get industrialization, an immensely useful early policy to compete with scientific theory entry.
I think the way to go is use the policy from Medieval to open Commerce, use the policy from Renaissance to open Rationalism, and use the Industrial policy to grab a tier two ideological tenet if you can manage a commerce gold-hoard factory rush. Obviously this relies on already having mined a source of at least 3 coal but I find this to be the case ~1/3 of my games, safe enough to bet on.

I'm playing Persia, 7 cities, 3 of which are next to mountains including the capital. All things being equal, after Education do you go for Satrap's Court or go for Observatories? What determining factors would make you lean toward the other option?

Have you been priority feeding the observatory cities? Regardless I'd probably enter through astronomy then head printing press>banking>public schools (Persia lets you delay ideologies)>factories etc. Have you been popping more tourism as Persia so you can go freedom without suffering happiness? It doesn't really effect tech path-- in fact, neither does the Satrap's Court in general-- just curious.
To summarize/directly answer, tech as you would normally. The Satrap's court is very nice but unless you're stagnating you don't need it before you'd normally need banks

My vote goes to observatories. It is an instant-effect, and a giant science boost to your bigger cities. Not to mention as soon as you get it all the techs to go for satrap's court are cheaper so you save time. Satrap's court is nice for money and happiness in a wide empire but I think it's worth putting off if you've got 3 observatory sites. Obviously, get workshops early before both, they are extremely powerful in a wide empire. The tech path to banks after education has nothing but wonders and military stuff so not much use to you till satrap's court. The tech path to observatories has seaports, an extra trade route, increases range of trade route, +1 gold from fishing boats, harbors, and caravels to discover more civs if you are playing continents/fractal, in addition to the observatory. If you have a few coastal cities the tech path to astronomy is far more valuable to you.

When in doubt, science > everything else. There are variation to which tech to open Renaissance, but usually Astronomy is best whenever you have mountains or water map. In some cases, it might be necessary to open Acoustic to get Sistine Chapel for CV or Banking for Forbidden Palace before AI grabs them but these are a little more specific cases and usually only on deity where AI can tech that quickly. However Satrap court itself isn't enough justification for opening with Banking unless you're completely screwed with happiness and gold but then something else is wrong.

Just wrote a basic shoshone guide after practicing with them! Great Expanse is game-breaking strong! Didn't realize how many liberty expansion problems it helps with! So much easier to cover terrain with strong cities and completely solves the slow border expansion problem every other liberty civ has. Plus natural protection against annoyed neighbors and I love the troll factor of settling next to some new city and eating all their 2-3 ring resources immediately. Their abilities all theme and synergize very well.

TBH I'd never played liberty with them till this year, but I love it!

Let me know if you guys want pictures of my games that I practiced these strategies on in the quick guides! I'm also willing to do videos of each just showing the basic opening choices for each wide civ I'm used to playing on a random map. I can mix these in with my novelty games.