BNW Deity Tier List

_megafone_ said:

There aren't a lot of really out-of-reach Wonders, even in Deity. I believe only Great Library is impossible, and some of the early "achievable" ones have far-reaching effects, like ToA. You also can't really get a Religion without a Wonder (barring extreme luck), so being able to get Stonehenge or Hagia Sofia is good.

You also get the bonus on National Wonders, something that you want on EVERY game.

To finish, free early Happiness is extremely powerful, giving you flexibility to either expand hard or go very tall earlier than your opponents.

I never attacked anybody with a Chariot Archer so I'm not sure about it. =p

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Chariot archers are pretty good in MP, attacking enemies have to commit because they really can't retreat

Deau said:

Ok I am now again getting back to Incans need to receive a boost to 2nd best tier. Particularly with the idea of making the most out of average/bad starts. For a start to be bad for Inca, you have to be terribly badlucky.

Look at this image

Spoiler :

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I lol-ed.

adwcta said:

I lol-ed.

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I should have linked the T0 save. All the terrace farms in the capital were f* jungles, so were most riverside tile. Cities 2-4 have literally 0 flatland natural farmable tiles. Not only is the UI the best in the game, providing a civ with the best potential paired growth+hammer per city but similar to Netherlands, it also often means that you will have outstanding city locations still available by T100 if you want to focus on capital earlier and pump settlers when they're only taking 3-4 turns to build. 2-3 4f2h or more Terrace farms in newly found cities and they're basically online building their own infrastructure within less than 1/2 the time a late found city would normally take.

What map is that? I refuse to believe that's standard Pangaea, that mountain range is downright ludicrous. I absolutely agree with your argument that the Inca have the unique ability of turning an awful start into a terrific one but that is just ridiculous.

Arachnofiend said:

What map is that? I refuse to believe that's standard Pangaea, that mountain range is downright ludicrous. I absolutely agree with your argument that the Inca have the unique ability of turning an awful start into a terrific one but that is just ridiculous.

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It is the basic pangaea map script ive been playing since vanilla. I have no mod or map scripts dled. Only 3rd map spawned

Deau said:

I tend to consider the Steele to be better than the Pyramids in that I can fully skip an early game building from my early game rotation. With the need to hard build settlers nowadays it feels even stronger to that extent and trade routes BPT seem to reduce the impact of the pyramid slightly in proportion to GnK. All this and the fact that it means the faith kicks in 10-40 turns earlier on cities 2-4 from trad opener as opposed to hard building pyramids.

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Yes, but the Pyramids give you the equivalent of the Babylon Academy, only a bit slower. No doubt that Ethiopia is the better civ on the back of the Stele, but the Pyramids simply provide so much more.

Arachnofiend said:

What map is that? I refuse to believe that's standard Pangaea, that mountain range is downright ludicrous. I absolutely agree with your argument that the Inca have the unique ability of turning an awful start into a terrific one but that is just ridiculous.

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I've been seeing a lot of starts like that lately. Off in a corner, massive mountain range with chokepoints and hill spam all around. Seems like the coastal bias civs are a lot more likely to draw something like that. Funny thing is, in vanilla or G&K a start like that would be a cause for celebration but now complete isolation just flat out sucks. Early trade routes are essential to get over the early hump, and then I generally flip them to once the aqueducts are in.

Deau said:

It is the basic pangaea map script ive been playing since vanilla. I have no mod or map scripts dled. Only 3rd map spawned

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Let's remember, in Pangaea, Inca^ would be at least second tier, possibly first tier.
I think that accurately reflects your experience. On a balanced map, nothing close your start would happen more than 5% of time, even with the Hills bias. Heck, you don't even get a mountain in more than half your cities 50%+ of the time.

adwcta said:

Let's remember, in Pangaea, Inca^ would be at least second tier, possibly first tier.
I think that accurately reflects your experience. On a balanced map, nothing close your start would happen more than 5% of time, even with the Hills bias. Heck, you don't even get a mountain in more than half your cities 50%+ of the time.

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I'll try this challenge.

I'll try to get saves for continents and fractal the only map which I have found the incan bias to not deliver solid starts within just a few rerolls is archipelago.

I hardly have enough time to play during the week so I'll spend the night trying to show that Inca bias is not just Pangaea good it's general map excepted maybe archipelago good!

Quick update, I've only had the time to do Continent maps tonight, the start was so bad for expansion I felt like I had to play through to see viability. My 2nd and 3rd cities have like 8-10 viable tiles only yet one of the 2 made it to size 18 or so by T160 whilst working 6 specialists thanks to a completely OP UI.

For the record, this was my FIRST map rolled. I didn't even have to reroll. I stick by that Inca is the civ that can make the most out of the worse and has a bias that can turn their UI into heaven. Tiles with 7 yield (counting only food and hammers) are completely broken. It's not just faster growth whilst being able to infrastructure properly, it's also that they require extremely few tiles to sustain a high amount of specialists whilst still retaining reasonable growth and production. Remember all those times you shifted the 2 university specialists in cities size 4-5-6 and regretted it later because your cities didn't grow nearly enough for the late game? (happened to me much more in GnK, I've corrected that in BnW) Anyway, it doesn't happen much with pachacuti.

That's actually a fairly good start you rolled. All you care about are Mountains, so if you have more than 1 mountain range, as Inca, you are golden. The problem is that that doesn't roll more than half the time. You don't even need to play these games through, just build 2 scouts each game to scout the first 30 turns of surrounding area and you'll know whether Inca'll do as well as Austria or worse than Austria (the other civ with the Hills start bias; to leverage their UB; also conveniently ranked one exactly one tier above Inca). I haven't played around with Inca that much, so it may be a low sample size of okay but not great start-locations, but I never felt that they were that much more powerful than Netherlands (except for military). Interested in the result of your experiment in terms of the hills start bias though.

Netherlands has a similar (ok, a bit delayed, but similar) start bias - UI combo. I keep seeing people clamoring to move them down, instead of up (and they're already on a lower tier).

Yeah I don't know. I've always considered them to be runner-up to god civ since vanilla just due to their growth potential/bias combo. I almost always play Pangaea or one-landmass maps when tinkering strategies though so I guess my start bias experience is not all so representative but I could roll 5 turn 0 maps and take a decision from warrior movement alone and find myself in a super easy game each time.

Then again, I've had a doable start on my 3rd archipelago roll and on my 4th fractal. Not godly but a few setups to compensate.

That and they also seem to have an absurd bias to mount Sinai or whatever is the name of the +8 faith wonder...

Have to agree with Deau, I hadn't toyed with Pachacuti's terrace farm abuse until reading this thread. He's godly on anything next to mountains. A few from my game:



This game included many wars and was a diplomatic nightmare. I only had to reroll once to get mountains near Cusco. I am a fan of Fractal myself, but I can't imagine starts like this are a rare thing. I suppose you could say the same thing about a baked reroll of Egypt (marble, salt, plains riverside corn etc.) or Spain (almost any NW), but Inca does not rely on the AI.

I've rolled random Inca starts a lot to test the very thing being discussed here, and while not every single time do you get enough mountains nearby, most of the time they are available.
They have always been one of the best overall civs; BNW has not changed this...if anything, the lack of early gold makes them even better due to their maintenance-free roads on hills.

The idea is that if you don't have a mountain nearby, you have very little to work with (the roads UA by itself is usually worse than papermaker since there's one less road than # of cities). ense7en, what were your exact stats on a fractal/continents map for capital by mountain, second city by mountain, and not really any mountains for the starts you rolled? I'm curious, and "mostly" is kind of vague. I think a no start bias roll is something like 20% on a fractal map for viable mountain placement next to your capital, less for continents, more for earth and pangaea. If the hills start bias is really pushing the start to something like 50% then I'm moving both Incan and Austria up one each, since that +30% chance for mountain start would be a pretty big benefit in and of itself.

My general theory in ranking the civs: If Inca gets graded an A for 50% of games, a B for 15% of games and a F for 35% of games; Siam gets graded a B for 90% of games and a F for 10% of games.... I would not hesitate to rank Siam as a clearly better civ than Inca. To take an example, goodolarchie mentions the great game he had with Inca, on his SECOND roll. You would almost never say that about any of the top or upper tier civs... because almost all starts are good starts for those civs. The idea isn't "look how great Inca is when they have mountains", no one doubts that they're a higher tier relatively if you reroll all civs until you get a mountain start for each of them... you just have to modify that enthusiasm by the % of times you actually do get mountains.

In any case, enough people have spoken up. If no one backs me up and one more deity player thinks Inca should be moved up, I'll move them. Also, I think at this point the only debate is what% of Incan starts on balanced maps actually has mountains, which can be resolved statistically. No one seriously thinks Incan are anywhere near top tier without mountains, they'd be solidly lower-mid tier, very similar to Persia (better movement speed for military and has culture/hammer/gold split instead of pure gold bonus; which is fairly comparable). If the hills start bias really lets you have a mountain start 50%+ of the time, then I'd move both Austria and Inca up.

For me Poland (and Maya to some extent) just stand out to other civs - their specials arent comparebale to other ones imo - getting a tile improvement there or a little gold/faith whatever bonus here just doesnt compare to their ability.

Getting a full tree of sp for free is ridic strong.

And maya is so flexible - get yourself a general if u want attack early or an admiral to scout a continet map- get CI at deity - everything is possible with maya

nice list, here is what i would change

...You want to bump the science civs down a tier? Please, do tell.

adwcta said:

(the roads UA by itself is usually worse than papermaker since there's one less road than # of cities)

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I didn't get this part. Are you saying that if you have 4 cities, you connect them with 3 roads?

Blitz Spearman said:

I didn't get this part. Are you saying that if you have 4 cities, you connect them with 3 roads?

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Yes, that's all I meant, confusing language I know. Anyway, I'm reluctantly moving Inca up. This is the first move that I have strong disagreement with. It just feels so wrong putting them next to Austria (same start bias; since, we haven't confirmed whether hills start bias gives more % chance for mountains, which would be a rather large consideration). Inca gets more gold (a lot more actually, as with a couple of terrace farms, you can save 1-2 food routes) whereas Austria uses gold, but Austria actually lets you expand and get pre-formed fully functional mid-sized cities at any point in the game, which on Deity, with the crowding of cities, is extremely useful for everything from science (you get more pop from a couple of mid-sized cities than any amount of terrace farms will give you) to culture (you buy the CSs with workable dig sites, for a significant source of tourism, not to mention for extra great works of writing slots).

Ah, well.

I think you're overrating Ethiopia. Pretty much the only decent thing they get is the monument replacement but even then it really does not help that much outside of getting an early religion. Their UU is pretty much trash unless you are like defending your capital from invasion and that is never a good spot to be in. Maybe it is just my playstyle but I think Ethiopia is pretty terrible.

I think you are underrating Greece. With consulates you get a quick cheap and insanely good boost to everything and doing a diplo victory with Greece is pretty easy. Not to mention their unique horseman replacement is amazing early on to wreck havoc with multi-pillage just completely destroy a civs production with the the 5 movement so early.