BNW Deity Tier List

Greece is too low, I would put them in line with Rome and Persia, but behind Egypt and Arabia. Persia has beend nerfed due to the GA gold bonus, but is still good. What makes Rome so much better than Persia and Greece? So I would put Rome, Persia and Greece all in the same tier.

Here is my post from the other thread:

My estimate is based upon the list of this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=488701


God Tier: these civs are so good that they can win from almost any kind of starting point, and they are often suitable to win in many different ways.
Ethiopia, the Mayans, Austria, Arabia, Korea, Babylon.
--------------------------
1st Tier: these civs are in general fairly good, but they are not as good as the God Tier civs.
China, England, Mongolia, Egypt, the Celts, the Incans, France (1 up), Shoshone, Brazil
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2nd Tier: these civs are decent, but they are lackluster compared to the other civs on the higher tiers, or require some luck to get going.
The Netherlands, Russia, Siam, the Aztecs, the Huns, the Iroquois, Rome, Persia, Greece (1 up), Morocco, Poland, Portugal
--------------------------
3rd Tier: these civs are considered to be not that great but workable.
Germany, America, Carthage, Songhai, Denmark, India, the Ottoman, Assyria??, Venice
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4th Tier: these civs are comparably pretty bad.
Byzantium, Sweden, Japan, Polynesia, Indonesia, Zulu
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Dice-roll Tier: way better than God Tier with luck, 3rd~4th tier without luck.
Spain.
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The god tier civs for me, did not change, but there are quite some first tier additions.

Reasons for my classifications:

France: The new ability is very powerful especially when you go complete Aesthetics it is 4x the normal Theme bonus for Culture and Tourism in your capital. You will build culture wonders with France anyway, and because most cultural wonders are midgame, you will have a chance to build quite a few of them even on higher difficulties. France is also able to get more culture and social policies than any other civilization. Maybe only rivaled by Poland, by the number of policies.

Shoshone: The Shoshone are very good. The Pathfinder is awesome, and offers you a lot of possibilities in early game. It would be God tier, if you could select the faith bonus with your very first ruin. The way it is now, does not guarantee to get a religion, without building a shrine.

Brazil: Brazil is a great tourism powerhouse, when you manage to get a lot of golden ages, which can be done through great artist burning, as well as with their unique unit. You can even time your great musicians to spawn during your artificial golden ages, to make them stronger aswell. The wood camp finally offers another imporvement for jungles, except trading posts. The special unit has a nice trait, but comes in too late, Although it can be used through the rest of the game and does not become obsolete, except you upgrade to mobile infantry, which you do not have to.

Greece: The control of the World Congress and easier/earlier diplo victory makes Greece better than before. The lack of gold for CS in early game is also of less sgignificance for Greece, because it can maintain the ally status far longer than any other civ. While oponening Patronage is a must for Greece, you will also get extra delegates for building the Forbidden Palace, which is also unlocked by the patronage tree.

Morocco: The Kasbah is nice, but does not let you build anything else on the tile unlike the Petra. The unique unit is decent and the Trade bonus let other players prefer your cities for their trade routes. This civ is missing some flavor, like the Kasbah should be a building in the city, which gives you the bonus for all tiles of the city, like the Petra, but I guess that would have been too powerful. Now they are just a mediocre civ.

Poland: Poland is very good for culture and getting a lot of social policies, but without a mayor tourism bonus, it is not such a significant civilization for a culture victory.

Portugal: The Feitorias are awesome, while the pure gold bonus on different resources at trade routes does not seem to be much of a difference. The Nao is only a mediocre unique unit and is not as powerful as it should be. Portugal is only good on water maps, Feitorias and the Nao are almost useless on Pangea or any other land based maps.

Assyria: Assyria has a great unique unit, but the unique ability is situational, because once you outteched your neighbor, you get nothing out of it. However you can fully focus on one part of the tech tree, while constantly filling up the other side through conquest, but the 5% science penalty will hit you pretty soon. So you get a free tech, but you will get all future techs even slower. This makes the unique ability a truly double edged sword. The unique building is rather poor, because there are more than enough slots for great works of writing available in the early game due to Amphitheaters. The royal library does not offer anything else, except that additional GW slot.

Venice: Venice is incredibly situational. Well it has its great strat bias, which will ensure you the best possible starting locations before any other civilization is placed on the map. But the lack settlers is forcing you to very special tech path for optics and also going Liberty, both of which are not the best choices. And neglecting the important military techs for too long in favor of getting some early puppets could really hurt you. Not to mention, when you only get a decent or bad start or you are missing iron or coal... You can not settle there and you are doomed if no CS has it.

Indonesia The bonus resources are nice, but they are not a big deal. Any other civilization with a happiness building will easily be able to exceed that bonus. The Candi has a very situational bonus and is unilkely to give you a lot of additional faith, you are very dependent on the religious performance of your neighbors, therefore the bonus you receive from it is minimal.

Zulu: The unique unit is very strong and the army maintenance bonus is nice. However in total the Zulu are a pure warmongering civ and have nothing more to offer, unlike other civs. The Ikanda becomes obsolete after gunpowder as well as their unique unit. The moment they shine goes by pretty fast. You can better play the mongols.
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adwcta said:
Rome - I'm standing by this one for now. Has anyone tried them on BNW? It's a much better start. You also get iron now and CSs get iron earlier, so you can grab a CS even if you don't have it. This is one of the most improved civs, so let me know if you've tried it in BNW and are still unimpressed. Instead of gold buying buildings in cities, you can buy them in your capital, freeing up many hammers for caravans, army, etc. Food routes can also get your other cities up quick so they become self-sufficient even at mid-late game very quickly. Synergizes well with a wide-culture/science game or domination game. Very flexible. Very safe.
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Rome was always a 2nd to god tier civ. The small changes to Iron is marginal. Their value is all in the UA. The issue with portraying rome against most other UA/UB/UI/UU is that it is far, far less tangible. It's just there and you hardly notice it since it does not affect capital output. Over the course of a game though, it compounds to a huge amount of hammers, consistently unlocking Nat wonders earlier and simply having enough hammers to both infrastructure and military.
 
sidereal said:
So I've got to ask, what's so good about arabia? I've tried them out several times on emperor and never had much success.
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I haven't played them in BNW but, imo, Camels are easily the best UU in the game. Fully promoted Camels can last well into Modern, given them an awesome longevity. I would be interested to know if Arabia can still be a gold power in BNW.

By the way, I pretty much like the OP list. I would move both Greece and Japan up though.
 
Martin Alvito said:
They aren't that good. Definitely tier 2, borderline tier 1 given the no-reroll stipulation. Double :c5culture: ruins going straight down the left side of Liberty is hot. Add in a couple of early CBs, some :c5pop: ruins and a :c5faith: ruin if you're lucky and you're looking at a solid opening. That said, the other top tier civs get substantial benefits throughout the entire game in addition to an accelerated start.

Agree with various others that Inca is tier 2, and that Rome belongs down a notch. Not sure how to handle Spain either. I'd tend to list them in tier 2 myself.

Poland belongs in its own tier. Getting an extra tree of SPs is just absurd.



They all pretty much got buffed, relative to other civs. Ethiopia's better now that coastal starts aren't so bad, the :c5science: civs (Babs, Korea, Maya) all got relatively better now that :c5science: is very hard to come by early on, Arabia got a massive buff because the extended trade routes more or less guarantee a trade partner, and Poland is completely broken.
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With the new policy costs, and the fact that Poland's UA is divided over the entire game I'm not so convinced. It's good, no doubt, but I no longer feel like in G&K or Vanilla where I'm avoiding policies because it'll simply be impossible to fill other trees later. I'd put it in the same category as the Science civs and Arabia.
 
Things I disagree with the most on OP's tier list:

1) Calling the Zulus "balanced" is a blasphemy imo. Only thing keeping them off the top tier to me is that they're too focused, but they're definitely THE most powerful military civ, not close. Impis are ridiculous. Even playing DC29, going OCC peaceful science, I was extremely impressed by their usefulness. They're SO far ahead of other military civs that they belong to a higher tier.

2) You also really underrate the Shoshone. Going with a Tradition start you can have, by turn 20, a 5-pop capital with a Monument and Granary already up AND a Pantheon. It's nuts, and flexible enough to take you to whatever kind of win you want. I'd actually go as far as putting them on the top tier, but I didn't play them enough to be sure of that. Another civ you seem to vastly underrate are the Inca, which a lot of great players consider to be top tier (I don't play much on them but I trust the forums on that one).

3) Netherlands is worse than every civilization you've placed on the bottom tier. They have a situational UU, a hard to utilize tile improvement (as their grass starting bias usually don't give you a lot of tiles where you can place Polders), and the UA got severely gimped by the early lack of gold + lump sum selling restrictions. They're just an awful civ now, with nothing that stands out for them on any kind of map whatsoever. India is also still pretty bad; it was almost consensually the worst civ in the game for most Deity forum posters pre-BNW.

I'd make some other minor adjustments to his list, and thus my tiers would be like this (listed from best to worst on each tier):

Top Tier: Korea, Poland, Babylon, Mayans, Ethiopia, Arabia
2nd Tier: Shoshone, Inca, Venice, Austria, Zulu, China, Morocco, Egypt, Rome
Middle tier: see below
Bottom tier: Byzantium, Denmark, Netherlands.

The middle tier is every other civ lumped together, as they're all somewhat situational, and how good they are is basically contingent on the map - even civs heavily slanted toward specific map types can be used to great effect if the RNG is good to them. For example, you can be playing Indonesia on a Pangaea and get a bunch of random 1-tile islands off the coast each surrounded by 4-5 fish, and then your civ choice suddenly looks awesome.
 
Assyria is definitively God tier (only civ I've managed to win domination on deity since BNW (did not try mongols//zulus yet)) .. Those siege towers are absolutely ridiculous for early conquests .. The extra +15XP from Libraries is also huge -> when you couple that with the +15XP from autocracy you can for example mass buy cheap +1 range frigates from pretty early ..

The steal tech on conquest is very solid for deity tech pace ...
 
Assyria and Rome should be t1.

Assy can close the gaps in techs very quickly if you spam 3-4 towers early. Grab 3-4 crappy cities and get techs.
Also they get almost a lvl 4 upgrade for new units due to Royal Lib.

Rome, well, Ballista+Legion make early conquest a piece of cake, and building stuff faster is great.
No need to rely on iron at all. Some games I don't even build Legions, Ballistas alone are great.

I agree with the rest of the list :)

Btw I wonder why Legions don't have a double attack since they used to throw Pilums before entering melee.
Pretty much all Legionaries had at least 2 Pilums to toss before battle, makes me sad to see this applied to Zulu -_- We invented this tactic long before Zulus!
 
adwcta said:
Arabia - Tich, Arabia has a desert start bias, so you will always start next to the desert. That's why they're top tier. I agree that they're not top tier if you re-roll starts to get a desert with other civs. On a 8-player game, you'll have at most one other civ competing with you for desert folklore, so your chances of getting it with just a shrine and exploration (faith-CSs) is still very high. And of course, you would bee-line Petra, which you can get almost 100% of the time.
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I should have clarified that a bit. Yes, you always start next to a desert, but that doesn't mean that you'll have a strong desert start. Sometimes you only get a few decent tiles. You're not guaranteed to get a ton of desert hills and such. I've gotten some extremely lackluster starts as Arabia.

You will not get Desert Folklore on Deity 100% of the time. If any of the computers have a Desert start then you'll probably miss out on it.

You will not get Petra on Deity 100% of the time. Again, you just won't beat other computers who happen to pass by it.
 
Tich said:
I should have clarified that a bit. Yes, you always start next to a desert, but that doesn't mean that you'll have a strong desert start. Sometimes you only get a few decent tiles. You're not guaranteed to get a ton of desert hills and such. I've gotten some extremely lackluster starts as Arabia.

You will not get Desert Folklore on Deity 100% of the time. If any of the computers have a Desert start then you'll probably miss out on it.

You will not get Petra on Deity 100% of the time. Again, you just won't beat other computers who happen to pass by it.
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I almost never get Petra :( Even if I beeline currency with the most beakers possible the AI just WILL get it first and build it with their 50% bonus to buildings thing, they will get it first.
Unless I use the Liberty GE that is :lol: in that case I love to read the diplo hit because I built it before them.
 
peddroelm said:
Assyria is definitively God tier (only civ I've managed to win domination on deity since BNW (did not try mongols//zulus yet)) .. Those siege towers are absolutely ridiculous for early conquests ..
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The argument against Assyria isn't that they're bad. It's that warmongering is generally suboptimal in BNW, but you have to choose that road from the first turn if you're playing Assyria. For the absolute top tier civs, warmongering is an option but isn't forced on the player.
 
Falconiano said:
I almost never get Petra :( Even if I beeline currency with the most beakers possible the AI just WILL get it first and build it with their 50% bonus to buildings thing, they will get it first.
Unless I use the Liberty GE that is :lol: in that case I love to read the diplo hit because I built it before them.
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This has been my exact experience as well. Don't get me wrong, Arabia is still fine without Petra, I just find that I rarely get Folklore or Petra on Deity unless I get super lucky and no one else has a desert start. This is why I don't think that they're a God tier civ. They are very very very good but I don't think that they're God tier.

Martin Alvito said:
The argument against Assyria isn't that they're bad. It's that warmongering is generally suboptimal in BNW, but you have to choose that road from the first turn if you're playing Assyria. For the absolute top tier civs, warmongering is an option but isn't forced on the player.
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Thank you. You articulated that better than I did/could. I think that Assy is a weak civ because I personally think that early warmongering is horrible in BnW on Deity. The AIs are more than happy to play nice with you and feed you tons of gold from trade routes, resources, gpt to lump sum conversions, etc. Their stuff is all fine insofar as war is fine but I personally find war to be horrendous.
 
Tich said:
... I personally find war to be horrendous.
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Therefore your scores towards warmonger civs will be biased against them :) .

This thread was not named - sort by fastest win time (best culture/diplo/science civs) for deity. Neither was it named most flexible civs that could go for any victory types .. Assyria can win via domination deity from most map starting locations and that makes it very strong in my book ...
 
Well actually, the OP orders his tier list based on flexibility. His requirements for top tier are that the civ should be able to achieve any win condition from virtually any start position. He also takes into account strength on water maps which mitigates the usefulness of siege towers for the obvious reasons. So, going by the criteria in the OP, Assyria is not a top tier civ by any means.
 
Arachnofiend said:
Well actually, the OP orders his tier list based on flexibility. His requirements for top tier are that the civ should be able to achieve any win condition from virtually any start position. He also takes into account strength on water maps which mitigates the usefulness of siege towers for the obvious reasons. So, going by the criteria in the OP, Assyria is not a top tier civ by any means.
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Assyria is very strong on water maps too - can get to rush buy cheap +1 Range Frigates (3 promotions library/barracks/armory/3 factories Industrialization Autocracy) relatively quickly ..
 
Martin Alvito said:
The argument against Assyria isn't that they're bad. It's that warmongering is generally suboptimal in BNW, but you have to choose that road from the first turn if you're playing Assyria. For the absolute top tier civs, warmongering is an option but isn't forced on the player.
Click to expand...

However Assyria doesn't need to win by Domination, it only needs to soften up a high tech AI every now and again, something you pretty much have to do in any game. If the Top tier is to civs that have highest win % on fewer map conditions and no rerolling, I have to agree with the guy, it's up there.
 
peddroelm said:
Assyria is very strong on water maps too - can get to rush buy cheap +1 Range Frigates (3 promotions library/barracks/armory/3 factories Industrialization Autocracy) relatively quickly ..
Click to expand...

Yup, that's why unlike the Huns, they don't have a ^ mark. But, are they as powerful as the Huns on land?

Update: I updated the main thread and discussion topics thread, moving a couple civs around, and making a new tier.

Serious about Rome, let's not talk about them unless we have BNW experience with them on Deity. I understand they're not a 2nd tier civ on G&K, and the changes don't look spectacular for them, but it absolutely makes them that much better imo. If we get some BNW consensus from people with experience with this civ, I'll move them down. I'm going to get flak for saying this, but if you do a 150 turn side by side comparison, their starts are very comparable to Shoshone starts, and then they continue to have a major advantage throughout the rest of the game.

More Warmonger discussion. I moved England down, bad idea? or just an accurate reflection of warmongering in BNW. England does have an extra spy too. Enough to move it back up? I think I'm very comfortable putting the Mongols as a definitive new 3rd tier civ. Hard to say they're better than China/Austria right? And, I'm going to start comparing every "pure" warmongering civ on the axis of "better than Mongols" (China, England?); "on par with Mongols" (Zulu); "worse than Mongols" (Assyria/Songhai, Huns?); and "significantly worse than Mongols" (Germany/Japan, Ottoman?); oh, and then there's poor Denmark.

PDMX, Greece's UA is essentially a ton of situational gold savings for a specific item. You just can't compare that benefit to actual gold like Portugal, Spain, which you can use any way you want as you see fit. Anyone else share PDMX's opinion of Greece moving up?

Also, PDMX seems to have had very good experiences with culture-victory on Deity using France/Brazil. I played both and did not feel they were powerful (when compared to culture victories with civs that had no direct tourism benefits, I did not feel like I was significantly slower). But, I also think culture victory is my weakest right now, so will move these civs up if there's consensus that France/Brazil really do rock the culture game. I'm very willing to be convinced here. France suffers from needing to hit key early Renaissance wonders, which is an iffy proposition on Deity without a science boost; Brazil is in the "expert-civ" Sweden position of needing to fight a war to take advantage of its UA/UUs, but also needing peace to actually win the game (war-locked CSs / tourism dies with war). It's not that Lower Tier civs are bad, they're just difficult and situational to use, with only moderate payoffs.

Anchors: I've "anchored" each of the tiers with two civs of different play-styles, usually one wide-possible war, one peaceful-tall. These civs I do not consider controversial, so I'll be relating all other civs to these to do better side by side comparisons and help focus discussion:

Top Tier: Mayan, Korea
Upper Tier: China, Austria
Upper-Mid Tier: Inca, Siam
Lower-Mid Tier: Russia, India
Lower Tier: Carthage, Iroquois
Bottom Tier: Polynesia, Denmark
 
Polynesia shouldn't be bottom tier anymore; the new mechanics for culture mean that Polynesia can actually go wide and still eat up policies. Plus now the downside of going wide is more about slower border growth cause of weaker culture output from culture buildings; not so with Polynesia. Ok so they still gonna suck on Pangea but they do a very good job on continents plus and have a natural VC that can regularly work.
There are smaller boosts too; for example, their natural heavy worker focus synergises well with archaeologists being good for a culture VC, as pyramids+liberty means they get the landmark/artefact in 3 turns regular speed.
 
Mongols only "weak spot" was death by early rush .. As that almost never tends to happen anymore if you take basic precautions - they are even stronger than before. Be(a)st warmonger civ ...
 
Crafty Bison said:
Polynesia shouldn't be bottom tier anymore; the new mechanics for culture mean that Polynesia can actually go wide and still eat up policies. Plus now the downside of going wide is more about slower border growth cause of weaker culture output from culture buildings; not so with Polynesia. Ok so they still gonna suck on Pangea but they do a very good job on continents plus and have a natural VC that can regularly work.
There are smaller boosts too; for example, their natural heavy worker focus synergises well with archaeologists being good for a culture VC, as pyramids+liberty means they get the landmark/artefact in 3 turns regular speed.
Click to expand...

Anyone finish a BNW Deity game as Polynesia (besides me; spoiler alert lame default diplo "victory" =/)? I may be underrating all the +culture improvements (tourism in late game) for France/Brazil/Polynesia. Polynesia in particular is stuck where expanding kills your science, and if they're going to be working culture tiles, their cities will be growing very slowly. It becomes almost impossible to catch up to AI civs. Archeologists are only important if you can win the race to the tech, which you can't (or at least, I couldn't). As Polynesia, you're struggling to get enough archeologists out to landmark your own ruins before they're stolen, much less take any from anywhere else. If others have had good experiences with Polynesia (not theory-crafting, since this is a proven horrible civ in G&K), let me know.
 
adwcta said:
Anyone finish a BNW Deity game as Polynesia (besides me; spoiler alert lame default diplo "victory" =/)? I may be underrating all the +culture improvements (tourism in late game) for France/Brazil/Polynesia. Polynesia in particular is stuck where expanding kills your science, and if they're going to be working culture tiles, their cities will be growing very slowly. It becomes almost impossible to catch up to AI civs. Archeologists are only important if you can win the race to the tech, which you can't (or at least, I couldn't). As Polynesia, you're struggling to get enough archeologists out to landmark your own ruins before they're stolen, much less take any from anywhere else. If others have had good experiences with Polynesia (not theory-crafting, since this is a proven horrible civ in G&K), let me know.
Click to expand...

Yeah I've done fairly well with them. Don't get me wrong, they're not top tier, but I don't think they're bottom any more. It's mainly about not going ott on cities or moai. Bear in mind that you don't need to work all your moai, and that going wide you can spend a few rubbish tiles which you wouldn't work anyway to get one or two good ones. You don't need to moai every single tile, and should still improve the lux''s and farm the wheat etc. ICS is dead for everyone from science, but wide is not; the science penalty is not that strong if you stay reasonable, and culture policies get a much bigger boost from Polynesia (relative to other wide civs) than they used to. When I've played, I've taken liberty (sometimes with tradition opener for borders), then mixed aesthetics with rationalism (which Polynesia does need).
Tbh, I haven't really found the need to get landmarks, as moai do a good job anyway, so the few that I did get out really benefitted from being super fast as they were being snapped up, so I focused on depriving the culture leader from what they had yet to get. You are right that they don't get there super early, but tech stealing and a little intelligence over where to steal is a great leveller :).
Lastly, you don't need to crazy on the moai super early; I spammed them near the end when I had lots of pop and was getting tourism, but for the majority of the game they were just in the prime spots.

PS. Not about their strength really as it's situational and a little role playey, but I found it really fun when warring to take workers with me to quickly get moai up on the edge of new puppets to attack the next city. I also found planning city placement very interesting and fun.

edit: Oh yeah, of the 4 games I played w Polyneisa I had 1 diplo win, 2 culture wins, and one loss. 75% for me feels about par for a middle tier civ on deity. There was 1 pangea, 1 continents (the loss), 1 continents plus and one small continents. All standard size and pace, all else standard except quick movement and fighting.
 
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