First try at Deity, seeking advice

Hi all, I'm a long time Civ 4 player recently starting out in Civ 5. I've played through about 10-12 games starting at Noble and working up to Emperor. Feeling comfortable with the mechanics and wanting to give Poland a try, I decided to skip Immortal and try out Deity, hoping for a little advice in the aftermath.

The game - Poland/standard pangea/standard speed T305 SV

Fairly standard tradition start, 3 cities with NC at turn 90, dropped a 4th city right after NC finished. Edu at turn 114 to acoustics to enter Renaissance. Took 2 from Patronage after finishing tradition until I could start on Rationalism. Grabbed a couple short bottom tree for workshops before going Scientific Theory -> Electricity, then Oxford to bubble Radio and grab an ideology (order). Then to Plastics->Atomic Theory, Rati finisher + bubble fest to Satellites. Bubble the Hubble with faith bought engineer, and hard tech/bubble out the remaining techs I need for shuttle parts.

So that's my basic path, now for the problems/questions. First of all, I had happiness problems for most of the early game, until getting a bit into Order actually. My lux were 3 gem, 2 wine, 1 citrus. The AI were slow to hook up excess lux, so I could only make 1 straight up lux trade early, the rest I had to sell. Almost every non-mercantile CS had wine, which made them useless to me for happiness, and also provided wine to the AI so they didn't need mine. Both the mercantiles had porcelain, no jewellery in the game. The result was embarrassingly low populations for me in the end. The capital was 27, and 14/16/17 for the others. This can't be normal right? It seems awful.

I also spent a lot of the income from selling resources and trade routes spamming RA's and bribing other civs into war when I felt like someone was eyeing me up as a target (100% peaceful game for me, no war at all despite having the smallest military the entire game). This resulted in having to hard build most if not nearly all science buildings.

I hear a lot about sub 300 SV's, so obviously I making mistakes and I certainly see things that could have been done better, but my primary questions would probably be:

1 - Would it have been better use of gold to save for rush buying science buildings rather than spamming RA's?

2 - Are such happiness problems common at Deity? Was I suffering from a lack of lux resources or resource diversity?

3 - When having such happiness problems, could it have been wiser to choke the satellite city populations down even lower in order to push the capital higher?

4 - Am I missing any other obvious points that would allow me to shave some turns? (I really feel that the low pop's were the biggest problem.)

Thanks in advance, it's nice to have such a great community here to learn from.

-mosphet

Apologies, this probably belongs in Strategy & Tips

Am I missing any other obvious points that would allow me to shave some turns? (I really feel that the low pop's were the biggest problem)

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Yes, if you would go to war, you would save at least 50 turns. Capture 2-3 cities at the right point and you'll have 40%+ science production, by the end of the game, since your new cities will be annexed and filled with research labs. Just needs few artilleries/xbows and such to make this happen. Plus, few gifts from militaristic CS can help here. Gold that you generate from wars will compensate for initial investment, on top of getting tall cities for yourself.

Your tech path seems right, it looks though that happiness Was your problem and you didn't manage to grow high population cities. No recipe here, but your gold per turn has to be top notch, to be competitive.

I usually spend the gold between RA's and rush buys evenly, no clear preference here.

congrats on your deity win.

Moriarte said:

Yes, if you would go to war, you would save at least 50 turns. Capture 2-3 cities at the right point and you'll have 40%+ science production, by the end of the game, since your new cities will be annexed and filled with research labs. Just needs few artilleries/xbows and such to make this happen. Plus, few gifts from militaristic CS can help here. Gold that you generate from wars will compensate for initial investment, on top of getting tall cities for yourself.

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Ok thanks. I admit I was probably a bit overly apprehensive about going to war. In hindsight I probably could have gotten away with capturing a city or two from my neighbor Darius as he was not well liked and I was invited to war against him numerous times. I guess I didn't think about the fact the the AI cities would also be more developed than I'm use to at lower levels and would probably pay off faster. Is that a correct assumption or are they still a bit odd with city development at deity?

Edit: Also, would it be correct to assume the AI is still just as awful at 1upt combat at deity level?

1 - Would it have been better use of gold to save for rush buying science buildings rather than spamming RA's? RAs are usually the best investment for SVs. Use what's left for rush buying. I saw you went order, Skyscrapers tenant can make gold rushing cheap and help save money for RAs.

2 - Are such happiness problems common at Deity? Was I suffering from a lack of lux resources or resource diversity? Not any more common than any other level above prince. The map could be as much to blame as anything but from the looks of it your only happiness SoPols before order were aristocracy and monarchy. If you aren't taking many happiness SoPols you have to find happiness somewhere else which does leave you at the mercy of the map. If you don't found a religion yourself you can try using trade routes to put pressure on your own cities. Find one you like and send trade routes that way as much as possible.

3 - When having such happiness problems, could it have been wiser to choke the satellite city populations down even lower in order to push the capital higher? It kind of depends, did you have any satellites with observatories and jungle? An observatory is about the same as the NC so that citizen will make the same number of beakers in your cap as in your satellite. You can also grow citizens faster in smaller cities because it takes less food. Just make sure you have high enough pop in your satellites to work any scientist specialist slots and any jungle while still keeping the city fed. Once you hit that point you can choke back on the city to take advantage of Monarchy in the capital.

4 - Am I missing any other obvious points that would allow me to shave some turns? (I really feel that the low pop's were the biggest problem.) Hard to say, sounds like you did it right. Moriarte is right about war. If you can capture some higher population cities, especially ones with good wonders like the Forbidden Palace, the Porc tower, Chichen Itza etc. You can get cities that help your happiness and science almost right away. It's only the low pop cities that will slow your research down with the penalty.

IMO if you won, you did it right. I like these kinds of threads though it's interesting to hear what others have to say.

You should really try to place your cities in a way that they provide (multiple) lux. Overall 6 lux in 4 cities seems both like unlucky and bad city placement.

A religion can help a lot with both happynes and gold at least untill the ai starts its prophet spam (around turn 150).

Focus on having your cap grow - every happy face there costs only half unhappynes - send food caravans to it and rather put other cities on prod/great person focus.
Size 20 is OK for noncap cities just cap should be 35+ (I usually reach these number at like about turn 170 but if u do so turn 250 u should still be OK).

Maybe you should also explore more (early) - usually lot of CS got same lux but there are allways few "hidden gems" which got another lux.

Apart that there are some good guides in strategy section, or have a look on one of my videos to get a grasp on "perfect" gameplay. I lack deity videos atm a bit ..

mosphet said:

Ok thanks. I admit I was probably a bit overly apprehensive about going to war. In hindsight I probably could have gotten away with capturing a city or two from my neighbor Darius as he was not well liked and I was invited to war against him numerous times. I guess I didn't think about the fact the the AI cities would also be more developed than I'm use to at lower levels and would probably pay off faster. Is that a correct assumption or are they still a bit odd with city development at deity?

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Correct on both occasions. Core cities are usually well developed, filled with array of useful buildings, where as satellites are usually underdeveloped. Good scouting will reveal important targets. Aim for at least one capital to be on a safe side. If you start puppeting them around t.130 there will be universities to capture. Don't be too late about conquering too, since you might end up with too many units to deal with.

Also, would it be correct to assume the AI is still just as awful at 1upt combat at deity level?

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Yes, the amount of units can look overwhelming, but they use same algorythms as far as i noticed. Besides, with the help of some tactical bribing you can make sure there will be minimum defence when you charge in with your units.

Thanks Vic & Tommy. Yeah I usually am able to nail down a lot more lux with a 4 city spread, but I was mostly constrained to a narrow peninsula with close neighbors. Even reaching out a bit farther wouldn't have helped much in this game. I guess I need to settle faster in the future possibly. I had to forward settle on Darius a bit and buy tiles out from under him with my last city. In the end though, a good portion of my tiles were sea.

I did manage to keep up relations with all the non-wine having CS through most of the game, as well as the one military CS to help minimize troop production. Not sure if going patronage over commerce benefited me greatly in that respect though.

Wasn't able to nail down a religion, I'll have to get better at that. Darius and Pacal both missionary spammed me most of the game. I used Darius religion to get monasterys up, then favored Pacal's for +2 happiness from temple.

Had food cargo ships running to the cap for about the entire game, should have throttled the satellite cities to allow more cap growth and still stay happy though. That was one of the things I was most uncertain about.

To answer your question Vic, no observatory cities, and most workable jungle in the cap. So I guess that should have been the focus.

Tommy I've checked out some of your MP videos, I'll have to have a look at the SP now.

Thanks again guys!

Moriarte said:

Yes, the amount of units can look overwhelming, but they use same algorythms as far as i noticed.

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Thanks, good to know, kind of a bummer to confirm though. It seems to be the AI's greatest weakness in this iteration of civ.

mosphet said:

2 - Are such happiness problems common at Deity? Was I suffering from a lack of lux resources or resource diversity?

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What did you see on the map? Did the AI seem to avoid settling/improving duplicate resources in favor of putting a far-away city down on something else? That's what I find in all my games post-patch (immortal). Which leaves several luxuries as one-AI-copy-only - a nice element of rarity but makes it so i hardly even go for love the king days now.

as far as the conquering suggestion, it's what I would have done, I always conquer darius i hate him, but the drain on production / potential happiness and diplomacy penalties / general effects of distraction probably would have made it a wash, i doubt finish time would have changed.

getting lucky with a religion for happiness would have probably been the game changer here.

GhostSalsa said:

What did you see on the map? Did the AI seem to avoid settling/improving duplicate resources in favor of putting a far-away city down on something else? That's what I find in all my games post-patch (immortal). Which leaves several luxuries as one-AI-copy-only - a nice element of rarity but makes it so i hardly even go for love the king days now.

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They had extra lux available to them, but were either slow to connect them or trading amongst themselves. I was checking with them nearly every turn in the early game and only Polynesia had extra whale for quite some time.

I do often see the same thing you speak of though, civs stretching out all over to grab that unique lux. Arabia is about to pay the price for that behavior in my current game.

27,14,16,17 are horrible for population sizes I'm surprised you made it in 305 turns (must've signed so many RAs) not sure how you were suffering from unhappiness though as your cities are so small... (did you feel severe ideological pressure?)

kb27787 said:

27,14,16,17 are horrible for population sizes I'm surprised you made it in 305 turns (must've signed so many RAs) not sure how you were suffering from unhappiness though as your cities are so small... (did you feel severe ideological pressure?)

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Yes, major pressure. -20/+ happiness, but honestly it was early unhappiness that hurt more than that I think. I just couldn't get my hands on any extra lux early enough. By the time I was feeling ideological pressure I was able to grab some tenets to deal with it.

Started up another deity though following a piece of advice tommy gave in another thread: stray from traditional build orders to crank out a couple more early warriors to clear barb camps. It allowed me to get to quite a few more camps than previously and establish much earlier CS influence. Pretty much solved early happiness problems, though the CS lux diversity was slightly better in this one too.

And yeah, sooo many RA's.