Crossbow rushing on Deity ... help?!

So, I don't know that I've tried to CB (not CB, the other CB) rush on Deity before, maybe way back in the day when I had less of a clue ... but my memory is that the AI gets their cap up to a 40+ defense very quickly, plus generates a billion units, and so early war rushes when I'm literally 12 techs behind don't work very well.

BUT. Clearly, some of you are pulling this off! So -- what's the plan? I take it you beeline to Machinery, ignoring CS/Education for later? (If so -- that doesn't cripple you for the rest of the game?) You building anything but archers (and a granary and a library and maybe one settler) early on? Is Liberty truly the way to go? (It woudl seem to me that happiness is a lot harder to manage w/Liberty).

Inquiring minds want to know. Lack of ability to early war/war while behind on tech is the gaping hole in my Deity game.

I'm curious about this too. I'm interested in trying to incorporate a sort of "value rush" with xbows into my standard gameplan -- conquering one target of convenience around T100 (hopefully getting a couple nice wonders) as an alternative to founding extra cities myself. But it seems like most of the discussion around early war on this site nowadays relates to Domination victories, which I'm just not interested in.

My last game I had a very easy time with beelining Machinery post-NC and sending 6 xbows at my target. I did a 3-cities Liberty thing and it worked really nicely. But I was playing Babylon, which obviously helps a lot with that plan.

I guess I'm mainly curious about how many xbows are generally "enough" to go on the offensive at this stage of the game. Obviously factors like terrain/opposing civ/war allies matter too. What's the minimum number of xbows for a rush under ideal circumstances? What's a "safe" amount for tougher setups?

Liberty is better than Tradition (and Honor ) at early war because without Collective Rule it's quite hard to get both army and Settlers. You either delay expansion which means good land will be taken away or you get a late upgrade to Composites which is bad (CBs are no good against 25+ defense).

Construction -> Philosophy -> Machinery -> Education -> Industrialization -> Science Theory -> Flight is a common tech path for Liberty games. There's no point rushing to Universities if you can't fill them anyway. 6 cities running 2 specialists will stagnate unless you feed them with caravans but internal trade routes aren't worth it without Aqueducts and they come quite late for Liberty.

As for the actual rush, your priority should be getting those Archers out and training them on barbs/City-State/AI units as much as possible. Don't expect to take any cities just yet. Wait until you have a bunch of Range and/or Logistics Composites and go to town with them. Take pot shots at the city with your Range dudes while Logistics ones deal with units. Once the path is clear move into range with all your units at once, also bring some trash units (scouts, catapults etc.) so the city has something easy to focus on.

There's nothing 8 promoted Crossbowmen can't steamroll until like Turn 150. Not even the Great Wall can stop you. Upgrade to Gatling Guns and keep the snowball rolling as long as possible. Steal upper techs (Navigation, Biology) with spies and use Oxford to get Flight in a timely manner. Don't bother with Artillery unless your is superb and you can get it on ~T175. AI has a boner for airplanes and will get them on T200 if they aren't slacking too much. Great War Bombers aren't super strong but a number of them will thrash your artillery if you have no anti-air. Only once you've gained air superiority do get Dynamite and roll any cities that are left.

Thanks, Pasz -I will have to try this.

I take it that theoretically the new-city-having-luxes is supposed to help take care of the happiness problem?

Struggling with the same problem here, thanks for the advice pasz.

Could you post your typical construction queu for the capital? For instance, do you get granary before making settlers? At which point do you make your first and second setters, and how many cities do you get before you attack?

TheGrumpyBuddha said:

I take it that theoretically the new-city-having-luxes is supposed to help take care of the happiness problem?

Click to expand...

Hapiness can be a problem. Ideally you'd expect each new city to have a unique Luxury you don't own but that doesn't always happen. Consider which cities are worth keeping and which you should raze immediately. Razing hits your happiness badly but it's better to suck it up and tank -10 for a couple of turns and be done with it than be stuck with a -5 forever. I would raze cities that have 0 happiness buildings and don't provide unique Luxuries, as they are just sucking up your happiness.
You should also try to have a healthy buffer before you start conquering by doing at least one of the following:

1. Build roads to enemy cities and inside enemy borders as you march for the instant and /turn from connecting new city
2. Pillage every tile you can (pillage and repair tiles repeatedly if you're feeling naughty) for a quick boost. Use spare gold to buy excess Luxuries from other civs. Lux vs Lux trades are good too.
3. Ally at least one Merchantile CS

DrakenKin said:

Could you post your typical construction queu for the capital? For instance, do you get granary before making settlers? At which point do you make your first and second setters, and how many cities do you get before you attack?

Click to expand...

Typical capital build order is: Scout, Monument, Scout, Shrine, Granary, Archer(s), Settler(s) once Collective Rule kicks in, Caravan if any civ in range, Archers until Costruction is finished.

If you get an early ruin you may delay the Monument and get a second scout before finishing the Monument. Also feel free to delay or skip the Shrine if your pantheon will be junk (no ). If you have no bonus granary resources you might want to build a worker instead but it is usually better to steal them .

The # of Settlers depends entirely on your terrain. In theory you should keep expanding as long as allows, that means each new city should connect at least one unique Luxury. In practice though it usually means 2-3 extra cities. If you hit 0 too fast you can lock a hill tile and keep a new city at 1 for a while.

I see, so granary is always built no matter what you go for. How about national college?

My favorite build (only emperor / immortal, not sure it would work on deity) is to stay on one city until i make national college around turn 50, and only then expand, either from buying settler or building it after the NC if i had to buy a worker earlier. Do you think this is decent for deity? if not, how do you think of buying settlers vs buying libraries for secondary cities to be able to do a quick NC while expanding? I guess my main problem is low production on new cities not able to build libraries, thus considerably slowing the NC down which i think is a big hit on tech that should be avoided.

Speed is the essence of everything. But if you throw only 4-5 of them it might not be enough so you need to balance your build order to perform the best combination of ''when'' and ''how much''. Later you should retreive yourself with some well promoted units. Use them at your advantage.

There are various opening styles and use what best suits you. But yeah, generally it's better to wait for Xbows and capture better AI cities with (maybe)universities, for example. Unless you want to try something special like very fast finish times where you have to take unusual paths and high risks.

Dutch Vid LP in my signature shows an example using 2 city Honor opening ...

Honor opening might be far from optimal but it has a few things going for it - very versatile (you don't need a lot of hammers/gold/dirt to get it rolling, you don't take a lot of space with only 2 cities so AIs will not hate/DOW you before you are ready )..

In this particular example the capital starting location was terrible hammer wise but on the flip side I had Kilimanjaro wonder (shows why incans are so beastly at war with their incerdible mobility) and got to fight mongols first ( lack of AI knights helps tremedously) ..

If you're tryng to et this to work for the first time I recommend China - probably the easiest civ to pull xbow rush with ... And don't try this first against Siam (elephants) ..

TheGrumpyBuddha said:

So, I don't know that I've tried to CB (not CB, the other CB)

Click to expand...

OT, but you can usually unambiguously use CB for composite, XB for crossbow...