[BNW] Help me find a balanced starting strategy on Immortal

I have some 600 hours gameplay experience on Civ V, but I don't seem to be able to find a good starting strategy. I play on Immortal because I find Emperor too easy - however, the jump to immortal is a big one, and I find myself struggling at times.

My biggest problem is always when starting up.

Often I would like to go for a domination victory and for that reason I would want a liberty start.

However, I nearly always find it REALLY hard to settle more than 3 cities within the first 85-90 turns or so. Why? Well, the other civs steal all the available land, settling their 3rd and even sometimes their 4th city before turn 50. I have to use blocking tactics with my units to try to contain their settlers before they get a chance to steal the good city spots.

I know this issue is bigger on some maps than others. But - I would like to play different map types, and that often leaves with this exact problem.

On standard map size, the problem is lack of space and aggressive, expansionist AIs steal all the land. If I play on a large map, that's less of a problem, but then there is the very likely problem of a runaway civ - one civ claiming half of all the land before others get 5-6 cities...

So what am I doing wrong? Even if I get my free settler out on turn 30, the AI has mostly already stolen the good city spots. If I start building a settler at pop 2 and get it out before turn 30, then that hampers the capital city growth too much.

As I see it, there is too much luck involved. Your starting resources are a huge issue and then your neighbours - who they are and just how bold they are in stealing all the land.

I can't go back to Emperor either, I will mostly win and always I will know early if I'm going to win, and that takes all the fun out of it.

So I need to learn how to start - I seem to do OK whenever I am actually able to get 4 cities up at 90-100 turns.

Domination as your desired victory condition does not mean you have to take Liberty. Try a Tradition start.

However, I nearly always find it REALLY hard to settle more than 3 cities within the first 85-90 turns or so. Why? Well, the other civs steal all the available land, settling their 3rd and even sometimes their 4th city before turn 50. I have to use blocking tactics with my units to try to contain their settlers before they get a chance to steal the good city spots.

Click to expand...

just steal their settlers and workers and no more settling into your face ...

There's luck involved in the sense that some starts are much harder than others. But skill and experience will overcome bad starts even on deity - so you still have room for improvement.

Hard-building a settler at size 2 is sometimes the right thing to do - though I almost never do that if I'm picking liberty. Your capital will grow, if not sooner then later. It sounds like you may be evaluating your situation a bit too negatively. What that can be hard to accept if you're new to immortal or deity is that you are always behind in the early game; the mid-game is when you catch up and eventually take the lead.

If you're struggling to settle more than 3 cities, even though you're very willing to build settlers early, I see two potential reasons: a) your map settings offer unusually little space (e.g. small continents map), or b) you're being a perfectionist in your choice of city locations. What I'm referring to is that many players are too caught up with building perfect cities in the late game and therefore will not accept any overlap between their cities and just generally ask for too much from the land. On higher difficulty levels it becomes more important to focus on the short term; settling on hills for defense, packing your cities closer together for short roads and easier movement, intentionally overlapping for the sake of tile sharing, and making sure key resources are within the first or second rings from the city for quicker access.

Perhaps you already do all of this... in that case I'm not sure what you're doing wrong.

tommynt said:

just steal their settlers and workers and no more settling into your face ...

Click to expand...

Hmm.. At the time they're sending out their 2nd and 3rd settlers, I'd have to be focusing solely on military to be able to take their retaliation and turn it into my advantage. Would that not negatively affect my science development?

hr_oskar said:

If you're struggling to settle more than 3 cities, even though you're very willing to build settlers early, I see two potential reasons: a) your map settings offer unusually little space (e.g. small continents map), or b) you're being a perfectionist in your choice of city locations. What I'm referring to is that many players are too caught up with building perfect cities in the late game and therefore will not accept any overlap between their cities and just generally ask for too much from the land. On higher difficulty levels it becomes more important to focus on the short term; settling on hills for defense, packing your cities closer together for short roads and easier movement, intentionally overlapping for the sake of tile sharing, and making sure key resources are within the first or second rings from the city for quicker access.

Click to expand...

a) and b ) are actually true I believe! I am a perfectionist and when those city spots come up that have a hill on a river with 3 different lux and 2 different strat resources plus wheat - I usually just rage quit when the AI grabs them using their early game bonuses and leaving me with just desert and grassland with no hills And also my map choices do seem to be a little unforgiving (such as a standard size Terra or small continents). I guess what I should know is when the game is actually lost. By not taking bad-looking games very far can leave me not knowing if there may still have been a good possibility of climbing back up from the hole.

Browd said:

Domination as your desired victory condition does not mean you have to take Liberty. Try a Tradition start.

Click to expand...

I can do Tradition starts pretty effectively, but with domination on larger maps, on the other hand, Tradition can become a liability in the long run.
Does somebody actually get away with mixing Tradition and Liberty on Immortal/Deity? That would seem like an interesting thing to try.

I'm not surprised, and I can easily relate to the perfectionism - it's in my nature too but I consciously suppress it as I've learned that it mostly works against you on higher difficulties. I would argue that the main challenge in moving up a difficulty level is dealing with your own ego - you will feel less in control of the game and it's frustrating. You have to consciously abandon your measure of a successful game on the lower difficulty level and accept that things don't go as smoothly on immortal or deity. On deity I accept that as I enter the medieval age, I will be 6-8 techs behind everyone, probably have about half the population of the AI civs, have no wonders or at most one while they've built lots... etc etc. I'll still be confident and know that that's perfectly normal and winnable.

When it comes to city sites, I've learnt that a shortage of decent tiles to work rarely occurs late game due to overlapping or less-than-perfect placement for the long-term. You typically have more specialist slots available than you can actually fill, so you really don't need all that much land after all. If you fill all the specialist slots and then run out of land, it's likely late in the game when your city is huge and you'll be winning the game anyway. You need every advantage you can get in the early game, while late game advantage isn't all that relevant.

Ironically, a shortage of good tiles to work happens more often in the early game precisely because you get tempted to settle your city in a "perfect" location (long-term), where half the good tiles are in the third ring, and none in the first ring, because you just had to get those horses over in the corner or that third fish way out in the sea... I think you know what I mean

TurboJ said:

I can do Tradition starts pretty effectively, but with domination on larger maps, on the other hand, Tradition can become a liability in the long run.
Does somebody actually get away with mixing Tradition and Liberty on Immortal/Deity? That would seem like an interesting thing to try.

Click to expand...

Tradition is not a liability when you have a empire attached to a tall core. Monarchy's 50% pop unhappiness from the capital far exceeds Liberty's mere one happiness per city for any empire within reason.

If you are concerned about cultural policy rate; leave more of your conquered cities as puppets longer; but maps bigger than standard already get reduced per city penalties for on cultural policy & science.

If you mean by mixing take full Tradition and then after Tradition is completed take half of Liberty, that can work. But taking just half of Tradition and then just half of Liberty tends to be much worse than both full Tradition & full Liberty.

Your initial post doesn't even say what version you are on? It's pretty impossible to give you useful advice RE immortal vs emperor if we're referring to a version different from what you have. i see you have edited the title to BNW now

Hr_oskar -> yes, I definitely know what you mean! Sounds just like me.

I'm trying a new approach now, limiting my perfectionism.. Playing now continents with Arabia. Instead of getting the perfect city spots I'm going for ones that wll be useful immediately. If I run out of room or resources, I can always expand to more and smaller cities. Somehow I thought Tradition would necessitate optimizing city locations, but with BNW you can use the late game's ideology bonuses so that
you can actually go wide without Liberty. I guess I was sort of stuck in G&K mode.

I'm going super heavily with religion and trade and hope that will allow an early boost and I have 8 city states within caravan distance. Selassie and Hiawatha are grabbing my lands again, but my plan is to crush them once I have Petra and National College. That would leave me on my continent with only one Spanish city and all those city states. That should work!

joncnunn -> that's exactly how I thought I'd mix the two. My biggest weakness in Civ is I don't calculate production / new cities / policy timing enough. So half filled policies are bound to happen.
I'll see if I can try the mix this round.

GhostSalsa - thanks for pointing that out for me. I'm playing with all DLC that's out (topic headline edited now).

Not a fan of mixed tradition / liberty, personally. Both trees have really nice finishers that you either skip or delay considerably.

If you're "stuck in G&K mode" you're also likely to underestimate the value of early trade routes for science. I find that my game has improved a lot just by prioritizing trade routes over libraries / NC. Granted, that's on deity, where each route will yield 4-5 science at a time when your science is somewhere around 8-10!

hr_oskar said:

If you're "stuck in G&K mode" you're also likely to underestimate the value of early trade routes for science. I find that my game has improved a lot just by prioritizing trade routes over libraries / NC. Granted, that's on deity, where each route will yield 4-5 science at a time when your science is somewhere around 8-10!

Click to expand...

Science bonuses not nearly that good on Immortal just one level lower.
Most I ever see to me on Immortal is 2-3. (1 to 2 is common but 3 is rare)

AIs second settler is probably more responsible for them getting 7 to 10 techs you don't have on Diety than the additional free tech.

TurboJ said:

Hmm.. At the time they're sending out their 2nd and 3rd settlers, I'd have to be focusing solely on military to be able to take their retaliation and turn it into my advantage. Would that not negatively affect my science development?

Click to expand...

That's not true. AI is very bad at combat and most don't build that many units that early. You should be able to steal workers/settlers with just 1 spearman + starting warrior + scouts with defense promos can steal a worker and fend off the AI pretty easily if you use terrain properly. Building a spearman to quickly & reliably complete barb quests is a pretty strong idea even if you don't get into a tussle with the AI.

TurboJ said:

a) and b ) are actually true I believe! I am a perfectionist and when those city spots come up that have a hill on a river with 3 different lux and 2 different strat resources plus wheat - I usually just rage quit when the AI grabs them using their early game bonuses and leaving me with just desert and grassland with no hills And also my map choices do seem to be a little unforgiving (such as a standard size Terra or small continents). I guess what I should know is when the game is actually lost. By not taking bad-looking games very far can leave me not knowing if there may still have been a good possibility of climbing back up from the hole.

Click to expand...

I'm still suspecting that your map settings are screwing you over. I usually play pangea or large continents and rarely have trouble settling at least two good places near my capital.

I can do Tradition starts pretty effectively, but with domination on larger maps, on the other hand, Tradition can become a liability in the long run.
Does somebody actually get away with mixing Tradition and Liberty on Immortal/Deity? That would seem like an interesting thing to try.

Click to expand...

There are basically no circumstances under which Tradition is a "liability." It is the best starting tree in the vast majority of circumstances. Your reasoning here suggests to me that (similarly to hr_oskar's suspicions) you are making early game decisions based on their ramifications for the middle and late game, and not taking into account the immediate needs of snowballing in the early game.

The only civs that can mix Trad/Lib are the ones with access to bonus culture or policies. So, Poland, Siam, etc. But in those cases I think Tradition & Patronage is better.

As one who's done plenty of Tradition and NC first play, I'll point out how quickly a new city can get up to speed with the free duct from the finisher and the growth bonus.

Of course on Immortal and worse yet, Deity you can risk losing all the good land, so this is situational. I play Immortal now, and often I can raise enough cash to buy a settler anyhow by making a worker and improving lux and selling and aggressively using my 2 scouts to meet CS and once in a while finding a gold ruin.

I've had 4 science from a trade route on Immortal when beeling the top of the tree and think I had more as Shaka when doing Glory7's domination strat which leaves you well behind in science. However +2 or 3 beakers is the norm for an early caravan playing Immortal.

@ TurboJ

I'm basically a standard Immortal Pangaea type player so not that familiar with Continents. Do you ever get a spot where there's 3 civs (you at 2) on your continent and 5 on the other? If so, I'd think you might be able to kill them both before anyone meets anyone from across the pond. Then you have whatever spots you want and hopefully some of their cities are in good spots. Perhaps a better player/attacker than I could kill all 3 quickly?

Sometimes, in spite of some warmongering consequences, you may have to take some AI cities early if you're super cramped. Of course there's always the option to make a couple of units and kill their warrior escorting their settler and grab a free worker while denying them that spot which you can then settle later.