Community Deity Game #1 - Persia

stormtrooper412 said:

The general consensus was that you really should win the suggested VC. As you can see, it's hardly a hassle

as for restarting, I kind of can't control that even if I knew the game was ever reloaded or not. My estimation is that everyone does it more or less and I don't consider it a big deal

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Wait... So these DCL's and CDG's are not "Restart them until you beat them"? Argh... Oh well, its not like I have time to replay them anyway lol.

I can be honorable, I'll let you know when I restart. I'd rather beat the map and not go on the spreadsheet then lose the map and never beat it.

Diplo VC, turn 336, so carpetbagging, carpets of doom not so much. I really did try to complete this map in the spirit it was offered!

stormtrooper412 said:

your strikes aren't nuclear enough, friend

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I could not make that work on this map either. Uranium is tight, but mostly I am not getting the tech fast enough.

Wild_Woojsha said:

Wait... So these DCL's and CDG's are not "Restart them until you beat them"?

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Sure they are. I think you misunderstood ST412’s response.

I can be honorable, I'll let you know when I restart.

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Yes please, reloads are also okay, just mention them. It is not really a competition. If I don’t win the first time through (which is more often the case than not), then I will try usually reload from Ideologies rather than going back to T0. OTOH, this map had me going back to T0 more than a few times…

I'd rather beat the map and not go on the spreadsheet then lose the map and never beat it.

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I feel the same way! This is like my sixth or seventh run at the map. Went Freedom this time, worked pretty well. Could have flipped to any time after Autocracy after SoL and FL but happy was never a problem. I did not get control of the WC until quite late, never researched Globalism, but I did not sabotage the vote either. I had recalled a couple civs to life, so once again it came down to an AI launching or not. This was the latest any of my tries had gone too.

I was in the process of razing only my third city. I did not build ranged units (but no achievements points there, since that one was scoped to dom VC). Siege units work well enough with the UA during GA, so it is not clear to me that this was much of a handicap. I had 146 turns of GA, burning all six GA that I spawned. Go Freedom! My base score was under 2000. So Achievement C is it for me.

Extra screenshot shows one AI with six (!) parts, so I really was already stretching things out as much as possible…

yeah that's definitely a wacky bug and I've seen it happen to me as well.

Defeat!
Now I finally had the time to play. I must say that I learned allot from this game. I just realized I can not do modern warfare. I can archerush, force plays with artillery and I can do peace VC, but modern warfare I hit the wall.

Ok so for the write up:

It keeps impressing me how different civs have different fates in different plays.

I can't offer much advice since your first 170-ish turns were much better than mine. Perhaps, if you don't feel bad about it, unleash some nuclear strikes to soften everyone up

Zyrica said:

Now in retrospective I compare my results with Olodune, I seam to be on track for the first 100, a bit behind but not too bad. At 150 I lack some serious culture (21 compared to 94 ), but are otherwise seemingly ok.
At the end I'm 10 turns late for the invasion party. And at the invasion part I managed 0 cities compared to 10...

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You have to make culture CS a priority in every deity game, if you want a decent culture output. By combination of buying them, quests, couping, you should be able to keep all or most of culture CS allied.

In your post, you said bombers, but I believe the screenshot showed GWB and probably they're getting shot down by triplanes. It might be wise to go straight to Radar before you attempt air combat, due to both the increased ranged and much more effective fighters. You will need to build enough fighters to begin each bombing run with an airsweep. Or else triplanes will have a chance (50%) of shooting down your bombers, fighters will always shoot bombers with 100% chance. Additionally some units such as AA guns or Mobile SAM, destroyers and missile cruisers can also intercept. Airsweep uses up one of their interception. For example, if you have 2 SAM within 2 hex of your target, you'll need 2 airsweeps to use up their interception before you can use bombers on your target. The best way to deal with ground AA guns would be to use high mobility units such as tanks to take them out so that you can use your fighters to lure interception from fighters instead. There is special rule regarding attacking AA guns directly with planes. In that case they can't use their interception ability, but any nearby guns/fighters can still intercept.

Also intercepted bombers take a very high amount of damage, and may die when attacking their target due to low hp. Depending on the opponent's number of bombers, you might also need some fighters on intercept duty, or build AA units to follow your ground force. Finally any unit with 100% evasion (such as stealth bombers) can't be intercepted, therefore you can also wait until you have stealth bombers, and you'll not have to worry about enemy interception.

Air combat is fun once you figure out the mechanics for them, and adds an additional dimension to combat in modern era.

So after my initial win, I kept playing until I had the domination VC. If you didn’t know, Dom VC can still spawn after winning or losing by lesser means.

I razed cities that I could not Liberate (and I had recalled a couple civs to life), but I missed B by a wide margin. This gets me C, D, and E for 11 achievement points.

Fun! New series! I really like how the achievements suggest paths that I would not otherwise taken... So, in spite of the fact that I'm not a good deity player, and have never done a DomV before, I've decided to try this one and to shoot for all of the achievements.

@Arenel - The biggest issue I see is that your cities have such a low population and therefore your science is low. Education won't even help much since all of your cities besides your capital are really too low to take advantage of universities.

My advice would be to go for a 4-5 city tradition as it tends to be easier than liberty for newer diety players. Then just focus on growth/science until you beeline to artillery or bombers.

Hint: achievements make most of the games harder and not advised for newer deity players. In this case, the immortals drain your gpt, but are too weak to use against the AI which will have more advanced units at that point. You can tell as the CS already had pikes, which means most of the AI also had it. By far the hardest achievement is the no ranged one, obviously. You will have to build siege units to compensate, but siege units at the early stage are extremely fragile.

Depends how you define 'hardest' as I think the 10 immortals is actually the hardest one as it forces you to build essentially 10 useless units early game and make sure to not lose them.

If you just avoid early war and tech up to artillery or bombers or xcoms then the no ranged units isn't a big deal. If the no ranged included seige and bombers then it would be a different story.

Trying to get 10 spearmen is what really killed my game. Extra useless units would be bad enough, but the delay to Civil Service really compounds the problem.

The no archer/cb challenge really crimps your early game -- but siege units with three move seems like it should be more than sufficient. Or is that because I am only comparing Persia GA against other civs? With Persia, does one use two waves of XBs during a GA?

The achievements I did/didn't get fit in my domination style well, I knew there would be major risks in delaying civil service for the sake of keeping the Immortals around, but I got kind of unlucky with the golden age thing, but I can definitely see the reasoning behind it, it's very very very useful for Persia

Literally copied vadalaz's city placement. I really think that there is some kind of scripting in the game which makes Deity do as good as the human player. In slow games, AI's are usually slow, but in a fast game like this, Ghandi and Ramesses have entered Industrial in 130's-140's. Sadly, I missed LToP by 4 turns. My production may slow down a bit and food is an issue, so I don't know whether I want to go Order for hammers or Freedom for growth and longer GA's (which also give hammers) because the ultimate plan is XCOM rush.

PS: Ugh why did I propose WF. I will barely squeeze in a school or two.

Looking good so far. Freedom should ultimately work better because SoL with Railroads with UniSuf will crank out the units. You're gonna need to go nuclear as well probably

Hm still not sure which Ideology to go. I can get fast Civil Society -> Universal Suffrage and try to work specialist slots because I have already run out of good tiles to work anyway. Plus I can do Arsenal of Democracy. ON the other hand, Worker's faculties and Five Year-Old plan can provide a nice production and science boost. Since it's not a SV and I will just need to get to XCOM fast and build units, it might be a better option. XCOMs cost 1140 gold, so I would need big Ben and diving into Commerce to buy them for ~500, but I also want to finish Rationalism, so it's another few policies, and Commerce might simply not fit into the plan because I can reach XCOM faster than I get all the policies I want. Besides, 6 XCOMs per capital is 3k gold with all discounts, and I just don't know if I will be pushing that soon enough.

Nice highlights of my early game: while I struggled to found a religion, Pedro spread his Catholicism to my cities with +1cpt from pastures and happiness from shrines and temples, which helped finish Tradition much faster and then open Rationalism right off the bat -- because my spy stole Acoustics from Gandhi 1 turn before I had to choose the next policy. It was simply lovely.

Well I knew from the start it would be a Full Commerce type of game so that massive conquest could be softened by piles of stored happiness. It ultimately worked

Big Ben + Mercantilism helped a lot as well

Since I am not going for achievements, the plan is to drop XCOM's and take all capitals in one turn, so it really doesn't matter how deep into unhappiness I drop. Is it even possible though? I might need to put AI's to war with each other, so there won't be any units surrounding their capitals.

adcarrymaokai said:

I don't know whether I want to go Order for hammers or Freedom for growth and longer GA's (which also give hammers) because the ultimate plan is XCOM rush.

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Freedom in this game is pretty much a must if you wanted the GA achievement, plus it is nice for the UA. Even if you don't want the achievement, freedom allows some extra growth which gets stronger bulbs later. XCOM is pretty deep in the tech tree.

Just nuke them to clear their units, then drop XCOM. You might also need stealth bombers to drop the city hp lower so you can do with fewer XCOM.

If you can capture Alhambra with Brandenburg gate in the same city, you can get blitz XCOM which can capture on the turn you drop them. Otherwise you need autocracy extra XP which isn't worth it in your plan.

Apparently, Plastics isn't required for XCOMS. Yay or nay?