Deity England continents game (early war)

After my first two victories on Deity (Babylon science pangea and France culture random-archipelago), I am left feeling like I want a more warmonger type game since I pretty much avoided war my last two games. I am thinking of more of an early/mid-war civ, and it makes sense in my head to go with England. I imagine taking my first city with composites, then upgrading them to a longbow rush to establish a solid prescence on my own continent, then go into a ship of the line rush for my first cross continent war.

I have attempted this twice today and got burned both times by going to war too early, with just archers and warriors/spears. I got forward-settled on, and my 4 archers, 2 warriors, 1 spear, and a scout got wiped out before they could capture the city. My next game, I demanded that Catherine not settle next to me, so she settles right next to me. I thought I could take out a newly founed 1-pop city with 3 archers and a warrior... clearly I could not! So I figure I just need to be a bit more patient.

My policy plan is to take the tradition opener, then go finish liberty. My plan is to go back to tradition way later to upgrade my amphitheaters into opera houses, then take Monarchy.

My build order would be scout, monument halfway complete, shirne, finish monument, granary, caravan, archers/settlers. The warrior starts to look for ruins and eventually camps next to the first CS it sees to farm a worker. The scout also looks for ruins. I figure two scouts aren't necessary because on continents, the ruins dry up fast. I'm ultimately trying to beeline comp. bows so I'm skipping building a library right away, instread building a caravan for an early science boost.

Does anyone have any advice or critique on my gameplan?

If you go "early war, full liberty", on a big continent it's quite beneficial to finish commerce instead of diving in tradition, because of the gold and massive happiness this tree has. Science will be alright with all the cities you capture (well, if they are good cities), so the only constraint is happiness. Still, secularism wouldn't hurt, if you can afford it, at some point. I understand the monarchy detour, but if you can manage to stay happy a little longer, until you finish commerce, you will be rewarded much more generously. Great merchants bought with faith is a nice little touch too. Also, what map size do you play?

In continental type of warfare you also might want an exploration opener. But, for England, it isn't critical.

Myself, i play huge continents/pangaea domination - deity and go tradition/full commerce/secularism/ideologies/finish rationalism (Maybe) (and in no particular order). Results in a win @ t.270-290, or in a loss. Yet to try a liberty full scale early game assault with my settings. I am more tempted to play nice until t.150 every time. Unless there is a juicy undefended cap right next to me. In that case i'll go for xbow/trebuchet kind of thing and roll on from there.

OP is having exactly the same problems as me. Waiting for longbowmen will be too late, and earlier on, well, it's still too late! To take even the early cities, you need so many troops, and many will die. That's lost science, money and culture right there.

England is great once you get the twin spies, but by that time you would need to be concentrating on naval warfare with ships of the line, because great though they are, longbowmen can't do squat to musketmen with Cover II.

I would just love to play a sort of a medieval domination game with England, but I feel deity is just too much for England...

Haha, I just read your topic! My latest attempt had me go straight into Liberty since I kept losing out on viable expansion spots in my other games. I ended up with three pretty solid sites, each with access to multiple luxes. My problem? I spent so much money buying tiles so I could improve those luxes that I was hurting for money! Maybe because of this, I neglected to bribe for war as much as I should, and Assyria launched a surprise naval assault that utterly destroyed my game. It was sad because I had such strong faith with desert folklore this game! Early warring on diety is such an uphill battle, lol.

Moriarte, I definitley share you love of the commerce tree and take it almost every game!

@TurboJ: England is one of the easiest civs to win with in Deity continents Domination.

They're definitely one of the best IMHO. I have won multiple times on Deity around ~t200 and I believe the following strategy to be reliable:

Social policies: Full Liberty->(Exploration or Commerce)->Autocracy

General Tech order: Construction->Philosophy->Machinery->Navigation

Early tech order: AH->Archery->Mining->luxurytech->Masonry->Construction.

Open Liberty to free settler while building archers. Save all your cash. Try to get a 7gpt/lux trade ASAP so that you can have enough money saved up by t55 to upgrade archers to composite bows when you tech Construction. After you have few archers, build the pyramids. Steal workers until then. No need to build them.

Do CS quests until t45ish. Plant your expo right next to your target if they haven't forward-settled on you. Attack with archers but the key is to be close to your city so you can upgrade the same turn you get construction.

Pummel your neighbor's cities with your CBs for XP until roughly t70, then start capturing cities. (Later is better but risky...)

Take logistics with your promotions.

After you get Pyramids and 4 archers, build 2 libraries then NC. There's no need for more than 2 cities because you're going to be capturing them. You may have to add coastal cities if your neighbors didn't make good coastal cities.

When you finish Liberty, plant a GS. For Pangaea I would bulb to get Machinery earlier, but you need Navigation too, so the long-term value of planting is better.

The battle plan is simple, but takes practice to execute: Kill everyone on your continent before anyone from the other continent sends over a caravel. You have until roughly t120 to take out an average of 4 civs. Taking the first one at t70, that's 3 more in 50 turns, or one civ every 17 turns. The first one should be almost immediate.

You'll get lots of warmonger hate, so I recommend trying to convince people to dow each other. You get your money back and it distracts your opponents. The warmonger hate will be reset though if you can clear your continent before discovering the other one.

Once you have Machinery, it's all about getting Frigates up ASAP. This is why Exploration *can* be a better play than Commerce. Commerce gives you Mercantilism for cheaper rush-bought Frigates, but Exploration gives you a production boost, so you can build Galleas while getting happiness, then upgrade for a much-lower per-unit cost than rush-buying. If you were doing a late-game rush I'd say go Commerce, because Big Ben + Autocracy + mercantilism is the best, but for an attack run starting around t150 where you *won't* have ideology yet, better to save your money to upgrade Galleas.

It may seem like overkill to go for Exploration's free movement as England, but movement rate is the single most important factor in domination. The faster you move, the faster you finish. The faster you finish, the less chance you'll run into later-era city defense and units.

However, Commerce is a perfectly valid play. That being said, for a t150 attack run, you'll never even finish the Commerce tree, so the happiness just isn't there.

England's bonuses are perfect for this strategy. Longbowmen for your starting continent, SotL for the other one, and spies to help you catch up. You'll most likely *steal* Education by around t120 with your extra spy, rather than tech it. You'll most likely be able steal Navigation or Industrialization too. If you want to go the Big Ben route, Industrialization is a decent gamble. Chances are you can build 3 factories and Big Ben by t150, getting you a steep discount on purchases with Commerce.

But, I generally go exploration. I generally go for +3production, +happiness, then free admiral.

Admirals make a significant difference. This gives you a second one early, so you can split up your fleet. The admiral will also allow your ships to stay in range longer by doing a full heal during your last two capital captures.

Industrialization is also a good strategy if you get unlucky and not all capitals have coastal access. Yes, you can swim over longbowmen/knights to take land-locked capitals, but it's easier with gatlings/knights.

Before you start your attack run, I recommend trying to start a war between your neighbors. This will make capture much easier.

Autocracy, should you have time to delve into it, will make your spies better, and allow you to rush-buy cheaper units, among its many other uses. +happiness from courthouses, +happiness from barracks.

If you plan to go the Commerce route, definitely build armories while you wait for Navigation, so that your ships start with 2 promotions.

With England, after Machinery I tech the bottom of the tree, focusing on the pre-reqs for Education and Astronomy, so that I can steal those two techs. Then you steal Navigation, Economy, etc. By teching the bottom of the tree, you get expensive techs for free and can actually achieve #1 in tech after autocracy despite having by far the *worst* tech rate. It's kind of awesome.

EDIT: Also, I forgot to mention -> You're going to be annexing most if not all capitals, and razing every other city for the most part unless it's a truly awesome coastal expo. Wait until you have the production policy of exploration (around t110 if you have good culture) and then start annexing. You need those cities annexed so you can build galleas or barracks/armories. With any luck a few will already have universities. Annex those first. Don't forget to build courthouses/lighthouses/etc for the happiness boost. It's a lot of production so that's why you need exploration. Also, god of the sea is a decent play here, since almost all your cities will be coastal, and production is your number one priority. Either that or +1 happiness/6 citizen cities. That will really come in handy. However, generally, I just grab my neighbor's religion unless I get a faith ruin. Obviously, if you get a chance at desert folklore or something take that instead.

Cromagnus, thank you for that very detailed guide. Some very good points there.
I guess I have already done most of the things you describe, but pacing the things may be where I lose it. I can see now that I should start was earlier to have the longbowmen already have some promotions when they become available.

I may have focused too much on infrastructure and good city locations too - your idea of only two starting cities sounds really smart. I never thought about doing that on liberty

As for social policies, I have experimented with both Trad and Lib. I have also raging barbarians on and as I play on Epic or even Marathon, I always open Honor for the added culture plus enabling a scout to take out some of the camps alone.
Then according to map I've gone to exploration or commerce as you describe. But usually I've taken 2 points in patronage to help me with food, culture and happiness. That may be too much since my culture growth usually will not allow that many policies and I get hampered in commerce or exploration.

I definitely agree that opening exploration is a huge plus for England - naval supremacy is just so much easier that way.

My problems are:

-Early archer rush usually sees the enmy already have swordsmen and composites.

-The first city I go to conquer will almost always have walls, sit on a hill, even a defensive pantheon. That always slows me down too much. Archers will insta-die if I don't have like 3 spearmen as fodder.

-Money and happiness. If I go to war right away, I won't get money from the other civs who will hate me. If I wait and sell, enemy will get too strong with their tech advantage. As for happiness, I guess the solution is the 2-city start..

-For end-game ideologies are important. But I never get to choose the ideology I want - playing domination on deity seems not to allow me building much early culture and by the time I have all three guilds up, the best AI will already have 30-40 tourism. I This is the single most difficult thing for me. And although I conquer and should get great works like that, I usually don't have museums until quite late and so I can't actually aquire most of the captured works.

Let's see If I can get things right the next time.. I'm rehearsing some things now with Assyria (they are simply great for eary-mid domination)

Pacing is definitely your issue. If you have 4 composite bows on t55 you will fare much better. Honor and Patronage are detours you shouldn't take because the later policies are too important.

You might also want to watch some video guides on early domination. There are tons of tricks to city capture. Pure liberty for domination has a number of advantages. +happiness, faster policy gain, more production, and the all-important pyramids for pillage-heal-repair during city siege.

Awesome walkthrough/guide!! I think my problem was thinking I was going to wait til longbows for my push, when clearly it looks like I should be starting with CBs.

paralistalon said:

Awesome walkthrough/guide!! I think my problem was thinking I was going to wait til longbows for my push, when clearly it looks like I should be starting with CBs.

Click to expand...

I would wait for Longbowmen if i can have 3-4 cities in decent spots. If <3 then CB rush first.

Well, the argument for starting with archers is XP. Even when I start attacking my neighbors with archers I don't actually capture until later. If you wait until longbowmen to start attacking you'll never get logistics. But even if you immediately attack and level up, if you wait until longbowmen to start capturing, you risk meeting the other continent before clearing. I'd rather push hard to clear my continent before that so I can get better DoW deals and trades with people on the new continent. ;-)

But that's not a requirement at all. I just find that attacking the other continent goes smoother that way. Trading for open borders, and the cost of a DoW in trade, like anything else, is based on their opinion of you, and these things both make a huge difference in how quickly you clear the map. But, that's splitting hairs really. In an ideal world I don't capture my first enemy capital until t90. If I only have 3 AIs on my continent I'll wait that long. But I'm XP'ing on their units/city the whole time.

If you're playing super-efficiently, you can get machinery on t100, but I maintain that this is waiting too long. You want to have your continent cleared, and all unrest done with by t120, so you can annex and start building ships. IMHO.

wrong thread

Cromagnus said:

Well, the argument for starting with archers is XP. Even when I start attacking my neighbors with archers I don't actually capture until later. If you wait until longbowmen to start attacking you'll never get logistics. But even if you immediately attack and level up, if you wait until longbowmen to start capturing, you risk meeting the other continent before clearing. I'd rather push hard to clear my continent before that so I can get better DoW deals and trades with people on the new continent. ;-)

But that's not a requirement at all. I just find that attacking the other continent goes smoother that way. Trading for open borders, and the cost of a DoW in trade, like anything else, is based on their opinion of you, and these things both make a huge difference in how quickly you clear the map. But, that's splitting hairs really. In an ideal world I don't capture my first enemy capital until t90. If I only have 3 AIs on my continent I'll wait that long. But I'm XP'ing on their units/city the whole time.

If you're playing super-efficiently, you can get machinery on t100, but I maintain that this is waiting too long. You want to have your continent cleared, and all unrest done with by t120, so you can annex and start building ships. IMHO.

Click to expand...

Sounds an interesting plan. I don't play these kind of games often so it's only based on my opinion. But when i got into these games some time ago i got success with both approaches. I have seen cvivs getting Astro very soon...Can you really clear everyone in less than like 120-130 turns? You better hurry.

As for XP it's sure that the earlier the better

It's like a battle between:
Do it a bit late with some XP in bank
vs
do it fast with either CB or Machinery approach.

What is riskier?

I can pretty consistently clear a continent by t130 on Deity with England, unless I get unlucky and my continent is 6 civs. 5 is tricky too, but more doable.

With Attila it's a no-brainer. You can absolutely clear by t100 every time. Sooner even. And the sooner you clear, the sooner you annex and catch up in tech. Which is why I keep maintaining in the Deity rankings thread that Attila is awesome for continents, but nobody listens.

Early with XP is huge IMHO, because Longbowmen with Logistics and +45% damage are WAY more effective than freshly built Longbowmen. This is why Liberty is so great for this strategy. Improved production for more units, free settler, cheaper settlers, etc... so much synergy with early aggression. It's really sad that Honor doesn't compare, but that's off topic too.

I can see that you have really thought things trough and have a lot of experience on this.
I guess the biggest difference between your approach and mine is that you start war immediately with early archers. I can see how that can work beautifully.

I keep having some starting luck issues too. If I have to actually build my first workers, that slows things down so much. The last 4 starts I have tried haven't had a good CS available for worker stealing (their luxuries or other workable resouces behind the CS on the coast or such). I guess you could take the workers from the AI, but I wonder how early that can be accomplished.

I will definitely try this approach, but I also wonder how will things work if you don't have any neighbours, or if your closest neighbour rushes some strong UU and a defensive pantheon, early walls or even Great Wall (this seems to happen to me a LOT).

I guess I will have to do more standard speed games for practice, and once I have the hange of it, switch back to epic for immersion.

For some reason, my victories on immortal or deity are all pretty late (playing most any Civ). I lag behind until 1400-1600, and then quickly pass the oppos. If I had to guess, it's the culture rather thank tech that I do bad. I wonder if anyone could help me how to build culture early if you're focusing on war also.

EDIT; Cromagnus, do you build a barracks at any point during the early war? It always feel so tempting to do before going to war..

TurboJ said:

I can see that you have really thought things trough and have a lot of experience on this.
I guess the biggest difference between your approach and mine is that you start war immediately with early archers. I can see how that can work beautifully.

I keep having some starting luck issues too. If I have to actually build my first workers, that slows things down so much. The last 4 starts I have tried haven't had a good CS available for worker stealing (their luxuries or other workable resouces behind the CS on the coast or such). I guess you could take the workers from the AI, but I wonder how early that can be accomplished.

I will definitely try this approach, but I also wonder how will things work if you don't have any neighbours, or if your closest neighbour rushes some strong UU and a defensive pantheon, early walls or even Great Wall (this seems to happen to me a LOT).

I guess I will have to do more standard speed games for practice, and once I have the hange of it, switch back to epic for immersion.

For some reason, my victories on immortal or deity are all pretty late (playing most any Civ). I lag behind until 1400-1600, and then quickly pass the oppos. If I had to guess, it's the culture rather thank tech that I do bad. I wonder if anyone could help me how to build culture early if you're focusing on war also.

EDIT; Cromagnus, do you build a barracks at any point during the early war? It always feel so tempting to do before going to war..

Click to expand...

I build barracks only if I'm going for Commerce, and only after I clear my continent. The temptation to delay going to war until you're "ready" is something I had to overcome. You're ready as soon as you have a few archers.

Re: workers, on Deity you can worker-steal on turn 6. The primary initial goal of my warrior and first scout is to steal workers from a neighbor. Practicing early worker steals is really key. Never build workers on Deity.

I usually never make peace. It depends. Sometimes I'll make peace if I intend to start my conquest with someone else.

My general starting routine is to try to find a CS before I meet anyone, so I can DoW without anyone knowing, then DoW the first AI I meet, so everyone else likes me when I meet them.

But I don't DoW a CS if I think I'll need them early on. And I prefer to DoW AI when I steal a worker, rather than upon meeting a scout, for example. Much easier to steal a worker when you're not at war sometimes.

I have been practicing and trying different approaches; I still feel like the starting location, terrain, when you meet neighbors etc. plays a big role. Two times in a row I have had myself wiped after a surprise DoW at turn 45-50. This has resulted from me being in war with a single city state and a single AI (stealing the very first workers I've met). With just 5 archers and a single warrior I haven't been able to fend off an enemy invasion consisting of 15 troops.

It seems to me you have to choose either to steal from an AI or from a city state. And there I have a problem; the AI may already have quite a few troops and they may prevent you from using your own workers or settlers optimally if you get into war before you have a strong advantage.

If you go for a city state instead, in 5 or six my last games I haven't been able to get more than one worker from the initial city state war; terrain with hills and forest requires me to use a scout to do the stealing and as soon as the CS has a defensive troop in there, the scout gets killed and they take the worker back.

I also wonder if it makes a difference that I play on raging barbarians. That seems to occupy me quite a lot during the earliest 30-40 turns.

Also, warring with the AI seems to limit my trading options if there are only 2-3 other civs on my continent; also often I can't stop meeting 4 civs within the first 20 turns if there are many of them on the continent. In that case an early war becomes an expensive proposition, but on the other hand, if I don't go to war, the AIs will just steal all the land.

I have seen on many LPs on Youtube how things can work nicely if only you have enough space to begin with, and actual usable city locations. It seems to me if the available city spots are nice, you have to hinder your initial growth by rushing settlers (I had to complete my first settler with 2 pop on my last game (tradition start for culture this time) and I still had to block the AI's third settler with my troops). And if the spots aren't nice, I'm stuck with the capital and it cannot support too many troops. Poor second city spots would seem like a dumb thing to settle anyway..

Also, terrain can slow your progress early on in that it slows down your settlers from reaching their destination. On my current game my settlers had to crawl through 10 tiles of hills and jungle to get there - that's a 5-10% slow down to NC completion.

How about you create random England game on continents and send us initial save here, so we all can give it a try?

Moriarte said:

How about you create random England game on continents and send us initial save here, so we all can give it a try?

Click to expand...

Yeah, I might do that, would be fun to share experiences

BTW, I also have a 'challenge' type of game idea, where does one post such things on this forum?

I think a mutual map for us to start on and compare would be helpful!

I've been practicing more. My most recent game has me stablizing around turn 150. I haven't been able to capture any cities, however! I have 9 longbowmen and will be starting to produce my ships of the line. I got into a bind because I got sandwiched between France and Indonesia, and while I was setting up to invade France, Indonesia attacked me from my other side, forcing me to split my army in two. Luckily, I had a very defensible position against Gadja, who kept sending his groud troops across the water for easy sniping. Now, as with TurboJ, I'm finding that longbowmen struggle to dominate against wave after wave of musketman/musketeers and knights. I think I missed my window of opportunity for that really early clear and have to settle down for a late-game war of attrition with upgraded gatling guns and the rest of the world hating me.

I did take a bit of a gamble with going Honor again. I felt that the extra exp. would help get to logistics faster, then I finished the other side of the tree in time for cheaper upgrades to longbowmen. However, this also likely slowed me down. I also threw an early shrine in there for a religion, also slowing me down. I don't think it's necessarily bad to have a more drawn out game, but it takes away some of the glory of such a great UU, and it might have been better to just go peaceful tradition for the first 150 turns if that was my plan all along! But at least I have a couple of longbowmen with logistics to show for it.

TurboJ said:

BTW, I also have a 'challenge' type of game idea, where does one post such things on this forum?

Click to expand...

You can post a suggestion bout map settings, victory conditions, and civs in the HOF forum, but if you have a specific map to suggest, that would not be HOF eligible. In that case, you can post a "challenge" thread in this forum (S&T). If you browse the forum going back a few months, you will see how folks format their challenge proposals.