Non conquest victories with autocracy

I'm wondering if anyone has chosen Autocracy while pursuing something other than a conquest victory. Each ideology has three victories that it has advantages for but autocracy is the one that is most obviously suited to one specific victory.

I can think of two reason you'd take autocracy but not go for a conquest victory. You could set out for a conquest victory and then find a enemy that you can't beat so you have to try another victory type. Or some big cultural power could take autocracy first and so you can't take anything else without ending up in revolution, so you can still make use of it for two others.

As for the AI, I can think of at least two civs that would likely take autocracy but be better suited to non-conquest victories. France is best suited for culture but Napoleon's personality is more towards conquest. Same with Greece being good for diplomacy but Alexander being the aggressive type.

Well Autocracy doesn't really lend itself to much else.

Futurism (+100 Tourism to all Civilizations when a Great Writer, Artist or Musician is born) is worthless for a Cultural Victory, you will be pushing over 800 Tourism per turn near the end game, it should be +1000 and then maybe it would be good, also does bought/gifted count as born?

Industrial Espionage (Spies steal technologies twice as fast): this is good for a domination civ playing catch-up, or maybe a science civ just filling in the military techs, but since you can only steal techs someone else already has, not all that great if you're going for SV.

Militarism (+2 Local Happiness per Barracks, Armory and Military Academy) is probably the best tenet in the whole tree, mostly useful for a wide/domination empire though.

Cult of Personality (+50% Tourism to Civilizations fighting a common enemy): This is pretty good for CV.

Gunboat Diplomacy (Gain 6 more Influence per turn with City-States you could demand tribute from): this is cool, haven't tried it, I find CS never want to give me tribute. Does anyone know the mechanics of how this works? Is it gain +6 influence per turn up to the resting point (would be really incredibly bad in that case) or just indefinitely +6 every turn?

I think it works well with the other victory types, just that conquest is factored into the equation.

-I've had a couple culture victories with Autocracy, where I conquered my main culture rivals. You simultaneously take out your biggest competitors, while gaining their wonders improving your own tourism. If you can build a warmongering alliance, you can then get that tourism bonus from Cult of Personality and gain a quick culture victory. These were actually some of the easiest culture victories to obtain for me.

-You can accomplish diplomatic victory in a couple of ways. I haven't had a huge amount of success with Gunboat Diplomacy (I find the demand threshold to be too high in the late game). But, I have had success with liberating other civs, which has the bonus of weakening other warmongers, improving your diplomatic relations, and gaining a permanent ally. This isn't specific to Autocracy, per say, but makes good use of all the military benefits.

it's good for diplo, gunboat diplomacy is very powerful. Stealing great works & winning via culture is an option too.

They really do need to make it so that instead of helping with military, they allow military to help with other things (Cult of Personality+Gunboat Diplomacy are good examples.. Gunboat diplomacy is +6 every turn... if you have a big enough Military, ALL the CS will become your ally)

Perhaps if Unified Front gave a % influence bonus to gifts when sharing a war (20% extra influence from gifts+quests if at war with common enemy)

and perhaps exchange elite troops (since it overlaps with Japan's Bushido) for something that gives more tourism from killing units from a major civ (tourism based on the experience level of the troops doing the killing?)

Minor Annoyance said:

I'm wondering if anyone has chosen Autocracy while pursuing something other than a conquest victory.

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Sure, a Cultural Victory. As has been mentioned many times on the forums, a CV can sometimes--perhaps even often--be more easily obtained from warmongering than from straight-up "culture play". It also seems to be fairly common for a CV to be accidentally won while you're gunning for Domination. The latter is perhaps not quite in the spirit of "pursuing" a non-Dom victory, but it can't be denied that Autocracy's improved warmongering indirectly leads to better, or at least faster, CVs.

I have done diplo, conquest and culture with autocracy, since there is achievements for each. I didn't find it too helpful for diplo but culture it helped me great. I conquered Gandhi who was caushing me trouble and got China, the other problem civ to also declare war on him. I let Gandhi sit at 1 city so I kept getting the benefits of taking him over and still being at war with him for China.

Lochlann said:

Sure, a Cultural Victory. As has been mentioned many times on the forums, a CV can sometimes--perhaps even often--be more easily obtained from warmongering than from straight-up "culture play". It also seems to be fairly common for a CV to be accidentally won while you're gunning for Domination. The latter is perhaps not quite in the spirit of "pursuing" a non-Dom victory, but it can't be denied that Autocracy's improved warmongering indirectly leads to better, or at least faster, CVs.

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In my current conquest game I've gotten influential with two civs because they were taken down to a single city and had no culture generation left. I've fighting the big culture civ now. I can see this as a strategy of taking out the leader in culture (or diplomacy) and beat the rest the peacefully.

While it is possible, the other ideologies just do their respective victory condition much better. Autocracy, while giving bonuses to culture and science, is really only to be used when pursuing a domination victory.

I have found Autocracy to be fantastic for pursuing a peaceful science victory on Deity due to Industrial Espionage alone. In my most recent game, my Industrial Espionage-enhanced spies stole enough tech to allow me to grab the National Intelligence Agency relatively early on, which improved my ability to steal tech even further. All of this espionage has allowed the science from research agreements to go towards new techs that no one else has discovered instead of techs that other civilizations have already obtained. It has been a really hard fought game, and Industrial Espionage was the key to getting me back in the running when it all seemed hopeless (Shameless plug: read more on http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=506135 )

Gunboat diplomacy is excellent for peaceful diplomatic victories, at least on Emperor and below. Generating six influence per turn, every turn for hundreds of years is hard to catch up to with mere money. Another benefit is that it is one of those rare situations where you don't need to balance your peaceful victory condition against the need to invest in your own defense. And while this next point probably shouldn't affect the analysis, a gunboat diplomacy-based diplomatic victory is a lot more fun to pursue than a "throw all the gold at city-states at the last second" diplomatic victory. It does rely on having a powerful military relative to the other civs, however, so I'm not sure how viable it is at the highest difficulty levels.

Finally, Autocracy's ability to generate happiness is extremely impressive when compared to the other ideologies. While Order can squeeze the most science and production out of a wide empire, Autocracy can squeeze out substantially more happiness.

I'm not arguing that autocracy is better than freedom or more efficient than order; I'm just saying it that is a valid and effective choice to pursue peaceful victories with.

Alzadar said:

Gunboat Diplomacy (Gain 6 more Influence per turn with City-States you could demand tribute from): this is cool, haven't tried it, I find CS never want to give me tribute. Does anyone know the mechanics of how this works? Is it gain +6 influence per turn up to the resting point (would be really incredibly bad in that case) or just indefinitely +6 every turn?

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It is indefinite (+6 per turn) and it adds up fast. I have had a diplomatic victory thwarted when I discovered that Washington had just been gaining influence with the city states near his borders this way, and had four or five city-states with 300 to 400 influence each. I ended up having to go for a cultural victory instead.

You can see the exact mechanics if you go to the "Request Tribute" menu of the city-state and hover your mouse over the different options. The calculation is a function of 1) how strong your global military is relative to other civs, 2) your local strength, that is, the strength of your units that are very close to the city, and 3) the city-state's personality (for example, hostile civs are more resistant to tribute demands).

Yep, I've had to stop myself from gaining a Gunboat Diplomacy-powered diplo win as Shaka, because I wanted a domination win. It's actually really, really good for diplo victories.

On a side note, does anyone know if Civs you liberate will be more likely to vote for you as world leader? I might be wrong, but I seem to recall that anyone who was liberated in Civ4 would always vote for you. Just trying to find some new playstyles really, I get bored of the "buying up city-states" nonsense that really needs to change. Would be a cool way to win a diplo with city-states turned off.

Talcove said:

While it is possible, the other ideologies just do their respective victory condition much better. Autocracy, while giving bonuses to culture and science, is really only to be used when pursuing a domination victory.

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I emphatically disagree. The only CV Ive ever managed to win on Immortal has been with Autocracy, and it was entirely thanks to Cult of Personality. I've had games stall out or default to diplo on Freedom, and been entirely beaten to all the wonders as Order, without an army capable of defeating the snowball, only narrowly winning a SV before the AI wins a CV.

Autocracy isn't good at getting science -- duh. It's not supposed to be. It is designed for diplo, domination, and culture, and it is great at all 3. It is terrible at peacemongering, and does not add passive momentum to an already impressive start -- that's for freedom. It's weak at maintaining a science lead -- that's for Order. It is great at coming back from a mediocre start, and acquiring a dream army that you can use in all new ways. Trying to win culture but got beaten to key wonders? Best trained army in the world! Now theyre your wonders! People bothering you with joint wars you have no interest in? Cult of Personality! Now you're interested! Been out killing and got a huge army that's sitting there bored? Gunboat diplomacy! You'll teach those city states! Even better, GD creates so much passive influence on neighboring CS that you can demand tribute at will and remain allies.

Even without gunboats though, what if there's a warmonger/Venice out puppeting all the CS? Can't win diplo unless you liberate, and if you liberate a dead civ, you get their votes too. Autocracy has just such an army ready to do the job.

The thing about autocracy is that it is all about using your army to leverage everything else you do, and many mistake this as being only good for domination because theyre stuck in a mindset where war itself is only good for domination, not realizing that limited aggression can help any victory. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, someone else just got luckier. The other two can certainly make war, but if you don't want chain DoWs, you need partners. If you've got a partner anyway, why not influence them merely by declaring? Did you go commerce? Get Big Ben? Get Mobilization. Hello 400 gold bombers and 400 gold per turn.

Full commerce in general synergizes very well with autocracy. Caravans are easier to defend than ships and can be worth just as much gold, extra gold from trading posts means your massive puppet empire pays for an even bigger army, less maintenance makes city connections to all those puppets a gold mine, and faith bought merchants don't increase the cost of natural great people, double gold trade missions means your merchants can buy you a whole fleet, two nuke missiles, or a couple city states. Besides, I bet several of those CS have been whining about making a merchant anyway -- now's your chance! Indeed, my commerce-autocracy run had me drowning in units, even Attila was afraid of me. The CS were long since in my pocket, I was world leader right as the Atomic era came. Could freedom do that? Sure, but why give away your army for influence when you can keep the army and get it for free?

jahsoldier said:

Yep, I've had to stop myself from gaining a Gunboat Diplomacy-powered diplo win as Shaka, because I wanted a domination win. It's actually really, really good for diplo victories.

On a side note, does anyone know if Civs you liberate will be more likely to vote for you as world leader? I might be wrong, but I seem to recall that anyone who was liberated in Civ4 would always vote for you. Just trying to find some new playstyles really, I get bored of the "buying up city-states" nonsense that really needs to change. Would be a cool way to win a diplo with city-states turned off.

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Yes. Liberated civs do always vote for you.

Sweet. I've been wanting to play the 'benevolent warmonger' for a while but didn't want to get all the way to the UN only to find the selfish nobs are still voting for themselves. Cheers!

Gunboat diplomacy is an absolutely amazing tenet. Maybe the best level 3 tenet in the game.

The "problem" with it is that if you can get tribute from a CS, that usually means you're the number one or two military. If you're the number one or two military, you should be _______ ? Sure, you could easily coast to a DV, but you could probably get a conquest victory in half the time with such a large military.

Still gunboat diplomacy is amazing for conquest. Place a sub or two near a CS border when you are the largest military and most CSs will cave and your influence will beat everybody in a couple of turns, especially as quests get completed. Then when you declare war, every CS will go to war against your enemies and you have subs in place to pick-off those annoying caravels that float around and pillage your sea trade routes in addition to scouting for any real fleets (now that the AI somewhat understands the importance of moving a naval units around as a fleet). Oh, and hopefully you got united front so that the militaristic CSs give you a new unit every 8 turns =-) And hopefully you lucked out and got a militaristic CS with a late-game unit like Prachinha or panzers ... ummm, free panzer every eight turns AND lightning warfare in addition to all the tanks you make. Or free prachinha every 8 turns combined with the rediculous amount of happiness in autocracy ...

I got a little carried away there ... anyways.

SV with autocracy works just fine and usually happens on large/huge maps. Go commerce to mercantilism (and hopefully Big Ben), get most of rationalism, and then go stomp as much as possible with autocracy. The -40% on purchasing buildings helps get libraries/universities back online as soon as they're out of revolt to offset/overcome the +5% more science per city. Eventually, you'll just be making so much science that it just makes sense to build the apollo project and the space ships parts because you'll win sooner that way than by capping the last 3-5 capitals in some cases.

And it doesn't hurt that all the space ship part techs also have lots of great military goodies as part of the tech itself or the immediate prerequisite. That tech path has everything but modern armor, jet fighters, and stealth fighters if I remember correctly. Oh! Giant death robots too.

Won a diplo victory with Autocracy by mistake while pursuing domination. Gunboat diplomacy is amazing, and yes, works wonders with commerce.

I always at least consider autocracy no matter which VC I am aiming to get if I can get Industrial Espionage as soon as I adopt an ideology. IE is simply very attractive for me and my style of teching.

I usually win CVs with Autocracy faster than I can win them with Freedom, because I can simply kill off all my cultural rivals.

In my last CV game, on Immortal, I was Brazil and spawned in the middle of France, Carthage and the Celts, all of whom were going cultural/wonder spam. I was building culture too, but France and Carthage kept DoWing me. I fought defensively for a long time.

After my 3rd factory, I went Autocracy. I got the + military buildings, built them in like 6 cities and my growth exploded. Then I got -33% for purchased units. I started buying super-powerful units and pushing back France and Carthage.

When I got to Total War, I took over my whole continent, smashing not only France and Carthage, but also the Celts and Byzantium. There were several other civs further away, but it would have taken a lot of effort to get to them. I won not too long after that.

Autocracy is great.