Good wide civs?

MantaRevan

MantaRevan

Emperor
Joined
Oct 9, 2011
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I'm been playing tall too much recently, and expanding via conquest, so I'm looking for a good civ to go liberty/order with(excluding the mayan or arabian ICS). Who have you had success doing this with?
 
Just played a wide game with Indonesia. Actually went very well. ~8 cities by T100. Had to stop for a while until I got Astronomy, then settled a bunch of islands and smaller landmasses. The spices were guaranteed and luxuries are what fuels wide play.

I still ended up over-expanding, I think. Next time I may dedicate a few internal trade routes to pumping up late-game cities. Even cities starting at 4 pop and 10+ hammers take too long to catch up. Perhaps throwing on some naval trade routes would help.
 
Shoshone start strong from pathfinders and are generally good for early expansion with their extra tiles. Egypt, with Temples that provide +2 happiness and have no upkeep, make for good piety/liberty starts. Spain, if you're lucky, generally goes wide with bonus gold and happiness. Depending on the map, Polynesia has a leg up on early expansion via oversees settling, so if you're up for claiming islands, go Polynesia. Inca get cheap roads, which has strong synergy the city connection policy in Liberty. Rome, the original tall civ, makes building construction faster.

In all honesty, any civ can go wide pretty well.
 
The Indonesian special resources are a great motivation for going wide. Settling near a river makes it even more interesting because of the UB. In my current game I am with my 3 initial cities (on the same continent) plus the other 3 I built in other continents / islands just for the extra resources. But you know, once you have a foot in someone else's land, it is attacking or being attacked, so I'm planning to take a few spanish cities soon :)
 
Matthew. said:
Just played a wide game with Indonesia. Actually went very well. ~8 cities by T100. Had to stop for a while until I got Astronomy, then settled a bunch of islands and smaller landmasses. The spices were guaranteed and luxuries are what fuels wide play.

I still ended up over-expanding, I think. Next time I may dedicate a few internal trade routes to pumping up late-game cities. Even cities starting at 4 pop and 10+ hammers take too long to catch up. Perhaps throwing on some naval trade routes would help.
Click to expand...

What was your happiness? I suck at keeping it up and usually only have like 1-4 or so during good times, and after expanding a few times it seems like I'm constantly at -1 or 0 :/
 
It was fine. Forward settled on to Eqypt taking resources near him and cutting him off so I could expand in the areas around me. Most of the cities were coastal, so that was an extra 2 happiness per city. 2 because I never got around to building seaports, just the lighthouse and harbor.

Kept it low since every time I got a decent surplus I'd expand some more. In retrospect, I may have been better off building up my cities a bit more instead of expanding. They were ~15 by the time I ended the game and would have been better at ~20.
 
This might sound counter-intuitive given their UA but ethiopia with a tradition opener gives you free steeles (monument replacement UB) which give you free faith so you can pop a happiness religion super early and easily expand wide very fast.
 
I'd say anyone with a good low tech (pre-Renaissance we'll say) building/bonus that works well in lots of cities can be used effectively in a wide empire.

So that's mostly Carthage (free Harbours), Celts (maybe? Ceilidh Hall is late but very strong), China (Paper Makers are pretty good), Egypt (Tombs OP), Ethiopia (Steles are great, you lose your UA though), Incas (sort of... improvement maintenance can be a lot of gold), Indonesia (some free happiness, Candis are good when close to other religions), Iroquois (free roads, and Longhouses work best in small cities), Maya (classic wide with Pyramids), Rome (building boost, this is meh) and Songhai (Mud Mosque is OP). Lots of choices!
 
Pretty much all were mentioned, I think:

Rome
Maya
America
Shoshone
Iroquois
Russia
Egypt
Carthage
Indonesia
Incans

are all leaders that favor wide rather than tall expansion.
 
How come Inca? Reduced cost on roads, yes, but city connections will cover that just fine. I'd much rather play tall with them, since you can get some crazy food tiles with terrace farms. I'd rate terrace farm abuse over a few GPT saved on roads.

Map dependent, of course. But wider play generally means keeping population lower than you normally would, which means purposely ignoring some sweet terrace farm improvements.
 
Matthew. said:
How come Inca? Reduced cost on roads, yes, but city connections will cover that just fine. I'd much rather play tall with them, since you can get some crazy food tiles with terrace farms. I'd rate terrace farm abuse over a few GPT saved on roads.

Map dependent, of course. But wider play generally means keeping population lower than you normally would, which means purposely ignoring some sweet terrace farm improvements.
Click to expand...
I could see the Inca working in a "wide-but-tight" formation where you space your cities four tiles apart such that multiple cities could be working the same farm at different times. Giving your new city two farms it can already work can get it up to a stable size pretty quickly.
 
I would argue that any civ with an early unique building usually benefits from going wide. Such as Etheopia, Maya, Songhai, Persia, Egypt, Arabia. Getting a lot of these buildings early on can give you a huge boost, assuming you can maintain happiness. India can also be very effective going wide because of how they can convert local into global happiness with the proper setup.
 
thegingerninja said:
Just not India
Click to expand...

Incorrect. India breaks the happiness system by making it so that your happiness buildings can contribute more happiness than your population is contributing happiness, converting that extra happiness into global happiness that can be used to cover new cities.
 
The "doubled unhappiness from number of cities" is nothing compared to the "doubled happiness from population". India receives a significant happiness boost no matter what.
 
MerchantCo said:
The "doubled unhappiness from number of cities" is nothing compared to the "doubled happiness from population". India receives a significant happiness boost no matter what.
Click to expand...

Say you have 10 cities with average of 6 population.

That's 60:c5unhappy: from population and 30:c5unhappy: from cities, 90:c5unhappy: total.

For Ghandi it's 30:c5unhappy: from population and 60:c5unhappy: from cities, 90:c5unhappy: total.

The break-even for Ghandi's UA is 6 average citizens, which is pretty high for the first 100 turns and certainly isn't a significant boost no matter what.
 
The one thing holding Gandhi back in G&K was you couldn't grow fast enough to abuse his UA. All tall play had zero happiness problems, so you were being punished (higher settle cost) for no return benefit (still grew as fast as other tall Civs).

With BNW I could see internal trade-route abuse mixing extremely well with his UA. Still probably an average-tier Civ, but at least now they have the option of boosting growth along with their UA.
 
Alzadar said:
Say you have 10 cities with average of 6 population.
Click to expand...

Completely unrealistic example that will never happen in a real game and puts India in a much worse light than they actually are.

India has actually been massively boosted with BNW and is looking very, very good now. Because happiness in general has been continuously cut down with each major patch and expansion, there's so very little happiness available now that local happiness is almost == global happiness, and also decreased unhappiness == global happiness. We used to have (G&K figures, they were even higher before) the Colosseum +2 happy, Theatre at +3 happy and Stadium at +4 happy for at total support of 9. Now, they've nerfed the happiness-buildings into oblivion (Stadium arguably being broken now, costing 500 hammers and 3 upkeep to provide just +2 happy) so that the happiness-buildings provide just 2+2+2 = 6 support total. Luxuries were nerfed from +5 to +4 happy, as well. That means India's UA has gotten increasingly better. They're still a tall civ, but yes, they can in fact almost work as a wide one as well (given how 'wide' has gotten less and less wide and more and more 'tall').
 
Strategist83 said:
Completely unrealistic example that will never happen in a real game and puts India in a much worse light than they actually are.

India has actually been massively boosted with BNW and is looking very, very good now. Because happiness in general has been continuously cut down with each major patch and expansion, there's so very little happiness available now that local happiness is almost == global happiness, and also decreased unhappiness == global happiness. We used to have (G&K figures, they were even higher before) the Colosseum +2 happy, Theatre at +3 happy and Stadium at +4 happy for at total support of 9. Now, they've nerfed the happiness-buildings into oblivion (Stadium arguably being broken now, costing 500 hammers and 3 upkeep to provide just +2 happy) so that the happiness-buildings provide just 2+2+2 = 6 support total. Luxuries were nerfed from +5 to +4 happy, as well. That means India's UA has gotten increasingly better. They're still a tall civ, but yes, they can in fact almost work as a wide one as well (given how 'wide' has gotten less and less wide and more and more 'tall').
Click to expand...

Do note that the 10 cities part is just for the sake of the example, average of 6 citizens to break even holds true for any number of cities. Not sure if that's what is making it seem unrealistic to you.

(3+x)=(6+x/2)
x=6

I don't see how an average of 6 citizens is completely unrealistic. For anything that could remotely be called "wide", you aren't going over that until at least around turn ~110. So for over the first third of the game Gandhi's UA is actually hurting him.

Honestly I think they should remove the negative half of Gandhi's UA. His UB has to be the worst in the game and his UU is totally forgettable, why does he also have the only UA with a negative side effect (unless you count Venice)?
 
Alzadar said:
Honestly I think they should remove the negative half of Gandhi's UA. His UB has to be the worst in the game and his UU is totally forgettable, why does he also have the only UA with a negative side effect (unless you count Venice)?
Click to expand...

The War Elephant is pretty fantastic, actually. They're mobile composites that come an era earlier. Just loo at any of the challenges involving India, you'll see most of the really good players defaulting towards early War Elephant rush for a fast domination victory.
 
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