Playing with Russia (mini-guide)

Well, I’m gonna tell you my experience with Russia and why I like to play with they.

One good reason is their bonus, which is nothing more than the double of the resources you have of: Iron, Horses and Uranium (say “hello” to my Little Boy xD). So if I only have 2 units of Iron I’ll have 4 and if I find a deposit of 6 my enemies will be able to see my twelve Iron based unit, really painful.

The best way for the Iron use to be this: research until you can build The Great Library and while it ends research Calendar to earn happiness with luxury resources and next go for the Bronze Working, when is over you can have one free technology and it’ll be the Iron Working. Now you can see where in the map is the Iron, create a city near to it and create a interesting army of Swordsmen.

Following this, here come the second “advantage”, the special building of Russia: Krepost. Why is so good? Well, for two reasons:

So now, with these options we could build a big swordsmen army and expand our frontier really fast conquering our neighbours and with a big empire and a strong army (stronger when you discover the Steel) must be easy reach the future faster than other player and try to wine for Space Race or Diplomatic Victory if you have City State friends. One pint for Russia here!

By the way, if you wanna conquest all your enemies after the Manhattan Project remember that with Russia you have duplicated your Uranium resources, so if you have 4 units you will have really 8, your enemies don’t wanna nukes? Then give them two cups!!

I hope that with this mini-guide you will be able to have a lot of fun with Russia.

I frankly found russia bonuses and units useless crap. You dont need more than 4 horsemen, nor more than 4 swordsmen initially. By the time you do you will have plenty duplicates

Cossacks (their special unit) is complete and utter crap. Krepost bonus is the only decent one . Compared to other civs I think Russia has overall one of the weakest bonuses .

Agreed... but the Krepost is *very* nice.

I'm very disappointed though with the limited strategic resources. Unit costs and army maintenance costs are so high that the resource limits are almost never binding.

Perhaps the best solution would just be to set all strategic resources to 2.

Dark_MadMax said:

I frankly found russia bonuses and units useless crap. You dont need more than 4 horsemen, nor more than 4 swordsmen initially. By the time you do you will have plenty duplicates

Cossacks (their special unit) is complete and utter crap. Krepost bonus is the only decent one . Compared to other civs I think Russia has overall one of the weakest bonuses .

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I find russia to be pretty good actually. I don't care about the double resources, but rather the extra hammer I get at the early stage of the game. You can often find cities with two horses in their borders sometimes three or four.

As stated earlier, the Krepost is awesome. I could care a bit less about the special unit as well, but that goes for several of the civs.

Getting double strategics is a nice bonus of course, but what I really like is the hammers.

The extra hammers are absolutely huge in a resource-heavy start.

Early hammers mean an earlier Worker, which means more food and hammers, which quickly turns into more food, science and hammers. There is a lot of dead time in the first dozen to fifteen turns, and reducing that dead time by several turns means that you're going to be several turns ahead of every player in the game once Medieval rolls around. Russia's bonus is really an early pop and unit bonus in disguise.

Napoleon has a strong REX using Liberty (see the Apolyton post), but Catherine doesn't need to waste Culture on Liberty in order to get a strong REX.

I agree that the doubled resources is a weak ability. The one nice thing about it is that you don't have to worry about finding a second source of Horses. Maximizing the power of Cossacks means a lot of early warmongering with horse units, and you're going to want more than four. Usually you can befriend a city-state to supplement your supply of Horses if you only secure one tile, but that can come back to bite you hard if the Horses get pillaged.

The extra hammers are absolutely huge in a resource-heavy start.

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The extra hammer only applies to strategic resources though, right?
Horses, iron, coal, oil, uranium.
None of these are visible early game, and only horses are revealed early, and with high chance you won't have any of those in tiles covered by your culture in the first couple of dozen turns.

Am I missing something?

If you're playing Catherine, you should be researching AH first and aggressively settling every Horse you can. Even if you have to be brave about it.

+1H on a 70H build matters a great deal in your tiny early cities, and Horses aren't terribly uncommon.

Ok, but you were talking about the first dozen to 15 turns.
Its going to take you several turns to research AH, and even then you are hardly guaranteed to have a horse in your nearby tiles.

I hardly think its worth changing your city placement for secondary cities all *that* much just for a measly 1 hammer per turn bonus.

Though cavalry are awesome in the early game, I get very frustrated by the fact that they don't seem to upgrade into anything in the late game, so you have to abandon them when infantry arrive, no matter how highly promoted. Cossacks are possibly the worst UU in the game; weak bonus, and no upgrade opportunity.

What I'd really like to see is the resource yields tweaked downwards (and horses made less common), so that double resources was *not* a weak ability. Fielding 4 cavalry rather than 2 should be a nice bonus.

Honestly, the best part of the Siberian Riches is not being able to build more units. It's having more Iron and Horses to sell to other civs. You'll make ridiculous money and drain your rivals' treasuries at the same time.

Ahriman said:

Ok, but you were talking about the first dozen to 15 turns.
Its going to take you several turns to research AH, and even then you are hardly guaranteed to have a horse in your nearby tiles.

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Do the math. Suppose you research AH. It takes you 9 turns to complete on Deity. At this point, you find a Horse. You immediately switch to it to complete the Worker (unless you need one more turn to grow), because this is the smart thing to do.

Suppose that you started with 4 Hammers, because you're in a spot without Plains Wheat. So it takes you 18 turns to produce the unit. After the Horse pop, you have six remaining, where you would have seven as anyone else. You have 36 Hammers. At 6H per turn, it takes another six turns to make the Worker. At Russia's 7H it takes five. That's one turn.

Now you make a Settler. It takes, say, eleven turns to complete. With the extra Hammer it takes ten. So your Settler lands another turn early, possibly two if the numbers break right as you improve tiles. That's 2-3 turns of time now.

Now you settle another Horse for another +1HPT. You start on a second Worker. This worker completes several turns faster than it otherwise would due to the second Horses, even if you send the first worker over to choprush and improve a luxury after you improved your first luxury.

This doesn't work if you didn't spin up Horses, but that's the lotto with Catherine. It's like Fishing in Civ 4. When it's good it's good, and when it's not it's terrible. But in my experience, you either have or can cheaply buy Horses more often than not.

I'm still in my first game with Russia (not my first game, just first as Russia). The Krepost didn't seem good at all until I built a few. They are especially useful in cities bordering on the expanses of useless terrain (tundra/snow/desert) where you really don't want to drop extra cities down. I also agree that the biggest advanatge of their special ability is the additional hammer. I have one city with marble (no hammer bonus), three horse tiles, iron and now oil. So I have +5 hammers over anybody else in the exact same situation and that means every production enhancing building is that much better, I actually built a windmill for the first time and with a factory my St. Petersberg is a monster than can spit out units very quickly and build wonders like no other (love my marble). To put that +5 in perspective that's like the communism bonus for that city without spending a single point on policies

I have also been pretty impressed with my Cossacks. Their extra bonus against wounded units stacks with the charge promotion, more importantly it allows you to get that bonus without spending a promotion on it and with that bonus they can take out infantry easily. The trick to using them is to take advantage of that, you use them as city garrisons and attack the units wounded by your cities bombard or you use them on the front line to finish off entrenched units that your canons or artillery can't kill. Against riflemen and older units it's almost comical how potent they can be. They're certainly not the best UU out there but they're definately not worthless. The big question is, do they upgrade to helicopters and keep their bonus?

The only good thing with Russia is the Krepost. Nothing else.

Funny how people whined about Russia being OP before release, having massive armies etc. I never have problems with lack of horses/iron with other civs, and selling the surplus you get as russia doesn't net you nearly as much as extra luxury resources.

Cossacks are the worst UU in the game. You can read more about that here.

Russia should have +1 production from mines AND strategic resources. You typically have just 1 strategic resource per city (for the most part of the game), the bonus isn't nearly as good as some other civ UAs.

But yeah.. other than Krepost the situation is pretty grim.

Well, I'm only up to renaissance at present but my thoughts so far are. I'm going for domination.
Krepost is nice. They let you settle cities further apart. Settle near horses and iron. Build mega sprawling industrial towns. Getting the heroic epic after spamming kreposts seems like a good idea. I also built the sistene chapel. The social policies are coming in handy to shore up my happiness. Having a garrisoned army adds about 10 happy people. Getting communism is my aim to spam nukes late game. Don't know how feasible this will be as my empire expands. I guess I'll use a lot of puppet states until I go nuclear.
Double strategic resources hasn't come in handy so far. I'm hoping uranium will be at a premium though. Having twice as many nukes and heavy production could be a lot more explosive than not having to worry about running out of iron.
I've got the US sitting all alone on a continent on the other side of the world. Late game well get to see what might have happened had gen MacArthur made the White house and had Gorbachev never made it out of lowly administration. BOOM!!!!!!

Ahriman said:

I'm very disappointed though with the limited strategic resources. Unit costs and army maintenance costs are so high that the resource limits are almost never binding.

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This right here, and excellent use of the word binding. I've hardly ever hit the limit.

Celevin said:

This right here, and excellent use of the word binding. I've hardly ever hit the limit.

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What kind of victory do you normally go for? I know that if I am going for a domination victory then I am going to use every resource I got.

Silvis said:

What kind of victory do you normally go for? I know that if I am going for a domination victory then I am going to use every resource I got.

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You can stomp any AI with 6-12 units. ANY, even deity. Even if all of them require strategic resources, you never run out of horses/iron. So having double is pretty much redundant, since they don't sell so well to the AI.