Babylon - Standing the Test of Time?

First of all, yes, I am a lurker who's decided to make her account for the primary purpose of posing a single question on the forums. I'm really sorry about that. After a few hours of reading the posts on this particular (sub-sub-sub-sub-?)subforum, though, I reckoned that the lot of you would be able to provide insight for my specific issue. I'm curious to see if anyone's tried/succeeded in something similar.

Would you care to share your strategies for surviving as Babylon for the full game (normal speed and Monarch difficulty)? I find the UHV easy enough, but as a matter of course I tend to avoid pursuing UHVs in general, especially for those civilisations who win long before the bulk of Classical history has even begun.

Originally, I had hoped to attain that feat on a self-imposed one-city challenge (or at least a very tall and diplomatic Babylon), but warmongering or expansive strategies would be appreciated, as well. Note that I'm not so much interested in actually winning as I am surviving the whole 5050 years as a cultured, sufficiently advanced nation. The advent of the Seljuk invasion was the point where I realised I could endure no longer, and without motivation to try my hand at it again for the time being, I turn to you.

Welcome.

For a Babylon OCC, it's perfectly doable.
But you'll want to approach it from a warmongering route as opposed to the peaceful one.
Take advantage of the fact that you cannot collapse if you only possess one city.
Specific to the Seljuks, try and secure a source of Ivory before their spawn times and
try to keep at least 15 War Elephants and 1 GG Super-Medic unit at the ready by the time of the Seljuk spawn.
But I would settle near the coast if you were to attempt it namely because you would not be able to finish off island civs
(England, Japan, Indonesia) and New World civs without it.

Here is a warmonger strategy for Babylon.

I appreciate your responses. Mending my strategy to take the lack of collapse into account helps; I'd been playing as cautiously as ever to avoid that turn of events. Does moving my capital to a coastal tile put me at risk for flips to the Arabians, though?

You can't be flipped if you only have one city. And if it's coastal one SW of Babylon then that should be protected from flips even with multiple cities.

Excellent. I wasn't sure if that was a part of their flip zone or not.

Ugh. None of the coastal cities are much good for Babylong in my opinion. My preferred capital location is two tiles east of Bablyon itself.

When Babylonia reaches the modern era, it really should be called "Assyrian Federation" or "Syriac Republic", not Iraq.

Pavel Chichikov said:

When Babylonia reaches the modern era, it really should be called "Assyrian Federation" or "Syriac Republic", not Iraq.

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Agreed wholeheartedly.

That's a good point.

I forgot to take a screenshot..but i saw babylon in 100/200 AC...Its magic hahaha

Pavel Chichikov said:

When Babylonia reaches the modern era, it really should be called "Assyrian Federation" or "Syriac Republic", not Iraq.

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Out of curiosity, why ?

Pavel Chichikov said:

When Babylonia reaches the modern era, it really should be called "Assyrian Federation" or "Syriac Republic", not Iraq.

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I disagree. In this game, Babylonia represent every people in Mesopotamia: Sumerians, Semetics, Kassaties, Arameans etc. All those peoples were culturally and sometime even racially different. Since Babylonia doesn't represent a particular state in Mesopotamia, I don't understand why Iraq shouldn't be the name of the Mesopotamian state in the modern era.

teriaky said:

I disagree. In this game, Babylonia represent every people in Mesopotamia: Sumerians, Semetics, Kassaties, Arameans etc. All those peoples were culturally and sometime even racially different. Since Babylonia doesn't represent a particular state in Mesopotamia, I don't understand why Iraq shouldn't be the name of the Mesopotamian state in the modern era.

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I think it's because Iraq implies an Arab state, which the Babylonians don't represent.

yurisusuki said:

I forgot to take a screenshot..but i saw babylon in 100/200 AC...Its magic hahaha

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I had one game in which both Babylon and Egypt were still alive and strong just before the arab spawn. I really should have taken a screenshot.

DC123456789 said:

I think it's because Iraq implies an Arab state, which the Babylonians don't represent.

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Also because modern Assyrians are Christian.
Which I'm assuming is part of the motivation for suggesting this.

I actually very tenatively agree with Pavel though.
But only tenatively because while I understand its rationale,
this is definitely an instance where a contradiction arises from its implementation.
We have a problem with Egypt in this instance.
Because a rebirthed Egypt and onwards in DoC tends to represent an Arab entity as opposed to a Coptic one,
if we were to make a revived Babylon an Assyrian one, then we have a contradiction in our design principle.
It won't be a problem if we use that name for a surviving Babylon,
but a revived Babylon should remain as Iraq.

Since there are still at least a few people whom I surmise still
don't understand that this mod more or less includes entities based on their
status as a civilization, rather than a state,
I feel it's very important to highlight the grounded tenets of design here,
and make sure there are no contradictions reflected in the game,
and to properly explain why the exceptions that exist, exist for good reason.

Christianity has nothing to do with it. It's that Assyrians today speak a language directly descended from the ancient Semitic languages of Mesopotamia & have tried very hard for centuries to keep alive the pre-Arab culture and traditions of that land, surviving through a lot of hardships.

DC123456789 said:

I think it's because Iraq implies an Arab state, which the Babylonians don't represent.

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This is it in a nutshell.

DC123456789 said:

I think it's because Iraq implies an Arab state, which the Babylonians don't represent.

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Yeah, I got that point. I just don't understand why a Babylon should represent all the different cultures ruling (from) the territory except the Arabic one. I agree that a surviving Babylon should keep the name of one of the ancient Semitic people, but a respawning Babylon should represent an Arabic Mesopotamia.

Only if their state-religion is Islam, though the chance of that is around 99.9%