Austria OCC Immortal CS Puppeteering Extreme

Having only recently found that Great Admiral can cross oceans without Astronomy, I came up with the following extreme setup and strategy.

Setup: Immortal, Continents Plus, 40 City-States, Barbs off, Policy saving enabled; rest standard

Ingredients and main idea:

1. Landlocked OCC is better than coastal because there will be more available tiles and no sea resources to worry about; in addition, OCC will make it easier to deal with the AI peacefully
2. Use Naval Tradition to get an enhanced Great Admiral to meet off-shore City-States as well as Civilizations on other continents early
3. Use Aesthetics + Pledge to Protect to befriend 40 City States
4. Use Religious Unity (= Religion spreads to friendly CS at double rate) to spread your religion quickly and get a massive boost to Happiness via Ceremonial Burial
5. Acquire as many puppets as possible via Diplomatic Marriage

Suggested Strategy

Save


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I have chosen this nice desert starting location because getting a Religion is quite important for the success of this strategy. On levels lower than Immortal this should work on a non-desert start as well. Note that Happiness and not Gold are the biggest limitation to marrying City-States and that's where Religion can help immensely.

Having played a few turns already I can attest that this particular start is seriously OP (pure luck and I doubt I will ever get such favourable start again ):

Took me some time but finally married the last CS on Turn 283 (running a ridiculous 5500BPT and 2000GPT).

OCC=1 city challenge. Am I missing something here cause this certainly doesn't look like an OCC game to me.

OwlRaider said:

OCC=1 city challenge. Am I missing something here cause this certainly doesn't look like an OCC game to me.

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It's not strict OCC; you start with one city and do not settle any new ones. Just acquire puppets via diplomatic marriage or conquest.

If you have OCC ticked playing Austria and you do Diplomatic Marriage then the CS you marry will disappear from the map.

Merenptah said:

It's not strict OCC; you start with one city and do not settle any new ones. Just acquire puppets via diplomatic marriage or conquest.

If you have OCC ticked playing Austria and you do Diplomatic Marriage then the CS you marry will disappear from the map.

Click to expand...

Did you annex Delhi?

Herfelt said:

Did you annex Delhi?

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Yes, that was a late annex for building Neuschwanstein and SOH.

It wasn't my original plan to annex any city. And this post isn't really about OCC (so maybe I should change the title), but more about exploiting Austria's UA to the max and acquire as many cities as possible via diplomatic marriage without buying or building a settler ever.