I never realized how powerful Victoria was

This is my very first time playing as Victoria. The reason I never played her before was because I always thought (and still believe) that Liz was too much better with Fin + Phi.

But I just got a great map that really let me put Fin + Imp to great use due to having loads of floodplains, and a large semi isolated continent with just one AI (Huge fractal marathon map on Immortal):



I played a landgrab start, even opening with making a settler first because it was going to take me a while to get my worker techs.

So I went Settler > Worker > Warriors while growing to size 3 > settler x 2 in the cap

And Worker > Warriors while growing to 3 > Settler x 3 in my second city which was built on a plains hill and had a horse, pigs and lake tile to work.

I also managed to steal Hammurabi's worker, and pillage one of his farms and a few roads to slow him down, and now all the land is mine to cottage spam everywhere.

I dont want to, nor need to conquer babylon though, I'd rather keep him alive for tech trading, and maybe vassal him later, peacefully if possible. I have his expansion blocked off and plenty of jungle to the north to settle.

I ended up with 12 cities by 250 BC running comfortably with 70% science slider, what a beastly trait combo.

Victoria isn't a bad IMP leader, but Catherine is so much better.

Why is Catherine better? I like CRE early in the game, but it loses some steam later while FIN is very good throughout. UUs and UBs are both similar, but i would give the slight edge to England unless you are playing an extremely old version of the game with pre-nerfed Cossacks. Starting techs are pretty similar too as they share Mining and Hunting/Fishing are both weak.

AC is far and away the best IMP leader in my eyes. Suleiman, Cyrus, Vicky, and JC would probably be my 2nd tier. Cathy, Joao, Justinian, and Genghis 3rd tier, and poor Charlie has a tier of his own as probably the worst leader in the entire game.

Cyrus, Vicky, JC, Cathy, and Genghis are all interesting because, IMO, they all have stronger counterparts for their respective nations. Cyrus is fun though - I like him on his own merits.

Sulei #1 for me
Bulb an Engi rush, PHI is awesome for that and most important no fishing combined with strong starting techs. Imp allows focusing on getting your needed libraries and still settle rather quickly, and later fast generals give strong rush armies.

Ind and Praets are strong too, but they lose value on deity while early Trebs will take every city.
If you look for the fastest possible deity pangea map type wins, look at Sulei.

Fippy said:

If you look for the fastest possible deity pangea map type wins, look at Sulei.

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do you mean all civs or just imperialistic ones? Cause I'm pretty sure huayna capac beats everyone by a mile as far as fastest wins, if you get lucky enough with the quecha rushes...

nate45 said:

do you mean all civs or just imperialistic ones? Cause I'm pretty sure huayna capac beats everyone by a mile as far as fastest wins, if you get lucky enough with the quecha rushes...

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On HoF picked maps maybe, after spending 2 weeks until you get that map.
How often can you Q rush more than 1 deity AI?
How often will you run into hill cities, or AIs like Mansa..or first AI further away..and so if you are lucky you rush one AI, but that does not give you a complete map win.

With Sulei most starts work, he does not need luck.
Maybe i should have said most regular fast wins, HC is annoying.

haha well the criteria was fastest possible, not most consistant! and you can still quecha rush and then go engineering, it will greatly improve your start if you do it right.

Fippy said:

How often can you Q rush more than 1 deity AI?

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More often than you'd think. I've actually been playing around with Hyuana capac and diety trying to perfect the strat... I never actually finish the games, I just do the quecha rush and then restart at about 2500bc and then do it again. I'll often get starts with quecha's that are much better than what you could get building settlers/workers. I'm still only an immortal player but when i first make a serious attempt at diety it will probably be with inca's cause they're the easiest civ...

But here's my working strategy so far for diety quecha rushes:

1) Move starting settler and quecha in different directions to scout.
2) Don't found your city until you find an opponent that is not mansa musa. Hopefully this won't take long.

The reason you move starting settler is two-fold: 1 ) less maintenance costs for your future cities. 2 ) the settler moves faster than a quecha does, so your eventual rush will be faster assuming you're going in generally the right direction (not guaranteed, you need a bit of luck for this strat, lol)

3) try to found the city on plains hills as close as possible to an enemy AI.

4) With your starting quecha, steal a worker from a random civ that is not nearby (NOT a civ you plan to attack later with quechas. You don't want to give up the element of surprise!)

5) in your starting city... If you have plains/forest/hills, work that immediately and don't grow at all. Otherwise grow to size two and work two forest/plains or grassland/hills/plains tiles. You want to go no-growth until you get at least 6 quechas, after that i'm not sure, it's hard to decide what to do... i think it depends if you plan to continue quecha rushing more cities or just develop what you already have within sight.

6) Once you get 6 quechas you're ready to take somebody's cities. It's usually easy to take a city with 6 quecha's, although if they're on a hill or protective, you may want 8.

7) you can attack a second person if they're close enough. This requires luck. But its not worth it if they're far away, you don't want to kill your econ in maintenance costs.

we're getting way off topic here...

I guess for Op's playstyle, regarding his latest Threads, the old fat british lady is indeed his best choice, since financial simply helps the most compensating early overexpansion

Izuul said:

Why is Catherine better? I like CRE early in the game, but it loses some steam later while FIN is very good throughout. UUs and UBs are both similar, but i would give the slight edge to England unless you are playing an extremely old version of the game with pre-nerfed Cossacks. Starting techs are pretty similar too as they share Mining and Hunting/Fishing are both weak.

AC is far and away the best IMP leader in my eyes. Suleiman, Cyrus, Vicky, and JC would probably be my 2nd tier. Cathy, Joao, Justinian, and Genghis 3rd tier, and poor Charlie has a tier of his own as probably the worst leader in the entire game.

Cyrus, Vicky, JC, Cathy, and Genghis are all interesting because, IMO, they all have stronger counterparts for their respective nations. Cyrus is fun though - I like him on his own merits.

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You put Catherine in the 3rd tier- Blasphemy!!!!
With Victoria, you get the cities but you need to pump culture in them. That means one of two things- Stonehenge or pop rushing monuments.

Catherine doesn't need to waste that one pop one a monument, she can grow her newly built cities to size two then pop rush a worker. So essentially you save early turns on development. It is the time it takes to grow one pop for Catherine versus the time it takes to grow one pop whip it into a monument then grow again to size 2.

And if you go the Stonehenge route, well first of all England doesn't begin with mysticism so you have to tech that, then once you start building Stonehenge, your chances of making it largely depends on the competition. Second of all it means that you don't get the GW which is another crucial early game wonder that you should be building instead of Stonehenge. With the GW, you can afford to take a detour to BW for chopping, but you don't really have that luxury for Stonehenge. And the GW is far more useful, because the Great Spy allows you steal tech off the AI that is off your path in the liberalism race.

That's just agreat start which would work ok really for any leader. But which leader is best for carrying you in a bad start?

Izuul said:

Why is Catherine better? I like CRE early in the game, but it loses some steam later while FIN is very good throughout. UUs and UBs are both similar, but i would give the slight edge to England unless you are playing an extremely old version of the game with pre-nerfed Cossacks. Starting techs are pretty similar too as they share Mining and Hunting/Fishing are both weak.
...
Cyrus, Vicky, JC, Cathy, and Genghis are all interesting because, IMO, they all have stronger counterparts for their respective nations. Cyrus is fun though - I like him on his own merits.

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Early game trumps rest of game. That's why cre is so powerful. I don't think Stalin or Petey boy are as good Cathy. Both sides have merit of course, just personal preference.

sinimusta said:

That's just agreat start which would work ok really for any leader. But which leader is best for carrying you in a bad start?

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It depends on your definition of a bad start. If the map was all ice with no other resources, then no leader could possibly save that start, because the max city size is 1.

If you mean tundra near a river with deer and a silver and some trees, then Catherine the Great would be your girl, because both resources fall under her starting techs and chopping for settlers and the GW is made easier by the fact BW is so close by. You might lack a bit of food, but with agriculture, farms can get you to a decent enough size. your capital won't be a good city until biology, but until you find something better it will be serviceable.

Gwynnja said:

Early game trumps rest of game. That's why cre is so powerful. I don't think Stalin or Petey boy are as good Cathy. Both sides have merit of course, just personal preference.

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But FIN is good in the early game too. Settling flexibility is nice, but the best part of CRE is probably the cheap library at the start. Many cities don't actually need border pops too early.

But Imperialistic didn't exist back in Vanilla.

jackelgull said:

It depends on your definition of a bad start. If the map was all ice with no other resources, then no leader could possibly save that start, because the max city size is 1.

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Hm, interesting thought experiment: Imagine a map consisting only of ice, without any resources, river, hills or water. You'd mostly work citizens until you get either Caste or a specialist slot providing building.

Let's go over the traits:

Financial: Completely useless, there'd be no tiles providing even one commerce, let alone two.
Expansive: Health is useless for size 1 cities, you'll never produce more than 3 Hammers per turn without settled great people before Factories so no effect on worker building speed, the two buildings it boosts are of no use either so nay.
Aggressive: This one might actually prove useful, if every city is producing with the exact same speed (2H/Turn) you can have a better quality of units with the same quantity which is better than nothing as you can use them to more reliably acquire more cities, and hence more sources of two hammers per turn.
Protective: See Aggressive, though since everyone can only build archers/longbows, catapults and warriors until gunpowder I'd say this one is actually a bit stronger.
Charismatic: Happiness is useless, for the less experience needed see the two points above.
Philosophical: You can only ever have a single specialist per city, but it does give you your rare great people in shorter intervals than otherwise which is not to be underestimated. I imagine settled Great People will make out the bulk of your production and commerce, as they are just so much more powerful relatively speaking when you have literally no tiles to work.
Spiritual: Hm, first I'll have to analyze how the different civics would work out in this scenario before I can say anything about the quality of this trait, though it would at least retain its bonus for diplomacy as you can switch civics and religions on the fly whenever an AI asks you to.
Industrious: The bonus for Forges would be huge, less for the +25% Production though but more for the Engineer slot, effectively adding +50% Production over the city tile and citizen.
Imperialistic: For earlier Great Generals see my better quality at same quantity point under Aggressive, but the +50% Production for Settlers is where it's at. With no workable tiles the only way to increase your yields to spam as many cities as possible, though maintenance will quickly become a problem.
Creative: Culture is useless, but the double production for Library is awesome for the scientist.

Tell me if I forgot any traits.

Now my thoughts about civics:
Government: Hereditary Rule and Police State are completely useless and Universal Suffrage might just have some use, but Representation is the best available choice for the +3 Research per city.
Legal: Free Speech is just a no-no, Bureaucracy might give you some extra hammers if you have a bunch of settled great people in your capital, Vassalage could be useful for better units, Nationhood because of no maintenance though it's actual effects are all irrelevant.
Labor: Slavery is useless, as is Serfdom unless you enjoy spamming Forts everywhere, Emancipation as well, so the winner by default is Caste System with its specialist slots.
Economy: Mercantilism or State Property. With eternal size 1 cities trade route commerce won't ever amount to much and corporations are impossible to found, Environmentalism is crap as always and so the only question you should ask here is whether you'd get more from de facto doubling the population of all your cities or removing city distance maintenance.
Religion: Organized Religion for missionaries without having to waste hammers in monasteries, Theocracy for better units or Pacifism for earlier great people. Free Religion's +10% Research isn't worth squat when only very few cities even get close to producing over 10 beakers per turn. I'd say Pacifism is the best choice here, though OR and Theo also have their uses.

As for the civ, you'd obviously want a resourceless UU.

Anyone up for actually trying out such a game?

jackelgull said:

With Victoria, you get the cities but you need to pump culture in them. That means one of two things- Stonehenge or pop rushing monuments.

Catherine doesn't need to waste that one pop one a monument, she can grow her newly built cities to size two then pop rush a worker. So essentially you save early turns on development. It is the time it takes to grow one pop for Catherine versus the time it takes to grow one pop whip it into a monument then grow again to size 2.

And if you go the Stonehenge route, well first of all England doesn't begin with mysticism so you have to tech that, then once you start building Stonehenge, your chances of making it largely depends on the competition. Second of all it means that you don't get the GW which is another crucial early game wonder that you should be building instead of Stonehenge. With the GW, you can afford to take a detour to BW for chopping, but you don't really have that luxury for Stonehenge. And the GW is far more useful, because the Great Spy allows you steal tech off the AI that is off your path in the liberalism race.

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Starting a new city by rushing a monument is indeed a waste. But if you settle wisely you don't need that culture and can skip the monument. Your alternative plan to first grow, then whip a worker also sounds odd. Does this mean that you don't already have a worker available to improve your new city when you settle it? You want your cities to grow onto their good improved tiles asap, whipping a new city at size 2 as a rule is not good. Also, settling a city with no prospects of working improved tiles until the city itself has produced a worker is a huge waste. A city working unimproved tiles only costs maintenance while producing barely nothing.

Stonehenge is a bad play in most cases. There are so many more valuable things to do with your hammers at that stage of the game. There was just a long thread about the subject that you can read.

GW is better, but on the highest difficulties it's very hard to get. You have to beeline it hard and sacrifice everything else to possibly get it. Usually not worth the sacrifices. And tech stealing is only really valuable if you are totally behind in tech, which you of course should aim not to be. As long as you are ahead in some area, you can trade for the techs that are off your path. I think TGW really shines on deity where barbs are brutal and the AI techs very hard, but on that level it's to impossible to consistently get it. Unless you are industrious, settle your initial city on stone and don't need any expensive worker techs immediately...

It's always depending on diff. level, so every opinion on traits should include those
If you ask deity players (or just peoples who sometimes like that challenge, then remember what worked well) they will most likely say Cathy is average, cos you often either get not that much space to expand or you do not want to rex cos..well too expensive.
Rex simply gets weaker on higher diff. levels, and on deity barbs would cause too many problems if you settle further away cities usually.

While Ind (Stalin) gains in power cos tgw will be powerful on non-pangea type maps, like Elite said you often skip food and city growth first but if you share a bigger continent with only few AIs (or worst case, isolation..) there would be so many barbs coming that you often cannot really develop without tgw. So it's worth starting slower, and then needing no units and focusing on other stuff.
You can completely forget Stonehenge usually, and so on.
You will value GLH and Pyras much higher than on let's say Emperor, so you can keep up in tech.

Creative also helps with barbs, sometimes that will not get mentioned.
With Cathy you would try different than with Stalin, and use culture expanding for removing fog. But your most difficult problem with Cathy will be..what's my long term plan of keeping up. Ofc all this depends on maps, we would have to assume something average without plenty gold mines and similar.
And then like Izuul said, Cathy has no trait to support wonders, cottages (Fin), fast GP generation (Phi) and so on.

jackelgull said:

And if you go the Stonehenge route, well first of all England doesn't begin with mysticism so you have to tech that, then once you start building Stonehenge, your chances of making it largely depends on the competition.

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it depends... with mining civs and one of those zillion forests starts that are so common in BTS, you can get either SH or GW reliably at ~2750bc, even on huge / marathon /immortal where teching is so slow. Just go bronze working first, then either mysticism or masonry depending on which wonder you want. Grow city to size 2 while you're waiting for your worker to have something to do, then build a worker, then chop two more workers.

for marathon/huge:

Have your three workers each be chopping a forest right as you get mysticism or masonry, and maybe pre-chop some other forests if you have time. Then you get an insta +180 production to your wonder of choice right as you get the tech. Then each worker chops another forest, and you've built the wonder 10 turns after you got the tech. Need 8+ forests for this, preferably more so you can chop settlers after... but you get the wonder ~2750bc and you have a bunch of workers that will be useful later.

Thing is with Cathy / Sury / Gilgamesh, I can at most manage 8 cities in the BCs. With FIN and plenty of cottages I can manage 12+.

Or one could just play archipelago, play as Willem and get the GLH ... Which is my current game and oh my god, soooooo many cities.

Fippy said:

It's always depending on diff. level, so every opinion on traits should include those
If you ask deity players (or just peoples who sometimes like that challenge, then remember what worked well) they will most likely say Cathy is average, cos you often either get not that much space to expand or you do not want to rex cos..well too expensive.
Rex simply gets weaker on higher diff. levels, and on deity barbs would cause too many problems if you settle further away cities usually.

While Ind (Stalin) gains in power cos tgw will be powerful on non-pangea type maps, like Elite said you often skip food and city growth first but if you share a bigger continent with only few AIs (or worst case, isolation..) there would be so many barbs coming that you often cannot really develop without tgw. So it's worth starting slower, and then needing no units and focusing on other stuff.
You can completely forget Stonehenge usually, and so on.
You will value GLH and Pyras much higher than on let's say Emperor, so you can keep up in tech.

Creative also helps with barbs, sometimes that will not get mentioned.
With Cathy you would try different than with Stalin, and use culture expanding for removing fog. But your most difficult problem with Cathy will be..what's my long term plan of keeping up. Ofc all this depends on maps, we would have to assume something average without plenty gold mines and similar.
And then like Izuul said, Cathy has no trait to support wonders, cottages (Fin), fast GP generation (Phi) and so on.

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technically creative supports fast GP Generation, at least the first GS for example to bulb math. And she is one of the top tier choices for a horse archer rush. Fast expanding is overrated and i would only mention her strength to rush.