Denying victory in MP

btfx

Prince
Joined
Apr 17, 2007
Messages
362
Hey guys, I've played a couple MP games with friends. Wanted to ask a strategy question from a different direction.

How do you deny the different victory types? How do you keep track of how close your rivals are to victory?

Some of these are pretty straightforward - for domination you can keep an opponent from fighting you with forts in your borders, harassing them by sneaking a mounted unit into their territory and pillaging[1]. Being allies with their neighbouring CSs is a good idea, if you DOW at the right time[2] the CS will be able to do some damage, especially with the help of units you might have stationed around it. Timing in general is important, keeping a couple of military units on the domination player's border[3] will make them nervous about going off to gain territory or capitols. Looking at demographics will give you a hint of their military strength - more so if you have a non-zero military for theirs to be compared to. A tech lead is a military multiplier, and a stash of gold plus a turn of advance warning means that you can upgrade your units suddenly to turn the tables on their military advantage. This cuts both ways so watching their gold in the diplo screen can give you advance warning of this situation. Be aware that rushing a wonder with a GE two turns before they finish the same one will give them a gold boost and reason to hate you, but again - this can turn into a double advantage if you can draw your adversary into a losing fight.

Can you tell that one of my friends likes the domination route... but isn't alone in that?

Anyway, I'm sure there is a lot more to keeping track of and denying domination progress, especially from spaceship and diplo victory players. And of course I want to see tips against the other victory types. In particular, I can't find a way to track how close other players are to culture victory, I know this is not common in MP CIV5, but I'd like to know if there is some tab on some advisor screen I've missed.

P.S. I've rarely had a SP game that was still "interesting" when ideologies come into play, and all my MP games seem to "gg" early on (so far), I'm curious to hear from players with different experiences - a game of civ5 is too long and can go too many different ways for me to learn everything from my own experiences.

[1] Pillaging heals units a little bit - I just noticed this last game. This means that if you're just getting bombarded by one city, it's not a big deal for a mounted unit - it can pillage twice.

[2] The "right time" is while your opponent's military is too far to fight back.

[3] Popping in and out of their "peripheral vision" - edge of their fog-of-war is probably more disorienting, but in MP with simultaneous moves this might go unnoticed, which in this case is not what you want.
 
Always attack top dog on the totem pole to prevent them from snowballing out of control. Culture and Science victories have pretty obvious notifications that victory is coming. For diplomacy you can check how many CS allies people have.
 
Culture and Science victories have pretty obvious notifications that victory is coming.

For those who can't see the obvious:

Click on tourism icon(on top screen among the other icons). In this screenie you can see all civs progression(when changing related civ) related to tourism vs culture of other civs.

For science you can put a spy into capital of best science player and see what he build(like an early research Lab). Tech % can drastically change in a few turns so check often if he accumulates many gs because if he burns like 5-6 of them he will make a jump of 8-9 techs in 5 turns and it might be too late at that moment.

Overall, like Craig said, don't wait too much before hitting the strongest civ because at a certain point it can be almost impossible to hit him hard enough because he will have enough stuff to defend against any threats(especially if he reaches the info era while you are all still into Modern)
 
Honestly I've not played too much multiplayer I'm just getting into it, but I've watched over 90 games at a relatively high level.

- Diplo victory: almost never seen, usually people would keep very firm control over the city states close to them and so it becomes really hard to steal them away without huge money investment. People usually note when someone begins stealing city states and react either by firming their hold on the city stats or by declaring war which locks the city states in war.

- Culture victory: a bit more often seen that diplo, but almost as rarely overall. I've heard of a few people pulling it off. It mostly happens by no one doing anything about it before its too late. Check tourism screen every 10/20 turns and you'll never be caught off guard. Keep in mind of the different ways a player might force more burst tourism on you like warring you and sneaking musicians, by getting futurism as autocracy. Deny them any modifiers and inform other players so they take steps as well. Modifiers include, shared religion, trade routes, open borders and more.

- Science victory: Deny them aluminum any way you can. And full on war. Thats basically the only way you go about, though if they are sneaky with Freedom or Order they might pull a fast one on you.

- Domination: Well most games I've seen end one person gets nukes and the ability to deploy them considerable time before the other players. They rarely end earlier because its very hard to transition an army and fully defeating a player takes time and players not in war pull ahead in science. End result of this is while you defeat 1-2 players the rest have time to get to the next tier troops a bit of time before you and you can't fight them before you catch up make full use of the captured cities. How do deny that? Gank up on whoever is about to become a runaway, before he does. After that its usually too late. Always keep in mind a player that is well defended by terrain. I've seen more than one game lost to player like that teched like crazy while the rest were trying to keep someone big down.


I hope it helps somewhat.
 
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