[G&K] Tips for Ethiopian Culture Vic?

[Civ4Pengbo]

After my near culture loss to Ethiopia in my last game for my next I got to thinking it might be fun (challenging) to try for that combination.

However as I proved to myself you seem to end up losing the science race and that can be deadly as a more advanced AI would just role over me because of the SP combinations you seem to need to take.

So anyone got any tips on how to start/play this? What concerns me is how to get all the SP quickly enough to stop the AI getting to Artillery way before me. I would need 30 SP which even at an average of 10 per turn would take to turn 300 which is decidedly not good based on the tech level in most of my games.

Also the more cities the higher the SP cost so was thinking of keeping the city numbers down to maybe even one but again this presents the being wiped out problem. How do you play one city and not get beaten up against an AI that will spam them? I guess not starting on a large Pangea map may be a good idea?

I have read a couple of Deity challenge threads and seen some good players pull this one city thing off but there doesn't appear to be a lot of detail in those posts around how you stop the AI killing you although I did see one screenshot with a city flanked by two citadels which looked interesting.

Sorry for the long post. Hope anyone can offer some advice even if it's you're probably not up to this challenge yet

 

[anthropophage]

Ethiopia should be pretty decent for a one city culture victory, but I've never tried it. The stele pretty much guarantees you an early religion, provided you can get your hands on a faith pantheon, which means you have a good shot at getting Cathedrals for the extra artist slot. Because you'll be building the Stele first you'll also pick up a free amphitheatre from legalism so you can feasibly have two artist slots working before turn one hundred.

 

[Civ4Pengbo]

I just found Kirbdogs culture strategy guide and it just about answers every question except how the hell do you survive to pull it off there is an awful lot of building going on in this strategy there doesn't seem to be a lot of space for building a military.

Edit: to add a link to kirbdog's wonderful guide http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=493543

 

[kirbdog]

For deity, you build a lot less wonders than you do on the other difficulty settings, so there is a lot more time to build military. OCC has the advantage of making you a better diplomat and giving you lower policy costs, while 2-3 cities gives you more science and the ability to produce more great artists and units with the other cities. I'd suggest trying to do it with 3 cities and using the ancient era window to get cheap units from building warriors and archers, which later become crossbows/muskets and gatlings/rifles. You should really make cozy with a military city state or two. You have to be comfortable fighting at a technological disadvantage. At the end of the game you will probably just have frigates, rifles, cavalry, gatlings, artillery, and possibly great war planes.

One idea I haven't tried is to keep a constant war open with a city state to level up your units and get some great generals for planting citadels.

I purposely left out what I considered general background for playing CiV (like not going splat!) as that would be a much larger guide.

 

[Civ4Pengbo]

comfortable fighting at a technological disadvantage

hmm that could be a problem then as I suck at that. I usually fight a valiant defeat missing survival by quite a margin.

I think I need to work on fighting with CB and Pikes. I generally don't build enough pikes in most games as there is always something more important to build when they come along and they seem to cost double what any other military unit does.

 

[The Pilgrim]

OCC is by far the easiest setup to end a war you can't win.
Cheesy way out - sell all your luxes, strategics and gold for gpt and make a white peace.

And don't forget military CS. Their help especially in OCC is tremendous.