Immortal Difficulty

[Ookamikaze]

Hello all! I'm new to this forum and a huge fan of Civilization games. I have over 500 hours played on Civ 5 and have worked my way up to Immortal difficulty. I'm trying to get all the achievements and am doing well for myself. I have hit a bump though, Immortal is a whole different hell and I really don't know how to go about it. I really want the achievement, but fear I will just lose a lot and be too stressed to try again. I was hoping some veterans of the higher difficulties on here would give me some pro tips. I have all the expansions, even the maps. If I'm posting in the wrong area let me know and thanks again.

 

[Mesix]

Browse through the Strategy and Tips forum. There are some nice guides for winning on every level up to Deity (which is a factor of frustration higher than Immortal).

Here is one article which explains the finer points of the Tradition tall empire strategy which is very popular and works exceptionally well for growth and research.

Here is an article about winning a Domination victory especially useful at higher levels.

 

[Illianor123]

Play a 4 city tradition game as Babylon/Korea and go for science victory. Maintain friendship and research agreements with as many people as possible. Focus on growth, and use some interal food trade routes to grow your capital. Skip early wonders.

Or just be the Huns, and play a small Pangea and you should be able to wipe everyone out with horse archers and battering rams.

 

[wayneb64]

Doing well at Emperor requires decent knowledge of the game, but stepping up to Immortal requires a lot more focus and allows for very little messing around. I used to use a mishmash of Liberty and Tradition, but since I tried the full Tradition approach, I have not looked back. Stepping down to a Small map size will make things a bit easier as well.

Religion has a lot of benefits you will need to include in your game to help keep up with the AIs. Also, Culture/Tourism is going to bite you in the end game if you don't get started early and include that in your game.

 

[Ookamikaze]

Wow, I really appreciate all these experienced tips! So tall huh, I was told that before but didn't really understand the term. 4 cities or less right? I'm more of a culture/peace player, defensive. Any other strong Civs for this? How about map type? Small seems like insta war.
Thanks again, really!

 

[Puhi]

I'm hardly a vet, but I just won my first three games on immortal after trying the game out on prince.

All the above advice is solid and should be heeded. For me, however, there was one tip that made immortal seem practically easy to me: bribe the ai to attack each other. Of course you should always do this if the ai is massing troops at your border and you don't want him to attack you. But you don't have to wait for that! Bribe them before they bring troops to your border. It's amazingly cheap to do so.

Bribing the ai into wars with each other has two big benefits. 1) It gives you time to prepare to fight. 2) It can keep them occupied and wasting hammers beating each other up, slowing their economic growth.

I would also advise you to try a strong civ. My first immortal game was a diplo win with Siam. Second was science with Korea. Third was domination with Arabia. After using those civs, I feel ready to try a weaker one on immortal now.

 

[GKShaman]

I'm hardly a vet, but I just won my first three games on immortal after trying the game out on prince.

All the above advice is solid and should be heeded. For me, however, there was one tip that made immortal seem practically easy to me: bribe the ai to attack each other. Of course you should always do this if the ai is massing troops at your border and you don't want him to attack you. But you don't have to wait for that! Bribe them before they bring troops to your border. It's amazingly cheap to do so.

Bribing the ai into wars with each other has two big benefits. 1) It gives you time to prepare to fight. 2) It can keep them occupied and wasting hammers beating each other up, slowing their economic growth.

I would also advise you to try a strong civ. My first immortal game was a diplo win with Siam. Second was science with Korea. Third was domination with Arabia. After using those civs, I feel ready to try a weaker one on immortal now.

Great Advice here!

Try a strong civ! Better yet an easy to play civ - Poland, Germany (Simple bonuses that help early).

Definitely Bribe the AI to DOW other people - its annoying but it helps you grow and survive in the early game.


Big thing I can say: Watch out for the Initial RUSH: For some reason on immortal the AI sends 3 warriors, 3 archers, and a catapult within the First 60-80 turns (Standard speed) at your capital. Build 3 archers (City acts as the fourth) and 2 melee (warriors or spearmen) and DEFEND CAREFULLY!

Using all of your ranged attacks - kill ALL MELEE UNITS(only those can take cities).

Dont lose units and after killing all of the enemy units - get peace or go pillage carefully for some gold and pride. Then get peace.

 

[wayneb64]

Wow, I really appreciate all these experienced tips! So tall huh, I was told that before but didn't really understand the term. 4 cities or less right? I'm more of a culture/peace player, defensive. Any other strong Civs for this? How about map type? Small seems like insta war.
Thanks again, really!

Small is a six player game instead of eight. I normally play Continents and Small reduces the map size to something a lot more manageable as well as removing two competitors. There is not less land per player on smaller map sizes. The bigger the map the farther away your farthest competitor is and on Immortal if a distant AI gets to far ahead of you it is that much harder to get to them and hamstring them.

 

[Ookamikaze]

How about Pantheon beliefs, which are best for tall?

 

[reddishrecue]

Messenger of gods could be good for tall. Get your cities connected with roads and then get that science increase from this pantheon. The more connections you have the more science youll make.

 

[wayneb64]

Pantheons are totally situational with the map you get and possibly your Civilization and intended victory condition. I normally don't worry about VC until much later in the game however and I just pick whichever will get me the highest faith or culture bonuses.

I used to skip starts with lots of jungle, but now with the jungle pantheon I will play them as I can get a huge jump in early culture which gets Tradition finished much faster. If you see lots of plantations in your future there is nice pantheon for that.

 

[ShakaKhan]

@OP,

Hate to be the one to suggest regression, but how many games did you spend at King? I found the jump from king to immortal to be negligible; there was very little that I had to do differently and the results were about the same- maybe I finished games 10-12 turns later but nothing much else. Maybe you should have a few more games at King - try using civs towards victories they aren't designed for, like Genghis for culture, MariaI for dom, or Napoleon for anything other than culture. I found the big jumps to be from Prince to King (when you could no longer do whatever you want, have everything you want and began to need to prioritize/make sacrifices) and immiortal to deity(when many of the big boosts like wonders and wide empires were no longer an option and you needed to discover completely different boosts like tech stealing and trade route research).

Still, many of the aforementioned tips may help. Since the advancement you're asking about is king->emporer, I don't know if you'd benefit more from the prince->king tips or the immortal->deity tips, anyways:

-bring at least one worker with every land squad. 2 reasons for this are 1.)you can repair tiles in neutral or even enemy terrain in 2 turns and then pillage it for 25 HP whereas you'd only get 20 HP from 2 turns of wait-healing, plus you get some gold on top of that and 2.) lose him on purpose by leaving him unguarded 3 tiles out from enemy cities (you'll get him back the next turn anyway). this way when the enemy is lured out to capture him, you can finish the enemy without having your unit within 2 tiles of the enemy city, which means you'll lose the unit next turn.

-take note of which civ enters advancing eras first to find out who the tech leaders are. The civs with the highest scores aren't necessarily the highest in tech, and the civs with the highest numbers of techs may just be the ones who backfilled the tree. Then put your spies in that civs 2nd highest potential city, the highest potential is the capital but there's often a counter spy there, the second city takes a bit longer, but succeeds more than 95% of the time.

-immortal is the level when you can start to get a pretty decent amount of your research from trade routes. Internal routes are more-or-less still accepted as superior, but take a moment to see how many beakers you can get whenever it's time to renew a trade route. Additionally on this point, AI's will always send their trade routes to whatever city gives them the most gold and is in range. Use this knowledge to plan where EIC is going. Proper placement of EIC provides additional GPT, BPT, and can slightly reduce the chance of being DoWed upon. I'd argue it's the second best national wonder at high levels for this reason.

 

[Ookamikaze]

Pangea with Korea on small was a mistake, lol. Got destroyed by Shaka.

 

[GenuineRisk]

I actually think Korea on a Small Pangaea map is one of the most favourable setups for winning on a higher difficulty than you normally play on. Just use a basic, versatile strategy like 3-4 city Tradition, get Universities up in reasonable time and focus on survival until the mid-game. (this will likely involve some bribery if Shaka's next door) Korea's UA is so strong that you will naturally catch up in tech as long as you can start working specialists in good time.

 

[Mr. Shadows]

The guides and strats on here will help a lot, but they leave out a lot of the little details that good players pay attantion to. There's a really great thread buried in this forum somewhere on unusual advice, or unusual tips, something like that. It has tons of the little ideas that make the broad strategies work.

 

[joncnunn]

How about Pantheon beliefs, which are best for tall?

If after a religion, a faith producing one (terrain specific such as Desert Faith)

If not after a religion, then I tend to prefer a food producing one (terrain specific such as Sun God / Goddess of the Hut). Note that in this case, you'll probably eventually lose the pantheon on Immortal (as it probably won't be worth while attempting to found a major religion without a faith producing pantheon) but by unit blocking, you can keep the AI missionaries & Great Prophets away from your capital and the second best city for your pantheon for quite a long time.

 

[Ookamikaze]

Can't seem to win. Third try and I just feel that the computer is too fast. I'm always behind on score too, like 500 points. It's ridiculous how frustrating this difficulty has been. Just seems like Domination may be the only way to win, which is lame.

 

[Ookamikaze]

Going to take a break from Immortal difficulty. Sucks the fun right out of the game for me. I take an inch, they take 2 miles. Seriously wanted to rip my hair out every time Wu popped a new wonder that I was after and then she moved a settler on my island and put up a tent next to me. Then I was informed that she was looking to eat my cities. Lol, quit.

 

[GenuineRisk]

Don't worry too much about score - it's not uncommon to win with the lowest score due to the AI spamming wonders and worthless cities everywhere. It's only really relevant for a Time Victory, which will not happen in a normal Immortal game.

How many wonders were you trying to build? I'm certainly not in the "never build wonders" camp, but your level of frustration suggests that you're either trying to build too many in one game or serially missing them because you're falling further and further behind in tech. The only truly reliable way to build wonders is to get to the tech before the AI does, and if you continually start building them late, you're only wasting hammers in your capital that could be building other things, which just makes you fall further behind. Before you build a wonder, I suggest monitoring the AI situation to assess the risk of building it. For example, if an AI has founded the World Congress before you discover Printing Press, Pisa is going to be a risky build. If you try building Pisa and fail, and then try to build something like Globe Theatre or Forbidden Palace immediately afterwards, you could be setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment. You can also look at which social policies the AIs take (not 100% reliable as the game won't show if they took just the opener) or look for the skeletons of wonders in their capital, some of which are painfully obvious like the Pyramids.

 

[Bimblecrumbs]

Your score has little impact on the game and is only a rough indicator. Your score will be lower if you, for example, don't found a religion or build any wonders; that doesn't mean you're doing badly though. Ignore it.