RevDCM on Immortal is ridiculously crazy!

[Zeiter]

Holy cow, if you want to give yourself a challenge, play with the "start as minor civs," "barbarian civ," and "barbarian world" options...on immortal difficulty. You start at war with everyone, and before you can make peace, you've got to tech to writing, and they've got to tech to writing, AND you usually either need a larger power than them (hard to do), or have had success in warring against them in order to convince them to make peace without giving away a city or something ridiculous like that.

Then, on top of that, you've got barbarian civs popping up starting as early as 2500-2000 B.C., usually with a nice stack of axes, spears, and chariots. Dealing with these spawn rushes tends to give me innumerable "Oh ...how will I survive this?" moments when I see that 10-unit stack come into view. Early city placement becomes critical. Hilltop archers, hilltop archers, hilltop archers ftw!

I should really write up a walkthrough with screenshots of one of these games, maybe in the main forum, just to show how ridiculous it is. In this game I'm playing as Montezuma right now on immortal, which I might actually win, I've already gotten 3 great generals before 1000 B.C. Probably killed over a hundred units. My build order was worker, worker, stonehenge, warrior, settler, warrior, settler, barracks, and then just nonstop jaguars. Built 45 so far. Lost 27. Have 18 currently, most of which are highly promoted by this point. And mind you, this is at 1000 B.C.

The nice thing about these game options, though, is that they slow down the AI tech rate too since they are all warring against each other at the start too. So if you can survive the early game, you can usually emerge from the B.C.s with a competitive tech situation. I think I actually might win this particular game, which would be my first victory on immortal ever.

Edit: I should also mention that I've already had to deal with a revolution. I ended up conquering a barb city with all those jaguars, and the city was kinda far away, and it revolted on me. I just chose to peacefully let it secede. Later, one of the minor civs took the city with its spawn rush stack, weakening their stack in the process, and I was able to take the city back. Crazy game so far.

 

[Spirictum]

Nice to find a post about this. I'm used to play LoR mod for a long time already, since I still played on Noble. Time passed (a long time indeed) and I tamed Noble, Prince, Monarch and Emperor. I started playing on Immortal and it's a nightmare, but as all difficulties it needed to have some flaws that could be exploited.

The only thing I learned from my experience with Immortal was the "Shield Strategy". I'm not used to discuss strategies here on the forum (only on RFC Europe), so it may not be anything new to some, but it was for me:

The Shield Strategy is the placement of military units (one per tile is more then enough) making a shield around city tiles (only the city itself, not its workable tiles). If you can remove all "clean paths" to your city tiles (making it necessary for your enemy to attack a unit of yours to clear the path) the enemy will suddenly ignore your existence forever (or at least until something changes this situation, never truly tried to see up to when its still possible).

Against the Barbs it's 100% flawless strategy to make them stop targeting you forever. Against AIs it seems to work flawlessly too, but as time passes I tend to put more troops to be sure they wont try to break it, so I'm not sure if it succeeds with a single unit per tile forever.

But as perfect as it seems, if you didn't start on an appropriate place (with narrow passes to use few units) it's almost as bad as a minor spawning at your side: you will need lots of units to make it possible, and as you grow you will probably need more. Planet Generator 068 usually give the best maps for this strategy, but Perfect World 2 (my favorite) usually is the worst for it.

I convinced 3 friends to play CIV BtS, 2 of them were directly introduced to LoR 0.9.8, they've never seen original BtS. As we started playing together on MP we discovered it was a lot easier then Single games. So why not advancing on the difficulty? It was at that time that we entered on Immortal, and now we do it on Deity.

If you thought Immortal was a nightmare, Deity is a Total Chaos Unfair Battlefield of Doom, and we suffered the consequences, try after try, until something popped from a game we are still playing. As any difficulty, it needed to have a flaw, and we discovered it (when I say flaw it's not related to difficulty itself, but as most flaws get corrected when you advance in difficulty, new, harder and more sophisticated flaws need to be discovered). The shield still worked nicely, but on Deity spawns are even larger and have Swordsmen, and barbs come as soon as ~3500 AD. If you intend to expand, a nice frontier guard is a lot better then a full deployed shield of units, but on deity who knows what you will find if you stop the shield.

But what we discovered changed everything. The next strategy is to use the revolution feature against the AI. With creative leaders it's even easier. Make a second city, put a lot of culture on it (or at least be sure your capital border consumes its tile) and pray the minor is not a creative leader. How farther of their capital better, but not too far, or they will destroy it instead of capture. It's best to use it against a minor right beside you. He will come, and you will be ready to give your second city and garrison your capital at all cost. Soon the revolution comes, and when it does you are graced with settlers, GGs, lots of swordsman, axeman, spearman, chariot, archers and anything your enemy has in good number. And suddenly your unit cost goes to 0, as you are now able to have 20 or more units payed by the revolution itself. It decreases by turn, but a new revolution makes it go up. Now you are free to let your capital make buildings or wonder, the barbs usually prefere to get the city they got from you (or at least the thee times I used this strategy it worked like that), and if not just make the Great Wall anyways, the best wonder to combine with this. Done, now you are so unfair as the AI on deity.

So Rev DCM on deity is the Final Fatal Doom of Terror, but even then some strategies will arise to use the engine against itself. Who knows which more are there to be found, that's why I love this game, and LoR with the Rev DCM making it a lot better.