The Chinese UHV game is RFC/DoC in microcosm. A very large microcosm, as it runs from 2070 BC until AD 1800. But with that kind of length and breadth, it doesn't challenge you to be extra good at one or two aspects of the game. It challenges you to be good and skilled at the whole thing.
Launch a Chinese UHV game if you want to learn or practice every trick in the RFC/DoC/Civ IV playbook.
Unlike many UHV games, there is no single strategy or box of tactics to use as China. How you play and win is up to you. That doesn't mean that any old strategy will work, though. The Chinese UHV game is very hard, at least at Normal speeds. (Consensus is that it's easier at Marathon.) So if you're going to tackle it, it helps to know what you will be facing, and what you need to be concentrating on.
UHV Conditions
1. Build two Confucian Guozijians and two Taoist Gongs by Turn 220.
2. Be the first to discover Compass, Paper, Gunpowder, and Printing.
3. Complete four Golden Ages by Turn 355.
All three of these goals pull in different directions. The first pushes you to go wide, for you will have to control 8 cities in order to accomplish it. The second pushes you to go tall, because you will need lots of science and an economy to support it. The third, depending on your strategy for handling the first two, complicates those goals by forcing you to generate and hoard Great People.
In lieu of a specific strategy, here are some of the things to watch out for as you're puzzling out your solution to the UHV game:
Barbarians
Starting on or a little after Turn 100, barbarians will start to trouble you. They will start small—Warriors on your north and northwestern frontiers. These can be easily handled with Chariots or Light Swordsmen.
On or after Turn 125, Light Swordsmen will start to infiltrate from the Tibetan plateau. They will move through wooded hills, so they will be a challenge to defeat in an attack. Fortunately, that plateau has only two exits, and these can be bottled up with Swordsmen or Chu-Ko-Nus. Barbarian Elephants will also show up in the jungles of northern Indochina. A city here with two Spearmen will render these a mere nuisance.
On or around Turn 140 you will start getting stacks of Horse Archers in the north and northwest, ramping up in strength until you are dealing with Keshiks. These will hit your northern cities, and if there is a gap between these cities they will pour through to devastate your inner empire. The Great Wall can degrade their strength, but you can keep them out by developing two or three strong cities in the north. Wall these cities and defend them with one or two CKNs, and the barbs won't even be a bother. (One CKN is almost always enough, but you might want to keep an extra unit inside these cities as insurance against ludicrously awful combat rolls.) If you develop a cavalry force, you can meet them before they even get to your cities.
Mongols
The northern attacks will culminate on Turn 240 with the greatest attack of them all, when the Mongols spawn with an enormous stack of Keshiks and Bombards. Sometimes the Mongols will spawn at peace with you, but usually they declare war. You need to be ready for them.
Their unique power—the ability to terrify cities into disorder—negates the possibility of a defensive strategy. You must meet them with an army. A mix of 10 to 12 Lancers and 10 to 12 Firelancers will do it. (An army that size might even be overkill, but with the Mongols you don't want to take chances.) Prepare for them by building a road into the northwestern desert, then move out to meet them on flat terrain with Firelancers that have been upgraded at least to Combat I and Lancers with at least Flanking I. Attack their stack first with the Firelancers, which cause collateral damage, then with the Lancers. You'll be lucky if a third of your Firelancers survive, but they will have weakened the Mongol stack enough that each of your Lancers will have an 85% to 90% chance of victory in the subsequent attacks.
Unless you have a stack of 20+ Lancers, you are unlikely to kill the entire Mongol stack in that one battle, but it will be so damaged that in subsequent turns you can mop it up.
Tech rivals
Barbs and Mongols aren't the only rivals to worry about. Rivals in other parts of the world will fight you hard for the techs you need for the second UHV condition.
Compass and Paper are the first you will be able to research, and you should concentrate on them. Watch out for the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Persians, and the Vikings, who will also chase them. If you have not secured those two techs by Turn 180, there's an excellent chance someone will beat you to them.
Gunpowder should be the third tech to secure, not only for itself but for the Firelancers it lets you build. (And on the way to Gunpowder you will research Feudalism, which you need to build Lancers.) Don't delay research on Printing after that. But if you got the other three techs first, you are much more likely than not to secure Printing as well.
City Placement
There is no best placement of cities in China. (Though there are some sub-optimal locations: Avoid Qingdao/Shanghai on the northeast coast, across from Korea; there are no resources there that can't be captured by other cities.) There are some standard city placements, though.
* Chang'an at your starting location is a powerful production city.
* Luoyang on the plains tile west of the Deer can scoop up massive food and luxury resources to make a super-city, and you don't need Alloys for chopping in order to secure most of the food.
* Kunming in the south, 1 east of the Gold, has good resources and a defensible location once you pop the borders out.
* Hangzhou (coastal city, north of Sugar) has good food and fair production, as does a city down Hong-Kong way on the south coast, where there is Copper, Bananas, and seafood.
* Beijing (coastal tile west of Fish) is another standard city, though it can feel surprisingly constrained, considering the resources nearby.
Where to found the other two cities? The choice is yours, but here are some options:
A barbarian city (Simiyan-hoton) will auto-found northeast of Beijing, and you can conquer it for one of your cites. Alternately, if you build an Ancestor Shrine first thing in Beijing (and make Beijing an early city) you can pre-empt Simiyan-hoton and build your own Manchurian city in another location.
Sanshan, 1 tile SW of the Korean Iron, is another reasonable spot, as it will capture Iron and Wheat in its BFC, though it will get squeezed from the south by Hanseong, and by Simiyan-hoton from the west if that city is also in play.
Personally, I like to found Datong on the Incense in the northwest. It blocks barbs streaming in from the northwest, and with Walls and 2 CKNs it is impregnable behind its river crossing, and is a good staging area for striking the Mongols in the northern deserts. With access to Beijing's pig and to an Oasis in the west, it can also grow to size 6, which is not nothing even if it's not impressive, and it can work the Silk tile, freeing up Beijing to concentrate elsewhere.
Techs
Obviously you will have to research a ton of techs in order to meet your UHV goals, but here are the key ones to aim for. The order you research them in will depend upon your particular strategy:
* Writing: For building the Taixue, which can hire three scientists and a statesman.
* Calendar/Alloys: For chopping forests and developing Plantations.
* Currency: For boosting your economy with Merchant Trade and Marketplaces.
* Architecture: For building the cathedrals.
* Ethics: For the Monasticism civic, which will boost your Great Person production.
Other worthwhile techs include Blooming (for Iron and Swordsmen); Artisanry (for CKNs); Generalship and Nobility (for building up and sustaining an army); Literature (for tech trading and the Caste civic). The two techs that found Confucianism and Taoism (Contract and Aesthetics) are of course necessary, but they need not be high priorities. Confucianism founds in China when anyone discovers Contract, and the Phoenicians like to get Contract early. Aesthetics (which founds Taoism) you will get while beelining Architecture, and you will still probably be spreading Confucianism and building Confucian temples while aiming for Architecture.
Note that you can save some on building Confucian Miaos by building Ancestral Shrines early, and switching to Confucianism as soon as it founds. In any cities it spreads to after that, the Ancestral Shrine will be converted into a Miao.
Golden Ages
There are three ways to trigger a Golden Age in time for the Chinese victory: By capturing the first two UHV conditions; by building the Taj Mahal; and by sacrificing Great People. You will get a Golden Age the first way. What about the other two?
To get three Golden Ages with Great People, you have to generate nine Great People of diverse types. This is doable if you build enough Wonders and hire enough specialists, but it means that you can't use the Great People you generate to improve your economy or speed your tech rate. For this and other reasons (it is tricky to generate the right diversity of Great People, for one) it makes sense to build the Taj Mahal. To do this, though, Islam must be present in the city that builds the Taj, and Islam must also be your state religion. This will probably entail a short war (at a minimum) in order to conquer an Islamic city. Central Asia and Manila would be places to look. This will also be a late move in the UHV game, because the Taj requires the Urban Planning technology.
Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
The following list is far from exhaustive, and I give them in no particular order.
1. China has great food production, and its unique power means that its cities grow fast. Despotism is a great civic for such a civilization, for the cities can quickly rebound from whipping. OTOH, such a tactic can play merry hell if you're running a specialist economy.
2. Chopping forests will give your cities a temporary boost to production and will also clear luxuries for development. But China is born in a technological dead zone (credit Enyavar for the metaphor) with little that is worth building early on. Hence, a dilemma. Do you chop early, with little worth chopping for while developing the landscape? Or do you delay economic development until there is something worth investing the chopped hammers in? Your choice, and I don't envy you.
3. Go wide early, or go tall early? If you build as many as four cities early, in locations that support specialists, you can get your science by hiring 5 to 9 to 12 scientists, even as your research rate falls to 30% or lower. Or you can restrict yourself to two cities early on, building them up while keeping your research rate relatively high. Each tactic has its risks. If you go wide early, you risk running your economy aground. If you delay, you risk waiting too long to build the rest of your cities, and failing to build the temples and cathedrals in time.
4. Tech trading is a must for China. Build a unit early and send it down to India and through to the Middle East; build a road to India too, to ensure a trade connection. You will find India, Persia, Greece and the others to be relatively open to tech trading (once you or they have Literature). Build a second unit if your first unit is not able to keep you in constant contact with all the other civs. If you are good and lucky, your units can survive into the Byzantine era and then move west to contact Europe.
5. The Great Wall is good for degrading barb units, but good city placement in the north and the placement of strong defensive units on the hills outside Tibet mean that you can do without it if your priorities are elsewhere. The Terracotta Army is mostly useful for the buff it gives to military production. If you build the TA in Chang'an, and use a saved-up Great General to build the Military Academy there, you can churn out a Lancer once every three turns after getting the landscape improved.
6. To speed generation of Great People, run the Monasticism civic and research Statecraft for the Civic Square building. If using the Taj Mahal strategy, research Urban Planning and look for Muslim cities in Central Asia and Manila if Islam has not already spread to any Chinese cities.
See this thread in the main forum for real-time discussion about the Chinese UHV game. Thanks to BaneFire, Enyavar, and others for comments and suggestions that I reference in this post.
Launch a Chinese UHV game if you want to learn or practice every trick in the RFC/DoC/Civ IV playbook.
Unlike many UHV games, there is no single strategy or box of tactics to use as China. How you play and win is up to you. That doesn't mean that any old strategy will work, though. The Chinese UHV game is very hard, at least at Normal speeds. (Consensus is that it's easier at Marathon.) So if you're going to tackle it, it helps to know what you will be facing, and what you need to be concentrating on.
UHV Conditions
1. Build two Confucian Guozijians and two Taoist Gongs by Turn 220.
2. Be the first to discover Compass, Paper, Gunpowder, and Printing.
3. Complete four Golden Ages by Turn 355.
All three of these goals pull in different directions. The first pushes you to go wide, for you will have to control 8 cities in order to accomplish it. The second pushes you to go tall, because you will need lots of science and an economy to support it. The third, depending on your strategy for handling the first two, complicates those goals by forcing you to generate and hoard Great People.
In lieu of a specific strategy, here are some of the things to watch out for as you're puzzling out your solution to the UHV game:
Barbarians
Starting on or a little after Turn 100, barbarians will start to trouble you. They will start small—Warriors on your north and northwestern frontiers. These can be easily handled with Chariots or Light Swordsmen.
On or after Turn 125, Light Swordsmen will start to infiltrate from the Tibetan plateau. They will move through wooded hills, so they will be a challenge to defeat in an attack. Fortunately, that plateau has only two exits, and these can be bottled up with Swordsmen or Chu-Ko-Nus. Barbarian Elephants will also show up in the jungles of northern Indochina. A city here with two Spearmen will render these a mere nuisance.
On or around Turn 140 you will start getting stacks of Horse Archers in the north and northwest, ramping up in strength until you are dealing with Keshiks. These will hit your northern cities, and if there is a gap between these cities they will pour through to devastate your inner empire. The Great Wall can degrade their strength, but you can keep them out by developing two or three strong cities in the north. Wall these cities and defend them with one or two CKNs, and the barbs won't even be a bother. (One CKN is almost always enough, but you might want to keep an extra unit inside these cities as insurance against ludicrously awful combat rolls.) If you develop a cavalry force, you can meet them before they even get to your cities.
Mongols
The northern attacks will culminate on Turn 240 with the greatest attack of them all, when the Mongols spawn with an enormous stack of Keshiks and Bombards. Sometimes the Mongols will spawn at peace with you, but usually they declare war. You need to be ready for them.
Their unique power—the ability to terrify cities into disorder—negates the possibility of a defensive strategy. You must meet them with an army. A mix of 10 to 12 Lancers and 10 to 12 Firelancers will do it. (An army that size might even be overkill, but with the Mongols you don't want to take chances.) Prepare for them by building a road into the northwestern desert, then move out to meet them on flat terrain with Firelancers that have been upgraded at least to Combat I and Lancers with at least Flanking I. Attack their stack first with the Firelancers, which cause collateral damage, then with the Lancers. You'll be lucky if a third of your Firelancers survive, but they will have weakened the Mongol stack enough that each of your Lancers will have an 85% to 90% chance of victory in the subsequent attacks.
Unless you have a stack of 20+ Lancers, you are unlikely to kill the entire Mongol stack in that one battle, but it will be so damaged that in subsequent turns you can mop it up.
Tech rivals
Barbs and Mongols aren't the only rivals to worry about. Rivals in other parts of the world will fight you hard for the techs you need for the second UHV condition.
Compass and Paper are the first you will be able to research, and you should concentrate on them. Watch out for the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Persians, and the Vikings, who will also chase them. If you have not secured those two techs by Turn 180, there's an excellent chance someone will beat you to them.
Gunpowder should be the third tech to secure, not only for itself but for the Firelancers it lets you build. (And on the way to Gunpowder you will research Feudalism, which you need to build Lancers.) Don't delay research on Printing after that. But if you got the other three techs first, you are much more likely than not to secure Printing as well.
City Placement
There is no best placement of cities in China. (Though there are some sub-optimal locations: Avoid Qingdao/Shanghai on the northeast coast, across from Korea; there are no resources there that can't be captured by other cities.) There are some standard city placements, though.
* Chang'an at your starting location is a powerful production city.
* Luoyang on the plains tile west of the Deer can scoop up massive food and luxury resources to make a super-city, and you don't need Alloys for chopping in order to secure most of the food.
* Kunming in the south, 1 east of the Gold, has good resources and a defensible location once you pop the borders out.
* Hangzhou (coastal city, north of Sugar) has good food and fair production, as does a city down Hong-Kong way on the south coast, where there is Copper, Bananas, and seafood.
* Beijing (coastal tile west of Fish) is another standard city, though it can feel surprisingly constrained, considering the resources nearby.
Where to found the other two cities? The choice is yours, but here are some options:
A barbarian city (Simiyan-hoton) will auto-found northeast of Beijing, and you can conquer it for one of your cites. Alternately, if you build an Ancestor Shrine first thing in Beijing (and make Beijing an early city) you can pre-empt Simiyan-hoton and build your own Manchurian city in another location.
Sanshan, 1 tile SW of the Korean Iron, is another reasonable spot, as it will capture Iron and Wheat in its BFC, though it will get squeezed from the south by Hanseong, and by Simiyan-hoton from the west if that city is also in play.
Personally, I like to found Datong on the Incense in the northwest. It blocks barbs streaming in from the northwest, and with Walls and 2 CKNs it is impregnable behind its river crossing, and is a good staging area for striking the Mongols in the northern deserts. With access to Beijing's pig and to an Oasis in the west, it can also grow to size 6, which is not nothing even if it's not impressive, and it can work the Silk tile, freeing up Beijing to concentrate elsewhere.
Techs
Obviously you will have to research a ton of techs in order to meet your UHV goals, but here are the key ones to aim for. The order you research them in will depend upon your particular strategy:
* Writing: For building the Taixue, which can hire three scientists and a statesman.
* Calendar/Alloys: For chopping forests and developing Plantations.
* Currency: For boosting your economy with Merchant Trade and Marketplaces.
* Architecture: For building the cathedrals.
* Ethics: For the Monasticism civic, which will boost your Great Person production.
Other worthwhile techs include Blooming (for Iron and Swordsmen); Artisanry (for CKNs); Generalship and Nobility (for building up and sustaining an army); Literature (for tech trading and the Caste civic). The two techs that found Confucianism and Taoism (Contract and Aesthetics) are of course necessary, but they need not be high priorities. Confucianism founds in China when anyone discovers Contract, and the Phoenicians like to get Contract early. Aesthetics (which founds Taoism) you will get while beelining Architecture, and you will still probably be spreading Confucianism and building Confucian temples while aiming for Architecture.
Note that you can save some on building Confucian Miaos by building Ancestral Shrines early, and switching to Confucianism as soon as it founds. In any cities it spreads to after that, the Ancestral Shrine will be converted into a Miao.
Golden Ages
There are three ways to trigger a Golden Age in time for the Chinese victory: By capturing the first two UHV conditions; by building the Taj Mahal; and by sacrificing Great People. You will get a Golden Age the first way. What about the other two?
To get three Golden Ages with Great People, you have to generate nine Great People of diverse types. This is doable if you build enough Wonders and hire enough specialists, but it means that you can't use the Great People you generate to improve your economy or speed your tech rate. For this and other reasons (it is tricky to generate the right diversity of Great People, for one) it makes sense to build the Taj Mahal. To do this, though, Islam must be present in the city that builds the Taj, and Islam must also be your state religion. This will probably entail a short war (at a minimum) in order to conquer an Islamic city. Central Asia and Manila would be places to look. This will also be a late move in the UHV game, because the Taj requires the Urban Planning technology.
Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
The following list is far from exhaustive, and I give them in no particular order.
1. China has great food production, and its unique power means that its cities grow fast. Despotism is a great civic for such a civilization, for the cities can quickly rebound from whipping. OTOH, such a tactic can play merry hell if you're running a specialist economy.
2. Chopping forests will give your cities a temporary boost to production and will also clear luxuries for development. But China is born in a technological dead zone (credit Enyavar for the metaphor) with little that is worth building early on. Hence, a dilemma. Do you chop early, with little worth chopping for while developing the landscape? Or do you delay economic development until there is something worth investing the chopped hammers in? Your choice, and I don't envy you.
3. Go wide early, or go tall early? If you build as many as four cities early, in locations that support specialists, you can get your science by hiring 5 to 9 to 12 scientists, even as your research rate falls to 30% or lower. Or you can restrict yourself to two cities early on, building them up while keeping your research rate relatively high. Each tactic has its risks. If you go wide early, you risk running your economy aground. If you delay, you risk waiting too long to build the rest of your cities, and failing to build the temples and cathedrals in time.
4. Tech trading is a must for China. Build a unit early and send it down to India and through to the Middle East; build a road to India too, to ensure a trade connection. You will find India, Persia, Greece and the others to be relatively open to tech trading (once you or they have Literature). Build a second unit if your first unit is not able to keep you in constant contact with all the other civs. If you are good and lucky, your units can survive into the Byzantine era and then move west to contact Europe.
5. The Great Wall is good for degrading barb units, but good city placement in the north and the placement of strong defensive units on the hills outside Tibet mean that you can do without it if your priorities are elsewhere. The Terracotta Army is mostly useful for the buff it gives to military production. If you build the TA in Chang'an, and use a saved-up Great General to build the Military Academy there, you can churn out a Lancer once every three turns after getting the landscape improved.
6. To speed generation of Great People, run the Monasticism civic and research Statecraft for the Civic Square building. If using the Taj Mahal strategy, research Urban Planning and look for Muslim cities in Central Asia and Manila if Islam has not already spread to any Chinese cities.
See this thread in the main forum for real-time discussion about the Chinese UHV game. Thanks to BaneFire, Enyavar, and others for comments and suggestions that I reference in this post.
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