Any tips for winning on Deity?

[kitfox]

So I've been putting a lot of hours into playing community patch on deity setting and I keep getting my butt kicked time after time. It seems so promising in the beginning and you feel like you're making progress - in the medieval and renaissance I can even take a few cities if I'm playing warmonger. But then around late renaissance/early industrial I keep hitting a wall where I just can't keep up. The AI has such huge output that simply keeping the hoards from sweeping over your boarders is about all you can do.

I've tried playing both passively and aggressively. Even if I focus on science, I'm still trailing the leader by about 10 in the early industrial. Even if I focus on taking cities, I can usually only get one or two before the AIs have so much production that my armies are outnumbered 4 to 1 with their units having 4 times as many promotions too. I only managed to get to the space race once, and that was playing as Korea (pangea/standard map/epic speed, progress/statecraft/rationalism/ordrer). Although that win could simply be because most of my border was with Morocco, I was super friendly with them and they never bothered attacking me.

Even getting to the industrial era seems to rely a lot on luck - having enough decent land to settle your first cities, having a production boosting starting resource, not spawning near an aggressive neighbor and crossing your fingers and hoping that an AI on the other side of the world does not start consuming everything.

Browsing this forum, you see occasional references to people winning on deity. I was wondering if anyone might share any tips for winning deity with any play style - passive or aggressive, tall or wide, conquest, science, culture or diplomatic win conditions.

(Also, does the designer of the mod expect you to pick certain starting conditions? Should I be picking something other than standard speed/ standard map size/pangea?)

 

[Favorius]

I moved to deity after winning in emperor became easy for me. Can you win emperor easily?

 

[kitfox]

I haven't tried emperor in a long time.

 

[stii]

I think the mod is designed around standard/standard and while the naval AI is ok I do think pangea is the best map.

I only play deity and I'm pretty confident I can win off almost any start/civ except the most terrible possible. A lot of this is rather subjective and while practise helps a lot isn't very clear it is still true. Some civs and starts are a lot better than other so the simplest thing to do is to pick one of the best civs (celts/assyrian/netherlands) with a good start and see if you can win win that first.

VP is quite a bit harder than normal civ but quite a lot of that is changing how the game works. In normal civ food-big cites produce loads of science and that is all the really matters. In VP more people doesn't really do very much so you are better off running lots of science/culture specialists reasonably early. A tradition capital in particular should be running an almost half specialists.

The AI does get a lot of advantage but it is also rather predictable both in terms of tech and combat. It will generally techs in the same rough order and it prefers the top of the tech tree. This means being on techs doesn't matter a much as long as you have the military techs. At the most extreme end being ten techs behind doesn't matter if you have up to stealth bombers because there isn't anything past that. You can use this to do timing attacks when you hit certain military techs, the AI won't upgrade anywhere near as much as a human. It will also ram its units into your defensive positions endless if you just wait and shoot them up as they come.

I like to open tradition as early game aggression is rather situational. open pottery so you can always grow to pop4 before taking the 2 free pop from tradition and then get two settlers out after you build monument/shrine and granary if you needed it. Try to block off enough space for 5 cities, but 4 is acceptable. The AI will complain if you settle too near but they are fine as long as you only do it once per player, you can avoid even this a bit by settling two cities at the same time. They might still attack you but you can at least try and zone their cities by leaving a 5-6 title gap between you so they can't found that close. Fill out the rest of your cities depending on how likely the AI is to take them. Aggressive Ai might attack but an archer is often enough as the early armies are so weak, a bit later they will have more but walls stop pretty much anyway.

Scout and try and find everyone, this lets you work out which techs they AI does and doesn't have, at least roughly. It is hard to get early wonders but you often don't have much else to do so trying for petra/mausoleum/terrcotta/partheon/sankore is fine even if you don't get them very often. The AI doesn't like the terracotta tech much so sometimes you will be first to it if you make a bit of an effort and don't need other techs outside that path. You can run lots of specialists while building settlers at no cost so oyu can get an engineer pretty quickly, using that on partheon/sankore times out reasonably well. You should be able to get something.

Set up a defensive position and just tech, you can't really attack with just crossbows so you need to goto metallurgy to be able to go on the offensive. You can pretty much always get to it first and even if you don't someone you border won't have it. Pre-build crossbows/knights and save gold to upgrade everything then pick a victim. Weakest possible with a capital on your border is ideal. You don't want to take a bunch of cities you want to take 1-2 and make them your vassal. Then repeat this on the next player and suddenly you have a huge boost to science/culture and a powerful army.

Wars can be very grind but they don't have infinite units and they certainly can't use all of them at once if you have 25 and they 100 it is still fine because they simple can't get to you with that many. Having honor/orders/terracotta helps a lot with this as at least you are getting something from killing their endless waves. Pull any damaged units back right away and cycle fresh units in, you should be rarely losing any units and once they get to l4 and get +1 range it becomes even easier to grind through. My armies are mostly archer type units with a few melee units to buffer.