Anyone care to share their experiences using Harald on Deity?

[Forbiddentwo]

I want to shake up my game, and I got to wondering about whether or not there's any way to take advantage of his abilities in deity that won't amount to a near guaranteed failure or playing just like I would with a better different Civ.

Maybe if I contacted every city state on a continents map (or islands?) and focused on doing their quests so I can get at least 2-3 envoys at each? I could make use of that one social policy I never use that makes my first envoy count as two...

Has anyone made it work?

 

[Victoria]

Yup.
I even won a science with him.
I was on a large peninsula bit, so I concentrated on filling the area and going overseas.
However you have no hope of meeting CS first unless they were on an island... and they were not but that's not a big deal.
The secret of the double envoy card is to use it for a short civic a few times during the game.
Swap it in, get those envoys out, then swap it out.
In that game I think I had 12 cities and Carthage with about 30 trade routes... it was hard work.
The best thing about the game was a large plain hill area in the middle of the peninsula with a single mountain.
It was a long game and I had to push Kumasi to keep ahead of Kongo's cultural victory but with plenty of trade routes it was not a problem. Germany (why is it always Germany with me?) declared war on me which allowed me to bombard his spaceport to pieces.(stupid AI)
Spain was a surprising pain at sea but I had the admirals... lost my early ironclad to an early battleship, they just get so far ahead at deity.
I think I had about 120 envoys by the end of the game. I love Merchant Confederation, really helped in times of need.
The GOTM tips really helped me too. Love reading them, never play but like to read.

I mostly play lower tier civs

 

[Darkhart]

Sorry Victoria.... I know you'll hate this one.

PERMA-WAR!!!

Map:- Continents, island plates etc (your choice)
Size;- Huge
Level:- Deity
Speed;- Epic, Marathon (the longer the easier)
AI civs;- All

Begin with an arbitary radius, say 20 hexes from your capitol, (the smaller the radius, the harder the game). All this land is yours to do with as you wish, colonise, develop, etc. The only allowed cities outside of this are naval bases:- small one square islands, max pop ~4, for healing, patrol and naval interdiction. You can build harbours here.
You may Suze CS, and also Joint war.

Domination victory, with two over-riding criteria. Capture AND raze ONLY their capitals. Once you declare on an AI, you can never make peace.

The challenge here is NOT killing your opponents, but maintaining your own internal cohesiveness against war weariness and an ever growing list of enemies and threats. Can you maintain "Full Spectrum Dominance", plus technical and economic superiority in a world that hates you!

 

[EpicWestern]

I want to shake up my game, and I got to wondering about whether or not there's any way to take advantage of his abilities in deity that won't amount to a near guaranteed failure or playing just like I would with a better different Civ.

Stave church is great for religious victory type but obviously never worth getting otherwise. Berserker is IMO just mediocre for domination. Harald is just plain one of the weaker civs. The early ocean travel is his biggest plus, but not really worth centering an entire strategy over. Even on island maps, most of the time the islands are connected by shallow seas anyway. If you get open borders asap (sometimes you have to pay for it) you can scout much of the map without ocean travel anyway.

 

[liv]

I did not play the Vikings on Deity but the most important ability of their boats was to pillage. They can pillage land squares, steal workers and settlers open huts etc. In the very early game a few longboats could take a city if they can access it with two boats on the same turn. I crippled most of the civs early by pillaging every thing they had built on the coast

 

[greygamer]

If you get a Quadrireme barb units will often leave the camp when spotted giving the longship an easy plunder. The biggest thing for me was that melee naval units can heal in neutral territory