Babylon!

[crdvis16]

Nebuchadnezzar II

Ingenuity
Receive a free Great Scientist when you discover Writing. Great Scientists are earned 50% faster than normal. Gold investments in Buildings reduce their Production cost by an additional 15%.

Bowman, replaces the Composite Bowman.
Special traits:
Has more Combat Strength (12 vs. 11) and Ranged Combat Strength (15 vs. 13). Obsoletes at Metallurgy rather than Machinery.

Special abilities:
Starts with the Indirect Fire (-10% Ranged Combat Strength and allows ranged attacks to fire over obstacles provided that at least one friendly Unit can see the target) promotion.

Walls of Babylon, replaces the standard Walls.
Special traits:
Increases the City's Defense by 15 (up from 10) and the HP of the City by 75 (up from 50). Provides +1 Science. Has 1 Scientist Specialist slot. Scientist Specialists in this City generate +2 Gold.

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To me, Babylon is an ideal civ for going progress/wide into a turtling/defensive science victory. Although I’m sure they could flourish going on the offensive or making use of tradition and going tall, I think every part of their kit lends itself to wide/defense. All in all, the main “problems” when going progress are:

1. How do you generate early science for the purpose of gaining culture via Progress’s opening ability?
2. How do you justify settling widely and ensuring those numerous cities are a net positive rather than a drag on you either because of happiness, diplomacy, or the penalties to science/culture/tourism?
3. How do you defend yourself when your land grabbing attracts hostility?

I think Babylon’s kit addresses each of these concerns rather well:

-Free scientist at writing is progress friendly, where early science and tech discovery begets culture.

-+50% great scientist rate (in all cities) favors wide and working scientist slots in as many cities as possible. This increase in scientist rate means that even if the capital has a few extra great person rate increasing bonuses (National monument or various wonders) the secondary cities are still able to produce scientists as well. Progress is best positioned to make sure your secondary cities can support working those specialists and maximizing your science. It obviously also lends itself greatly toward a science victory where the #1 priority is to make sure you are ahead of the competition in tech.

-Gold investments in buildings reducing production by an additional 15% can stack with Forbidden palace and create a situation where converting gold into production is much more efficient for a progress Babylon than arguably any other civ (maybe America could also make that claim?). I’m a fan of stacking bonuses like this to see how much I can lean into them even if they sometimes lead to diminishing returns- I just think it’s fun.

-Bowman UU with indirect fire lends itself more toward defense than other offensive leaning UUs IMO. Ranged units are ideally used with terrain advantages to kill enemy units while staying safe from retaliation and those terrain advantages are most readily found on defense at pre-planned locations. Indirect fire increases the ease with which you can shoot invaders without retaliation.

-Walls of babylon is obviously a defensive leaning UB, and I find that defensive bonuses work best when used by civs that land grab and then hold their possessions via defense (similar logic for Shoshone, Ethiopia, and Morocco’s kits). The extra scientist slot again makes it even easier for secondary cities to contribute to the creation of great scientists so using progress to hopefully ensure our secondary cities are healthy enough to work those slots is ideal. Also, the early science of course benefits progress’s main culture engine.

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Early Game:

My priorities early game will be to secure a good number of city locations (at least like 6+ to justify Progress), secure a religion, secure some early science to boost Progress culture, and build a military early enough to ward off the likely DoWs I will receive. That’s a lot of priorities all at once so I will have to weigh them as the situation demands.

Walls of Babylon are key to at least two of those objectives- if I get them up early enough my city by itself can probably hold off early invasions without a garrison at all and they provide science to keep my culture chugging. My early build order for secondary cities that are near potentially aggressive neighbors might be shrine->walls. This visibly leaves out the early monument but it might be justifiable in this circumstance- the main issue I foresee would be that my borders won’t grow very fast and grab good nearby tiles or that my culture may lag slightly.

Mid-Late Game:

Science victories seem fairly straight-forward at first glance- just get a tech lead by prioritizing science and you’re done. For Babylon that equates to being able to work lots of scientists slots in his wide empire. However, the main problem is that the other victory conditions can all happen faster than the typical science victory so you also have the secondary objective of making sure others don’t win, or at least slowing them down enough to give yourself a chance.

This means that you must be aware of the state of the game, especially when it comes to a tourism run away or someone racking up votes in the WC. This is particularly difficult if you’re planning to play peacefully/defensive- you’re sort of giving up the most direct tool you have for stopping someone else from winning (warfare). I think it’s important from early on to try to figure out who the culture/tourism run away might be and find ways to slow their tourism generation down and similarly find ways to thwart diplomatic civs from gaining dominance over the WC. There are many tools available to those ends:

1. Using diplomacy to isolate competitors via denouncement/friend status and even bribing wars. Many of the strongest Tourism/Diplo civs have fairly weak early/mid games and might fall victim to a useful warmonger
   
   
2. Minimizing the positive tourism modifiers and maximizing the negative ones for tourism centered civs. Trade routes, open borders, shared religion, etc. Don’t allow those modifiers to you from a tourism heavy civ or to another civ that has a large pool of culture (like a warmonger on a conquering spree).
   
   
3. Make an effort to secure at least your nearby CS allies and create embassies when possible. The WC has lots of ways to slow down diplo/tourism civs and early on it is much easier to do so but you really need to be in a position to make proposals. Your window for crippling a Germany or Austria is fairly short in the early game before their bonuses start giving them too much of a lead in votes but it is certainly possible to get sanctions/decolonization type proposals past even if they have a lot of votes already.

 

[Favorius]

Industry policy that gives an extra %10 discount on investment stacks perfectly with Babylon. Getting buildings faster also feeds progress policy that gives food/culture on building completion.

Still I am not a progress/wide fanboy as I used to be, I would open with tradition. (Is tradition now too good?)

 

[crdvis16]

Industry policy that gives an extra %10 discount on investment stacks perfectly with Babylon. Getting buildings faster also feeds progress policy that gives food/culture on building completion.

Still I am not a progress/wide fanboy as I used to be, I would open with tradition. (Is tradition now too good?)

It's just tough to skip Rationalism for Industry if you're going for a science victory, but it would be fun to see how well you could stack the discounts.

I tried Tradition Babylon a while ago and didn't have great success, though if you read my playthrough using the above strategy I'm not successful with Progress either

 

[Favorius]

It's just tough to skip Rationalism for Industry if you're going for a science victory, but it would be fun to see how well you could stack the discounts.

I tried Tradition Babylon a while ago and didn't have great success, though if you read my playthrough using the above strategy I'm not successful with Progress either

Well, after hundreds of hours in emperor, I still do not dare to play deity.

 

[Legen]

It's just tough to skip Rationalism for Industry if you're going for a science victory, but it would be fun to see how well you could stack the discounts.

I tried Tradition Babylon a while ago and didn't have great success, though if you read my playthrough using the above strategy I'm not successful with Progress either

I find Progress -> Industry tends to run out of buildings in the lategame even with civs that lack gold/production bonuses. Babylon would likely make it overkill.

Rationalism's weakness is gold/production output, which Babylon should be able to cover with its UA and the extra gold from scientists on its UB. In fact, the UA's investment part had the intent of covering Babylon's infrastructure being unable to keep up with its fast science back then.

 

[CrazyG]

I've found that the extra scientists were weaker than I expected, but the bonus to investment was much stronger than it seems on paper.

 

[azum4roll]

Running out of buildings means you can afford to spam military/diplomatic units without sacrificing infrastructure. More production is never a bad thing.

 

[Stalker0]

Running out of buildings means you can afford to spam military/diplomatic units without sacrificing infrastructure. More production is never a bad thing.

Never a bad thing true...but worth the loss of all that rationalism science? That’s the question.

I see rationalism Babylon as cake and eat it too, all the rationalism benefits but I get industry esque bonuses as well

 

[pineappledan]

I still don’t like the +2 on scientists myself... Babylon’s UA makes their gold investment 30% more efficient, they don’t need to generate more gold too. It seems more interesting for a design perspective if it is entirely up to the player to maximize gold generation using standard methods, rather than also making science buildings a source of gold too

I know Walls if Babylon needed some love, but I would have preferred +1 or +2 for scientists, or some other bonus for the walls of Babylon. Maybe +5 on citizen birth, like a mini goddess of love in reference to the Ishtar Gates?

 

[Stalker0]

I don't get the need to buff the Walls. They are stronger walls than normal walls, and then later on you get an extra scientist slot to work. Just because you can't work the slot right away doesn't make it useless. Its just a building that provides a part of its benefit early, and more of its benefit later.

 

[CrazyG]

Babylon's walls are thrown off by the current specialist happiness, that should be resolved independently of Babylon.

I think the best way to view the walls is you build them instead of a library, meaning you finish all other buildings earlier. As odd as it sounds, you can even skip writing for a while to try and get gold/production techs earlier (like currency) and possibly go for economic wonders, such as Colossus. After you get ahead in buildings, you can pursue libraries and start working science, doing it early game is usually the wrong decision.

You should view the scientists as a late game boost, and your win condition as flexible. Strong infrastructure plays well into diplomatic or cultural victories, and both of these appreciate extra science. A specific problem of going for science is that if you race Korea you will lose nine times out of ten. Also happiness can be very difficult that late in the game, depending on what patch you play.

 

[pineappledan]

Walls of babylon got that boost at time when walls didn’t really do anything if they weren’t on a border city. Walls were given +1 city strike range and -5% empire size modifier since then, so walls are far more necessary than they were. There was a lot of negative emotion towards the WoB because it felt like 110 for +1 and a specialist you may or may not use, and that no one else felt compelled to build. Like, you were going to get a granary in every city anyways, so Mongolia’s Ger felt like a great bonus while WoB felt like a chore.

 

[crdvis16]

WoB felt like an ok UB in my game. I purposefully settled provocatively such that walls in many of my cities were fairly high priority.

I will note that the purchasing strength part of the UA coupled with Forbidden Palace did not make gold overly plentiful for me. In the mid-game I felt fairly rich and rush built a lot of buildings catching my infrastructure up well. That lasted for like, 50 turns or so. After that gold felt really sparse and I was hardly rush-building in favor of upgrading my decently promoted bowmen line through the ages. I did not have enough gold for both.