Babylonian Acoustics Policy Slingshot

[bhavv]

I got a nice high production start with marble and some food:



Its a standard game, not OCC at king difficulty, continents, epic speed if anyone wants to give it a go.

 

[bhavv]

Heres my current attempt, I expanded much more aggressively this time, building two settlers (one in the capital, then one in the second city), and rush buying another two to quickly fill in the brilliant city locations that I had. I have Civil Service and Acoustics at 750 BC.



I dont plan on building anymore cities, and hopefully his will be my first successful culture win. I'll need to rush buy a load of bowmen for defense next.

Elizabeth attacked with around 4 warriors, 2 spearmen, and 2 archers .....

I pwned them all with just two bowmen

The AI is that stupid.

 

[Siberic]

If I am correct, adding Chivalry as prerequisite for Acoustics will pretty much disable this slingshot. Even with Babylon.

 

[r_rolo1]

If I am correct, adding Chivalry as prerequisite for Acoustics will pretty much disable this slingshot. Even with Babylon.

Or Physics ... it would even make more RL sense

 

[Siberic]

I got to thinking:

What if you do make this slingshot - apparently a number of ppl have managed to do it with ease.
You don't pick any SPs, just keep them in stock. Then, you sell all your cities to the AI (like described in another thread called "The best way to achieve cultural victory").

I wonder how many SPs would you acquire. Does anyone know the cost progress of SPs for just one city?

 

[Celevin]

The best way to remove this slingshot is to make a great scientist give you a flat amount of science that scales with era.

Secondly, to change eras so they happen when a certain amount of science is reached, and not on specific techs.

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, i can't say for sure, but i bought 6-7 SP in the atempt I posted results in page 1 ... with something like 700 culture banked ( nearby cultured CS grateful for taking barbs out ).

If pushed to limits IMHO this could give you pretty early culture wins. just conquer AI cities and puppet them ... you still get the culture from them, but your SP counter thinks that you only have your own cities

 

[bhavv]

Does this look like I'll get a culture win? I forgot to take more cities and make puppets, I captured London and spared Elizabeths other two cities because I dont like conquering people



Im at peace with everyone, but Rome is at permanent war with all city states which really doesnt help me out much as I have 4 of them allied.

 

[tibbles]

I hope I'm not the only one still interested in this thread, but a few more questions:

First and foremost, I'm still a little confused on the strength of this at high levels. The first page seems to be all people claiming it's broken good, but then the 2nd page kind of petered out or had examples of people getting DOWed before the slingshot kicked in. Is this viable at Immortal or Diety?

Second, what is the strength of Civil Service if you're slingshotting for Rifling? You recommended grabbing it along the way. I discovered the hard way you need CS to upgrade warrior>spear>pike>rifle, but when slingshotting I generally only have 1-2 warriors to upgrade and 1-2 farms. CS is a really expensive tech for what appears to be so-so immediate gains. Of course it is on the path to higher techs, but I'm going rifles, not culture.

I've got a lot more questions on leveraging this for culture, but I think most stem from not having a good grasp of how to culture win (pre2000ad ) in general, so will save them until I read some other threads.

 

[HuntingX]

I've gotten acoustics at 1600 BC without really trying; you can definitely get it 1800 or even earlier if you pay attention, I think. But I think the whole tree is a waste; doesn't contribute anything at all, and immediately gets you killed by the rest of the world at higher difficulty levels.

 

[tibbles]

I don't have access to Babylon, so my best was like 900bc acoustics and 200ad rifling. But with work getting in the way I've yet to play a game higher than king to see if I could live to 200ad to leverage.

I'm curious if some of the first calls for massive OP were from Civ4 thinking where slingshotting lets you backfill in trades?

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, i continued my game on king and it was quite peaceful until Biz decided to attack me because i had gobbled one CS that he cared about. By that time I already had rifles... and he had a catapult at best. i finished the war with ease, as you can imagine

 

[Dizzy75]

I think getting it that early (on normal speed?) definitely means sacrificing defense. I've been adjusting this a bit to make room for defense and some worker techs. It's still seemed quite powerful even if you wait until ~600BC to get to Renaissance.

 

[tibbles]

Yes, I play on normal. So I got rifles in 200 yet it took until like 900ad to win vs only 3 ais. I thought 2 movement base units would make my troops feel faster than in Civ4, but they don't. No preroading anywhere.

 

[delra]

Babylon is insanely good when you count all the wonder and policy bonuses you can possibly get to great person birth rate. You can launch one golden age after another - or take techs you'd have no dreams of taking for centuries.

800 AD I am gunning for Navigation already. Bottom part of the tree I am inventing myself, top part great scientists are handling.

With better walls and archers you don't need to tech much to defend yourself, just sit tight on 2-3 cities and use Rationalism and Freedom bonuses to boost your insanely good tech rate even more.

 

[Oerdin]

I just did this and it worked well though I wasn't disciplined enough to wait for two expensive techs before getting the two free techs in the rationalism tech tree (and it is a parallel tech tree; that's ******ed). I also ended up getting three great scientists to do my sling shot but, once again, there were no expensive techs to grab so I really ended up wasting one great scientist.

In the end though this has great potential. The one draw back is that unit maintenance goes up very fast as you change ages so that you end up pay a lot of money for workers who are doing just basic upgrades. That's the only draw back I can see right off the bat though, honestly, I would get at least one scout at the beginning because the goodie huts/ruins are so valuable in Civ5 it seems more effective to get the free techs, free pops, free unit upgrades (I love those archers who keep their scout abilities especially Babylonian archers who are much better then regular archers) other then that this strategy is great and you can really sling shot yourself into a superior tech position.

 

[Zenstrive]

So this will not work with Arabia...it has no bonuses whatsoever if played as one city civ....It needs to be played like the Abbasid period of the Caliphate: expand everywhere with the camel archer and enrich self with luxuries

 

[Martin Alvito]

First and foremost, I'm still a little confused on the strength of this at high levels. The first page seems to be all people claiming it's broken good, but then the 2nd page kind of petered out or had examples of people getting DOWed before the slingshot kicked in. Is this viable at Immortal or Deity?

Works fine on Immortal. Spun it up on Deity and managed to dodge the early DOW this time. Ate a DOW at turn 70 but by then you're fine. I think I have a severe diplo exploit that will enable any builder strategy, but I want to run a few more tests before I post.

 

[bhavv]

Im doing it on king difficulty, and in most games I dont get DOWed until the end game when one civ has already conquered everyone else.

In my last game, I only had 4 full policy trees, and only one policy in my 5th at 1950 AD, so I gave up.