Can someone advise how I survive?

[Victoria]

So there have been quite a few people saying any deity game you can win.... I've just come across this one that I am struggling with... I have given it 10 goes so far... if someone can survive to turn 40 I tip my hat to them

@DrCron you said a couple of days ago any deity could be beaten. Can you do this one?

Now the trouble here is where I started I saw a river just 2 turns away so went for it and only really got into serious trouble on turn 16 so I have a save from turn 6, best I can do. Just slingers and animal husbandry all the way as normal. Even if I had not moved I doubt it would have helped if you look at the potential vulture feast.

I'll keep trying but at the moment I have managed to survive long enough for 3 civs to declare on me

No mods, just all DLC's- and no cheating with fire tuner!

 

[craney1987]

good luck good players let the rest of us plebs know how you go

 

[Wilde]

I got to Turn 41 but needed to quit. You can peace out with Alex but Gilgamesh will pay you a nice sum to take peace. Gandhi...well, he won't take peace but he is also the one I want to remove from the game first. What I did was locate Gilgamesh (Ur) and then a couple turns later a settler (unprotected) shows up. I DOW'd him and took his builder then next turn settler. Eventually we peaced out with him paying me 3gpt. Both Alex & Gandhi did the same this (unescorted settler). So I DOW'd them and Gilgamesh sent another settler, thus WWIII. Tech wise, I researched Archery and only got two slingers out before I got the tech. I did get the tech boost from taking out a warrior for Gilgamesh. Pumped out a few more archers and just took out warriors here & there. I then went for Masonary so I could build walls but so far have not needed to use them, the archers are doing fine. I also got a pantheon and took the one for pastures (culture) since there are some nice spots on this map within my borders and it could work with a Monument to fly down the Civics Tree.

 

[DrCron]

Hey, thanks for the shutout. I'll give this a try probably tomorrow.

On a first look I'd say that, on your 2nd attempt (assuming you lost the 1st one and know you'll get a triple DOW early, and imagining this game did an auto-save on turn 1 as CIV 4 did) you could settle 1 tile SW, on the hills. Yes, you lose a turn, but then your capital has forest east and south, and river north, so whoever attacks will get bombarded one extra turn for sure.

Anyway, I'll give it a shot with this capital and let you know how it goes.

EDIT: why didn't you send Gilgamesh a delegation?

 

[DrCron]

Well, I couldn't help myself and took a shot at this right now. First attempt I lost on turn 20. 2nd attempt I played until turn 93, and things look ok. Once you deal with the initial invasion it's a regular early rush game. This is how it went:

1. Check the tile where my warrior is. Thanks to the forest bonus (plus river crossing from the north) he can take a bunch of hits there and not only survive but also kill at least 1 Sumerian warrior. Also I immediately focused production on London. I didn't lock any food tiles in order to get the slingers faster.

2. If the AI played as a human player Gilgamesh would do a war-cart rush and it would be impossible to survive having him as the closest neighbor. But the AI doesn't do that. On this game he only built 2 war-carts. So archers can deal with them. By turn 26 he was asking for peace (which I initially rejected, until he gave me a luxury and more gold a few turns later). Gandhi and Alex only sent scouts (plus that Macedonian warrior on the screenshot). Gandhi offered peace as soon as he could (turn 29) which I accepted because the land to the south makes it hard for an invasion (and invading India is always a pain). Alex seemed week so I rejected his offer (also on turn 29) and went for him.

3. Turned out Alex was so weak because he's getting swarmed by barbarian horse archers. Barbarians are actually a much bigger deal than he is. They delayed me so much that I could only take one city from him before that war started being a bit expensive. I took another luxury and his gold for a peace treaty. Came back south to attack Sumeria again, since I had enough gold (some of it from Alex) to purchase a battering ram (at this point Gilgamesh had walls). I built some chariots and I went for it. I took Kish and Ur and then he gave me everything he had, plus another city:

4. Now I'm on turn 93 with 6 cities (barbs took 1 settler from Alex, which I eventually took from them) and a nice army. I also have room to peacefully get at least another 2 cities. I'll be peaceful until Alex denounces me for not being at war (should happen in a few turns), and then I'll attack him, either with chariots or a bit later with knights. At that point it should be easy to get 12 cities and win the game. I'm attaching the save file in case you want to take a look at tech tree or anything else.

So yeah, that triple DOW is tough but once you know it'll happen (and when) it's actually not so hard to get ready for it. The game is clearly very far from "unwinnable". It's just hard on the first attempt, because of that weird spawn (no city states and 3 close AIs).

 

[Leyrann]

In my opinion, a game that cannot be won on the first attempt could be considered "unwinnable", because you're really just save scumming.

 

[Victoria]

Thank you @Leyrann was in fact my whole point

I still tip my hat to those that did and I managed to do it on my 16th attempt but thought I would leave the post up because my 16 attempt was in fact a mirror image of the 5th.

Locking that food tile was a mistake, I should have unlocked it as soon as I saw him

 

[isau]

In my opinion, a game that cannot be won on the first attempt could be considered "unwinnable", because you're really just save scumming.

I disagree to an extent. At that point it's just a "scenario." I replay old saves all the time to see if I could do better.

I was able to survive up to around turn 50, only because I had some idea of what was coming and how the AI forms attack teams, so I declared on Gilgamesh when I saw an unprotected Settler in his territory. From there, basically just defended in home turf as he sent units at me. That robbed him of a chance to declare a Joint War or to form a cohesive army that might have given me trouble.

Annoyingly, Ghandi knew about my war mongering before I met him (maybe he already met Gilgamesh) and denounced me right away when I met him.

I wasn't very successful capturing his cities. Unfortunately I settled the captured Settler to the north on the lake, and got hit by a MASSIVE swarm of Barbarians that was x10 harder to deal with than any AI player. I could have gone longer, but I was basically just treading water and not really going forward.

 

[DrCron]

In my opinion, a game that cannot be won on the first attempt could be considered "unwinnable", because you're really just save scumming.

Nope, this is not what people consider "unwinnable". One can always make a mistake on the first attempt because of either poor skills, being distracted, believing (erroneously) that the map will go the way it usually does, etc. Of course this is much more obvious on CIV 4, because there you can do a decent early game and still lose later on if you don't evaluate the situation correctly, but I say it still applies to CIV 6.

In this case I don't know how soon Gilgamesh was met, but we could argue that if you meet an AI with a decent early UU around turn 5, not rushing your slingers is a mistake. On my first attempt I also didn't position my warrior on that good spot I mention in my post, even though it was possible. That's another mistake. Was the map "unwinnable" because on my first attempt I made 2 early mistakes? No, obviously not.

In any case, I recommend people who are still improving on Deity to manually save on turn 1. According to my CIV 4 experience, replaying a difficult deity map that you couldn't figure out the first time is a great way to improve your game.

 

[Abraxis]

You're not learning anything by save scumming, you're only indulging your regret. Anyone can identify a mistake and its solution in retrospect, if anything going back to solve them only cheats you out of the consequences which will teach you something. Growing is about learning to recognize, and solving mistakes before they ever happen. There is no going back to try again unless you can also induce amnesia.

 

[Leyrann]

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's wrong to keep trying to win the same game over and over, that's the whole idea of trial and error games and you can certainly have fun with that style in civilization, but if you can't win it by "normal" gameplay on the first time, no matter how good you are, it's a trial and error game, not a winnable game. That's fine, and I could see myself having fun doing it (and I probably will once I attempt to win Alex' scenario on deity), but I still think it should be called an unwinnable game.

 

[Abraxis]

I wouldn't even call it trial and error though. Trial and error would be failing and starting a new game to try and not make the same mistake -that's fine.

Reloading into the same situation taking knowledge from after the situation isn't really playing the game anymore because managing uncertainty and risk is a major element of the game. You take that away and it's literally no different than turning off the fog of war. It's cheating. I have no problems with people cheating in single player games at all, but I do have a problem with them acting like they're playing the same game as people who aren't cheating.

 

[DrCron]

Anyone can identify a mistake and its solution in retrospect

You only need to read OP's post on this thread to realize this statement is factually wrong.

And of course to a larger extent I have to assume you never went to a chess class in your life. Analyzing famous matches and detecting the mistakes made by the losing player has been a main component of learning chess for over a century. Situations repeat a lot on any board/turn-based game, so studying previous mistakes and finding out what the best alternative was will definitely make you a better player.

Finally, a player who had Gilgamesh spawning really close to him on a previous game will have probably not committed the mistakes I did on my first attempt on this map, and survived the attack. Since doing it has been proven to be possible, the map is clearly not "unwinnable".

If you go to the CIV 4 forums it won't take you long to find out what people actually mean by "unwinnable": a map in which every possible optimization has been tried and still there's no way to beat it, no matter what you do.

 

[Abraxis]

You are absolutely right. I admit with overwhelming pride that I have never taken any chess classes.

It sounds like I've dodged a bullet, your perspective seems restricted to the very limited dimensions of a chess board. The closest equivalency I can think of to describe your actual position here within those confines would be that of a person with precognitive abilities entering a chess competition thinking they're on even footing with everyone else. Here it's more that you think you're playing chess, while the rest of us realize we can't see our opponent's pieces and are playing Civ 6.

I will try to break it down a little better.

In Chess, both players have perfect information over the game. In Civ, and pretty much everything else in life, we do not -and we're not meant to. This simple fact alters the correct course of action in a fundamental way. You act like it doesn't, that you're entitled to perfect information. You refuse to adapt and adjust your behaviour accordingly given the environment of obfuscation. Instead you try to reshape the environment and the rules of the game to try to impose perfect information so that your habits are compatible. It's the difference between playing poker with everyone's hands hidden and everyone showing their hands -take a second to imagine how differently that game plays with this simple alteration you refuse to acknowledge has any significance.

As for what the intended approach to the game is, obviously I can't speak for Ed Beach, but we can look at his design decisions. The already stated fog of war; the scouts, spies, hidden agendas... this all clearly tells us that your approach to the game is not the approach to the game. We are not meant to have perfect information over the game, information has value and we are meant to work for it. You're not working for it, you're stealing it every time you reload the game. This yields a tangible reward in the difference between resources a normal player has committed to preparing for all possible outcomes, and your supernatural ability to focus everything on what you know will happen. You are a precog playing chess, or a king playing poker with his peasants allowing himself the privilege to change his bets after his peasants meekly lay their cards on the table.

What I meant by your behaviour (save scumming) depriving yourself of the actual lesson in all of this is that I don't believe you're learning to act appropriately given an environment of imperfect data. Sure you may learn that Sumeria was there and so you should have built and positioned these archers here -but that's not the solution, because that was not your circumstance. Your circumstance was you didn't know who was next to you, the solution is how do you properly behave when you don't know who's next to you. There is no right answer, just a complex matrix of probabilities in which we try to position ourselves where the odds are most favorable. The only way to try again, is to re-roll a new map where you don't know what's coming next.

 

[DrCron]

You are absolutely right. I admit with overwhelming pride that I have never taken any chess classes

In Chess, both players have perfect information over the game. In Civ (...) we do not

If you knew how to play chess you'd know it's actually WAY harder to be a good chess player than to be a good CIV player. There are very limited changes to what CIV can give you: who's your neighbor, which resources you get, which city states are close, etc. And it takes very little time to learn what to do on each case to adapt. It's definitely way easier than adapting to the extreme way in which a different opening changes a game of chess.

We are not meant to have perfect information over the game

Yes we do, the only difference is that it will take us a little time to get it. The part of the game in which we explore while being mostly "blind" to the map is very short. During most of the game we do have most of the available information about the map (especially the land around us, which is what we need). During the late game we know the whole map.

What I meant by your behaviour (save scumming)

Nope, I'm not talking about save-scumming. That would be re-doing decisions mid-game, or maybe replaying when RNG doesn't go your way (CIV 1-4), which might create the bad habit of not playing along when the game gets hard (which I certainly don't recommend). I'm talking about playing the whole map again, from turn 1, after you lost. Especially if you had the (frequently erroneous) idea that there was no way to play the map in a better way. Confirming that there was a way to win, and checking what it was you didn't figure out during your first attempt will definitely make you a better player, I have experienced this myself. I don't know any good CIV 4 deity player that hasn't used this method to improve. Now of course CIV 4 is harder than 6, so it takes more time to beat average maps on deity, but if someone is having trouble with CIV 6 I don't see how the same method won't work.

Your circumstance was you didn't know who was next to you

Wrong. If you read the whole thread (which you should do before replying to it, I may add) you'll clearly see that the save file I played is from turn 6, AFTER meeting Gilgamesh. This means the map can be won AFTER you know who's your closest neighbor (so it's not "unwinnable"). At this point you also know which units will take place in the fight, and before they get to your city you have already scouted all the tiles where the fight will take place. So if you know the map where the fight will take place, and you know the units... It's really very similar to chess. If you had never played the game you might argue you don't know how many units the AI will produce, but the truth is we know how many warriors they have when they start, we know they build at least 2 more, and we know there will be at least 2 archers (usually more) if they don't have a good UU (in which case you should expect about 2 of that UU and usually a smaller amount of archers). We also know that once we destroy the units forming the first invasion (usually no more than 7) everything will be easier and the danger of an early loss will be gone. If there are more enemies (as it happens here), we also know that the closer enemy is the biggest threat. There really aren't so many options.

the solution is how do you properly behave when you don't know who's next to you

If you have a close neighbor you pretty much always meet them before finishing your first slinger, they won't be hiding exploring only in the opposite direction to your land. So you'll always know they are there soon enough to start an appropriate strategy to defend from an early attack. The only decision we take completely blind is the first build, which we already know on Deity should be a slinger (or a scout on CIV 5, or a worker on CIV 4...).

The fact is that if you play this map over and over until you win the early wars, the next time you get a double or triple DOW against you before turn 20 you WILL know how to deal with it.

 

[Leyrann]

I do not think that you can really compare chess with Civ. Of course, both have the same rules, but chess has the same start every time again, while civilization has a different (though similar) start every time. Comparing Civ starts with chess starts would be like your back pieces in chess (all pieces but the pawns) being positioned randomly at the start of a game.

Now, I'm not a brilliant or even a good chess player, but I do see the massive changes that would bring to the game. And you may say "it's nothing that severe", but if you realize: You may have a bad start with no tiles better than 2f1p and maybe another yield like +1 faith or +1 science, or you may have a perfect start with triple spice on grassland/forest/hills which all grant 4f2p. You may not encounter a barbarian for 50 turns or there may be two horse encampments almost right next to you. You may be able to settle 10 cities before even getting close to an AI or you may find yourself crammed for space after three cities. You may have a lot of flat land that is hard to defend or you may find yourself in the middle of hilled forests where a warrior almost wins against a swordsman. There are a lot of variables that change how a game plays out, very much different from the choices that you or your opponent makes.

 

[Abraxis]

If you knew how to play chess you'd know it's actually WAY harder to be a good chess player than to be a good CIV player.

And if you knew how to deal with obfuscation you wouldn't support your argument on an assumption like this.

Spoiler :

I grew up playing chess with my father, he was a firefighter and spent a lot of his time at the fire hall playing chess with the other firemen. He eventually got me Chessmaster 6000, which I played regularly for years until I was good enough to beat him, after which I began gloating endlessly and we never played again. Something I became very ashamed of.

From grades 5 to 7, There was an awkward gangly boy; my friend's older brother, in the class ahead of me who belonged to chess clubs and bragged about it constantly. That was his "thing". I found him annoying and so I never mentioned I even knew how to play, to anyone. One day, circumstances somehow led to his showing off by convincing the teacher to organize his playing our whole class in chess simultaneously. Don't ask me how he managed it, I have no idea, our teacher was a substitute who somehow ended up staying on all year. We watched Armageddon "for science" about twelve times. This was actually unusually educational.

The desks were placed in a 3 sided square with us sitting between them and the walls. He walked along the inside playing each turn and moving onto the next. To his credit, his beat everyone -everyone except me. I played on his low estimation of our skill and divided attention. I baited him into making himself vulnerable to try to get an easy win on me. In response he accused me of cheating and moved on to finish his other games. I was not bothered, those next to me knew I hadn't cheated and it took only till recess before everyone knew. But we all let it slide because of how intense he was and how much it meant to him.

I went on to spend all of highschool playing at least once a week with a friend, who was simultaneously high literally all the time, and one of the best chess players I've ever played with. I never figured that one out.

After highschool I hadn't played much in many years, the last time was against my brother's girlfriend. The daughter of the head of Computer Sciences at one of the largest universities in Canada. She very much his protege, member of Mensa, and self-identified intellectual. I accidentally humiliated her in front of my brother in only about a dozen turns after she'd spent the weekend talking about how much she played and that we should have a match.

I've not played since.

Yes we do [mean to have perfect information over the game], the only difference is that it will take us a little time to get it. The part of the game in which we explore while being mostly "blind" to the map is very short. During most of the game we do have most of the available information about the map (especially the land around us, which is what we need). During the late game we know the whole map.

If that's what you really think then that's that and there's no point in continuing this discussion we'll just keep going in circles around this discrepancy. That's the heart of our disagreement and I've already explained several times how much of a major deal it is, and you continue to dismiss it. Honestly I don't even understand why you don't agree anymore, it seems to me like you're just grasping for rationalization at this point, but maybe I'm wrong about that -Doesn't matter; talking about it is going nowhere.

 

[isau]

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's wrong to keep trying to win the same game over and over, that's the whole idea of trial and error games and you can certainly have fun with that style in civilization, but if you can't win it by "normal" gameplay on the first time, no matter how good you are, it's a trial and error game, not a winnable game. That's fine, and I could see myself having fun doing it (and I probably will once I attempt to win Alex' scenario on deity), but I still think it should be called an unwinnable game.

"Unwinnable" here as Victoria used it would mean "no possible path to victory no matter what choices the player makes." The way to disprove that is to play until someone finds a solution, which some of us did.

I understand your stance on save-games to a degree, but don't agree with it. A game like Super Mario Bros gives you the same level layouts every playthrough, as do many other video games. It doesn't make it automatically a simple thing to overcome just because you've seen it before. And there are probably at least some civ scenarios that are truly unwinnable--no path to victory no matter what choices are made, although they are probably rare.

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

Wow, Chessmaster 6000.... my first chess computer was a brand new Fidelity one with pegged pieces when I was 12. It had 3 whole levels: stupid, stupider, and stupidest. It took me a while to beat the stupidest, and then I progressed all the way to stupid.

Dang, I'm old.

 

[Abraxis]

Wow, Chessmaster 6000.... my first chess computer was a brand new Fidelity one with pegged pieces when I was 12. It had 3 whole levels: stupid, stupider, and stupidest. It took me a while to beat the stupidest, and then I progressed all the way to stupid.

Dang, I'm old.

Hah, Chessmaster had all the bells and whistles, it was great. You could play with all kinds of fancy sets and pieces. My favorite being an ornate set with emerald coloured stone and gold pieces that looked like it came straight out of the Nome King's treasure room from Return to Oz. And there weren't just scaling difficulties but personalities as well. Based on people I had no idea who they were so they meant nothing, but just the fact that it did that was awesome. Some Fisher fellow who I guess is a big deal was the highest level human personality I think. After that it went into crazy master wizard AI levels which I think were suppose to range up to literally unbeatable.