Hokie Fan
Chieftain
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2020
- Messages
- 58
I wanted to share a super cheesy strategy in which you win a space victory with one city building only a spaceport district. The premise of the game is to play on secret societies and apocalypse mode, build the Great Bath, join the Voidsingers and then generate tons of faith/science using soothsayers. Once you hit the medieval era, your faith then gets translated into science, culture and gold using the second tenant of the Voidsingers, which gives you science/culture/gold equal to 20% of your city’s faith output.
In my game, I played as China on deity, standard map size and shuffle (turned out to be continents-like). After finding an area with 9 floodplains, I settled and used my warrior to explore so that I could pick up an early governor. On one of the first few turns, I found a goody hut and unlocked the Voidsingers and a governor title. I used my first governor title on Liang so that I could get a 5-charge builder in order to secure the Great Bath. Almost immediately after building the Great Bath, I was warrior rushed by Eleanor. The only reason I survived was because an asteroid landed right next to my warrior, which gave me a heavy chariot and bought some time to build some slingers/archers. After staving off Eleanor, my next goal was to get Kilwa, which I ended up doing by beelining machinery and chopping it out using Magnus.
After securing Kilwa, the next stop was reformed church to unlock theocracy. Once I unlocked theocracy, I repeatedly purchased soothsayers and flooded my Great Bath tiles. When the soothsayer was down to one charge, I would put it to sleep so that it would gain more charges after the next appease the gods competition (I burned all of the soothsayers after the third appease the gods competition). At the end of the game, each of my nine floodplains tiles was generating 306 faith, 61 science, 61 culture and 61 culture. I was able to suzerain one faith city state (increasing overall faith by 15%, which then further boosted my science/culture/gold), two science city states (increasing science by 30%) and one culture city state (increasing culture by 15%).
As far as my science tech path, I mostly beelined each of the space projects (making minor adjustments based on when I could get eurekas).
As far as my civics path, after reformed church, I went directly to conservation. The purpose of this was so that I could plant forests, set them on fire a few times and then build lumber mills. One of the sort of tricky parts of doing a no district, one city space victory is that you don’t really have any production because you can’t get boosts from industrial zones, policy cards, shipyards, city states, etc. Plus, when you’re settling floodplains and not building dams/aqueducts/industrial zones, you typically don’t have production-heavy land. The end game civic was obviously synthetic technocracy.
Here are a few screenshots from my game, which was far from perfectly or even well executed. For example, I barely got off any spy steals. I also messed up my governors by miscounting the number of governors I had remaining, which in turn prevented me from using Moksha’s final promotion to faith buy the spaceport. This necessitated hard building the spaceport and using my previous few chops to do so.
T276 Screenshot of My City (Immediately Before Victory)
Victory Screen (Apparently Not Building Districts or Cities Nets a Horrible Score)
Victory Screen Reflecting Number of Districts (The second bump at T250 was when I captured and then immediately liberated a free city that was going to flip to me).
If anyone wants to try this strategy, I have a few takeaways that may be relevant:
In my game, I played as China on deity, standard map size and shuffle (turned out to be continents-like). After finding an area with 9 floodplains, I settled and used my warrior to explore so that I could pick up an early governor. On one of the first few turns, I found a goody hut and unlocked the Voidsingers and a governor title. I used my first governor title on Liang so that I could get a 5-charge builder in order to secure the Great Bath. Almost immediately after building the Great Bath, I was warrior rushed by Eleanor. The only reason I survived was because an asteroid landed right next to my warrior, which gave me a heavy chariot and bought some time to build some slingers/archers. After staving off Eleanor, my next goal was to get Kilwa, which I ended up doing by beelining machinery and chopping it out using Magnus.
After securing Kilwa, the next stop was reformed church to unlock theocracy. Once I unlocked theocracy, I repeatedly purchased soothsayers and flooded my Great Bath tiles. When the soothsayer was down to one charge, I would put it to sleep so that it would gain more charges after the next appease the gods competition (I burned all of the soothsayers after the third appease the gods competition). At the end of the game, each of my nine floodplains tiles was generating 306 faith, 61 science, 61 culture and 61 culture. I was able to suzerain one faith city state (increasing overall faith by 15%, which then further boosted my science/culture/gold), two science city states (increasing science by 30%) and one culture city state (increasing culture by 15%).
As far as my science tech path, I mostly beelined each of the space projects (making minor adjustments based on when I could get eurekas).
As far as my civics path, after reformed church, I went directly to conservation. The purpose of this was so that I could plant forests, set them on fire a few times and then build lumber mills. One of the sort of tricky parts of doing a no district, one city space victory is that you don’t really have any production because you can’t get boosts from industrial zones, policy cards, shipyards, city states, etc. Plus, when you’re settling floodplains and not building dams/aqueducts/industrial zones, you typically don’t have production-heavy land. The end game civic was obviously synthetic technocracy.
Here are a few screenshots from my game, which was far from perfectly or even well executed. For example, I barely got off any spy steals. I also messed up my governors by miscounting the number of governors I had remaining, which in turn prevented me from using Moksha’s final promotion to faith buy the spaceport. This necessitated hard building the spaceport and using my previous few chops to do so.
T276 Screenshot of My City (Immediately Before Victory)
Victory Screen (Apparently Not Building Districts or Cities Nets a Horrible Score)
Victory Screen Reflecting Number of Districts (The second bump at T250 was when I captured and then immediately liberated a free city that was going to flip to me).
If anyone wants to try this strategy, I have a few takeaways that may be relevant:
- Your economic policy cards are basically worthless because they’re typically premised on boosting district yields.
- Boosts are hard to come by because for many of the boosts, they require a district.
- Great people are almost entirely worthless because you need to activate them on districts, which you don’t have. The obvious exceptions are if you buy one of the wonder boosting great engineers or the great engineer that gives 1500 production to a space project.
- Most wonders are worthless except for the Great Bath and Kilwa. Hanging Gardens would be fine if you have a non-floodplains river tile (do not crush a floodplain tile for Hanging Gardens), as would Temple of Artemis.
- A religion is almost certainly detrimental because you want your faith for soothsayers.
- This strategy works very well as China, who may be one of the only civs that can reliably secure the Great Bath on deity. It would work even better with Ethiopia if by some miracle Ethiopia could settle on a hill with a sufficient number of flood plains around and then somehow secure the Great Bath.
