[R&F] Civ of the Week: Nubia

[liv]

Sooo I actually like to play Nubia rush once in awhile just to see how far I can get before the archers are obsolete. I am not a good deity player so for me it is still a challenge. Ahh the pleasures of ignorance (or incompetence in this case) LOL

 

[eleven11]

Deity - Pangea - Nubia - Standard All



Good start. Mining resources for Amanatoire's gold bonus. Plains hill start. BO was Slinger -> Slinger -> Settler -> Monument

Spoiler Good start :

Except I moved one tile to settle with the floodplains at my capital for the 40% bonus to districts. Uluru sighting. And a barb camp apparently in the 3rd ring of my capital.

Spoiler Fun times ahead :

I'm liking this start. I got culture and faith CS bonus which will help a ton. I handi-capped my expansion a little by settling Uluru first but I wanted to get culture squared away.

Spoiler Looks like there's lots of free space :

Amazingly, Germany hasn't attacked and I was bored so I took over Armagh. He must have heard fabled stories of my Pitati. The power of Uluru and workable tiles… My fpt and cpt are at or above AI average very early. I'm Queueing up Ancient Walls for limes overflow to Petra. I was able to chop in a +8 Amenity Temple of Artemis pretty late (4th city)

Spoiler Not lots of space... TONS of space. :

I eventually had to take matters into my own hands with Germany and DoW'd him. I had to wait to have the manpower for a 2 front push because he is in a very defensive position and had knights early. He slammed about a dozen of them into me which slowed me down further.

Spoiler One down... :

My focus on Culture coupled with Germany's terrain advantage really slowed the warmongering down. Germany capped Auckland and triggered an emergency so I re-routed half my forces to handle it. I decided to stop picking on Germany and expand peacefully as I had a ton of space. A couple of Pedro's cities flipped to me (no war). And I'm completely stomping everyone in culture.

Spoiler Piopiotahi is mine! :

Here are a couple of screens of Desert Paradise and Nubian Cultural Hub - Napata

Spoiler Pics :

 

[Ferocitus]

General strat as mentioned is build Pitati archers and stomp on everything. They are a little map dependent, but even an isolated start you can take advantage of +20% production to districts (+40% if terrain is favorable to build the Pyramid next to your city center) to really get ahead of the curve. If you are lucky like me, in that after I finished on stomping on everyone on my continent, I then the people on the other continent discovered me, and I formed alliances with all 5 of them you will notice in the save.

Nubia can be a monster, but in nearly all games I played they were overhauled by
Kongo.

Now that there are 5 African civs it is much more balanced around that
continent. Zulus aren't immediately belted by Pitati, and they keep Nubia busy
defending for a very long time so they don't go rampaging in all directions.

Of course, that's no help if you only play small maps against a small number of
opponents.

 

[acluewithout]

Oh and a typo in the OP. That should be 20% for the initial district, 40% of there's a Nubian Pyramid next to the city center. And that's for all districts. For some reason I was thinking it was only the first one (I'm confusing it with the pantheon).

Here is my start. King level if anyone wants to play it.

Spoiler :

The OP doesn't mention that Nubian pyramids must be built on desert or flood plains tiles, which immediately makes them rather situational compared to many other UBs (even unique districts, some of which have placement restrictions like requiring hills for example).

The district building bonus is nice, but also situational given the reliance on the pyramid for that extra 20% boost. Frankly I think it pales in comparison to the Aztec Legend of the Five Suns, which lends itself to more overall production bonuses with some work put into acquiring villagers (whether with Eagle Warriors or otherwise).

That said, the powerful pitati makes up for that in spades.

Thanks. Have (belatedly) amended OP.

 

[Disgustipated]

I wanted to complete a game as Nubia since I was unable to do so above because of the death of my brother. I dedicate this game to my brother. Rest in Peace. It wasn't a good year last year. Enough about that, back on topic.

This should be the last time I ever play Nubia. Nothing against them, other than they are massively overpowered and lack flexibility. I suppose if you don't conquer anyone with your Pitati archers they are somewhat balanced, but flat district bonuses aren't particularly exciting. And I found their UI to be pretty crappy. I wish it gave 2 food next to city center, and 1 food away from city center. It really does nothing to improve desert. I suppose if I was more creative I could put one in the middle, and make a ring of districts around it, but those districts won't have much for adjacency.

This won't be balanced with my other civ of the week game because I upped the difficulty level to Emperor due to the power level of this civ. But Emperor AI still was no match for Pitati archers. You really need to play this civ on Immortal or Deity. These archers are just that good.

Overall I begrudgingly give them an A- score. Very powerful, but not the most fun to play since you will most likely be doing archer rushes every time. I smashed Rome and Gandhi, and liberated a city-state from Latuaro, but could not find his cities so stopped conquest after that and went for science victory.

This game is on marathon which still has some balance issues I have discovered. Wish Firaxis would take a look at this. Hard to compare to my other games because it is marathon. My science victory seemed really early, but I did have a lot of cities. Marathon was interesting because I was expecting Trajan to attack me while I slowly build up a military, he was very close.

My start. I do like that they can overcome a crappy start. And my start wasn't great, my 2nd city was okay, but in general desert is still pretty crappy. Mali will get more out of it, but even as Mali I don't plan on having too much in the desert aside from one desert super city for trade routes. Nubia really can't do much with desert. And all the cities I conquered I couldn't place my UI. Thing is those cities were better than my cities I could put my UI. I will say at least Nubia can overcome bad starts with a powerful UU, Mali will have a much more difficult time.

Spoiler :

Although I should mention I did use some weird map settings, I wanted the desert experience, so that's one reason for the huge deserts. This is Large map, emperor difficulty, marathon speed, continents, arid and hot.

And my final screenshot. My spaceport city certainly wasn't a desert city, like I mentioned they still can't compete with this one.

Spoiler :

So final thoughts. You could use their UU for defense only, but like I said, a flat district bonus isn't particularly interesting, and it seems silly to leave that kind of power on the table. I would rather see a nerf of their UU, it really just skews the game. When you are playing against Nubia I try to take them out before they get their UU out. But only if they are next to me.

 

[MarigoldRan]

That's an awesome start. How is that a crappy start? You've got spices, and you only need AH to get Craftsmen.

 

[Disgustipated]

True that spice hills are amazingly overpowered. That certainly helped my war with Rome. Though with agoge I would have got past him anyways. Beyond that mountain is all desert. I ended up putting another pyramid over there, a campus district next to it, theater square on the other side, and Pyramids wonder. Amazingly got Pyramids and Petra built this game. Though perhaps I should have made my capital my Petra city, because my Petra city (my 2nd city) wasn't all that great in terms of desert hills.