Civ V Maximizing Score on Deity

[Avenos538]

Deity Difficulty • Standard Speed • Huge Map • Earth

Goal: Achieve the highest score you can by the time you achieve ANY victory condition.

Rules: No weirdness like disabling victory types, disabling barbarians, saving policies/promotions, or messing with the number of players/city states. You can pick which civs you play against.

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Introduction:​

After quite a bit of testing, I finally did it: built the largest empire Civilization V can sustain. On Deity difficulty, on a huge Earth map.

This challenge isn’t about launching a spaceship or conquering one continent or sniping everyone's capitals. It’s about true planetary domination: holding the world in a way that maximizes empire size and score.

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The Barrier: Soft Cap vs. Hard Cap​

To maximize our score, we want as long of a game as possible.

Soft Cap (~T290)

• On Diety on standard speed, at least one AI will almost always complete a spaceship by Turn 290 if left uncontested. If you can’t stop EVERY AI from building one, the game ends prematurely, and your score plateaus.

Hard Cap (T500)

• The hard limit, there WILL be a time victory at turn 500.

Takeaway: To dominate the planet and maximize score, you must be militarily strong enough to permanently stop 11 potential spaceships (and other victory conditions) while simultaneously sustaining a HAPPY massive empire, and ramping cities and population for as many turns as possible.

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Why Gandhi?​

The choice of leader isn’t arbitrary — it’s essential.

• Population drives score, and happiness enables population.
  
  
• Gandhi’s UA is especially useful on huge maps, since we double the unhappiness from cities but cities only give 1.8 base unhappiness instead of 3.6 on standard size maps.

With the -0.5 unhappiness per citizen, Gandhi’s UA results in around +700 happiness by the time we get to the ultra late game. No other leader can support the population required for this scale of empire.

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The Three Phases​

Phase 1: The Setup (Turns 1–230)​

Just by coincidence on this Earth map seed, we spawn almost exactly where India is in real life. We have rivers, forests for chopping, multiple nearby city states to steal workers from, a variety of luxuries, and a defensible position that also has room to expand.

• Rush Temple of Artemis, then expand to 4 cities → chop libraries → National College by ~T80
  
  
• Complete Liberty (Tradition doesn’t scale as well on huge I think)
  
  
• After National College, spam an additional 4 settlers for 8 total cities. Focus on connecting luxuries first.

Very Helpful Wonders:

• Temple of Artemis: +10% BASE food → exponential growth. Need to chop out by T40 or AI will get
  
  
• Alhambra: Completed with Liberty finisher Great Engineer, securing our ability to have Blitz XCOMs in the future. This is VERY nice, need to beeline in the tech tree.
  
  
• Forbidden Palace: Need delegates for enacting World Ideology: Order, and also considerable scaling happiness

The rest of this phase is pretty uneventful, prioritizing food, science, and production buildings and continuing to ramp.

There was a mini war with Ethiopia but I had a nice river to defend, and we staved off a war with Sweden using the mountain ranges. No other conflicts erupted besides that.

The ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE thing that HAS to happen around Turn 220, is to enact World Ideology: Order in the world congress. This prevents the public opinion unhappiness mechanic, which scales with the size of empire, killing our ability to expand and grow.

We NEED our Ideology to be Order for one reason and one reason only: Iron Curtain. We will be taking hundreds of cities, the entire planet. Getting a free courthouse, INSTANTLY in all cities allows our happiness to not tank, so we can continue conquest at a pace that allows us to beat spaceship timings.

The end goal is to reach ~T230 with the Stealth bomber and XCOM techs, Iron Curtain, and have all XP buildings built in all cities. Then we're ready to start cranking out Blitz XCOMS in our capitol and Stealth Bombers in all other cities.

War machine ready.

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Phase 2: The Long War (Turns 230–310)​

This phase isn't as many turns as phase 1, but the turns are far slower once our armies start to get big, very micro intensive. We want to expand as fast as possible while keeping happiness above 0 at all times.

Eventual Army Composition (per front):

• 8 Blitz XCOMs
• 18 Stealth Bombers (3 stacks of 6, with Air Repair. Each aircraft stack should be accompanied by a medic XCOM for extra healing)

Conquest Flow:

1. Prioritize neighbors → runaways → other continents→ spaceship threats
2. Stockpile around 4 ICBMS and distribute around the globe before nuclear non proliferation can be enacted to get through those final heavy unit carpets
3. Build CN Tower! Population boost and also huge help to our unhappiness issues.

You need to make a good pace on conquest. If you don't, you won't mow through the AI fast enough to stop spaceship parts once they start rolling out - this is the main threat to us maximizing our score with a longer game.

We first tackled Sweden to the north, eventually breaking through to Stockholm. Next, we struck the runaway Netherlands to the east, followed by an easy conquest of Ethiopia—Morocco was too far behind to bother with.

Siam proved trickier with its coastal cities; without a strong navy, we took their landlocked cities first, then bombed the remaining eight coastal cities to low HP before paradropping Blitz XCOMs to capture them to remove them from the game. They were getting too chummy with all the city states and had to go.

We declared war on Brazil. Within five turns, they capitulated a city, which we used to rebase stealth bombers across the Atlantic as we developed a second army. Throughout, our main eight cities never stopped producing Stealth Bombers and XCOMs.

Finally, we use our ICBMS to clean up Jakarta, Songhai, and the rest of the Netherlands.

Result: By Turn 300, ~90% of the globe is conquered. All AI are so far behind that they cannot build a spaceship. The game can thus continue to Turn 500 with no winner, growing cities and maximizing our score per our initial goal, provided tourism is minimized to avoid a cultural victory and world congress votes are managed. Soft cap broken.

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Phase 3: The Infinite Empire (Turns 310+)​

Objective: Push beyond the soft cap, finalize planetary dominance, and maximize score.

This phase begins with extensive settler and food building purchases. Once infrastructure is fully developed, gold becomes effectively useless, as there’s nothing left to spend it on. At this stage:

• Settle all remaining city spots on the map.
• Max out infrastructure in all cities: hospitals, medical labs, research labs, and other key buildings and maximize food.
• Stay happy, Aristocracy is a great policy for this

Key late-game tactics:

• Give the city with The Great Firewall to the AI with the highest culture to keep our tourism in check. This ensures they remain in the game until Turn 500, preventing accidental culture victories.
• All cities now start with +9 food (2 base + 6 from maritime city states + 1 from Party Leadership), allowing even snow or island cities to grow quickly, especially if we buy aqueducts to accelerate growth.
• At this stage, Great Scientists appear bugged; using one sometimes causes extreme negative science values (e.g., -410,000). The goal at this stage is to approach +80,000 science per turn, allowing a new Future Tech to be researched each turn.
• Complete Aesthetics → perpetual golden ages by faith-buying Great Artists (~1,000+ GPT)
• To prevent the Netherlands from completing a spaceship, we can spam gift them Modern Armor, putting them in a permanent aluminum deficit.

Game Engine limitations:

Around Turn 400 the game engine truly struggles, and things begin to fall apart:

• Saves fail to load entirely.
• GUI glitches appear; images fail to load.
• Placing/capturing a city freezes the game for 3 minutes
• 6+ minutes between turns and several seconds between all actions.

Continuing to Turn 500 would require leaving the computer running for ten hours while manually hitting ‘Next Turn’ every so often, and even then, I found that no save past Turn 400 could be reliably loaded. While this limits the final score slightly, it is mitigated by the score multiplier (see below)

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Score multiplier:​

Final score is affected by a multiplier that depends on how quickly you achieve victory. The faster you win, the higher your multiplier. For example (on standard speed):

• Victory on Turn 5 → multiplier of 100
• Victory on Turn 250 → multiplier of 2
• Victory on Turn 500 → multiplier of 1

We achieved victory on Turn 400 and couldn’t push further due to game engine stability limits, resulting in a multiplier of roughly 1.25.

The exact formula for turn-based scaling isn’t publicly documented, but testing suggests it roughly follows an exponential decline from early turns to the final turn.

Final Score: 19128 (~1.25 x 15303)​

Victory save file attached (takes a few minutes to load)

(P.S.) I unfortunately lost all my save files except the victory one I put in the steam cloud, so this guide is lacking some pictures and documentation I wanted to include. But I figured I would share anyway.

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Final Words​

This challenge isn’t about any single victory condition; it’s about pushing the game to its absolute limits and seeing just how far an empire can go, unmodded, on the highest difficulty.

I hope you found this an interesting read! If you have comments, questions, or ideas for further optimization, please let me know in the comments!


-Avenos

 

[könig utrecht]

hallo, bin neu und wenig ahnung habe das vor 15 jahren gespielt bin bei c6 wie pimpet man das speil mit viel gold, und wo ladet man das runter und wo
muss dann gespeichert werden, danke

 

[raider980]

Wow, that's pretty cool. I love settling cities so this is amazing! I've never tried to settle that many though, whew. I don't win reliably on Deity enough to even attempt something like this but it sounds fun. Might have to try something similar on Immortal, but my computer could never handle the biggest map, I'd have to cut it down to large lol.