Deity Always War OCC

[madscientist]

What a great game!!! Downloaded it and tried it twice, but got overrun both times. First time I stupidly delayed the GW, second time I got it and the extra GGs.

Seams to me the biggest problem is the catapults.

Also, One question regarding this game. Is it wise to build a fort at the choke point? I can get CG promotion to man it but that opens me up to CR attacks (which cats typically have).

 

[CocoLoco]

dualdoc, I'm impressed how quickly you were able to research. Do you remember how many beakers per turn you were generating in 1500 and how? It looks like around 2000? That is one thing I need to work on.

Has anyone tried this with all the victory conditions except conquest turned off? It is always war anyway. Does the AI behave differently?

In my games the AI builds the UN around 1700 but it hasn't been a game stopper. In my last game they even asked and voted for to stop nukes but, it didn't help the final outcome. The end came around 1830. It was very sad to see my 6 GG MGs (500xp each) and 40+ grenadiers, in the pass, all killed in one turn. I was still researching plastics and they had tanks.

 

[Jet]

@madscientist:

Personally, I suspect that on average the Fort helps.

On the other hand, I prefer Woodsman Melee. But maybe I should rethink that, since on paper the CG + Guerilla + Drill promotions available to archery units are better. Also, Archery units can go down the drill line for collateral resistance for your cat problem. Of course, Samurai can do that too once you get there.

Strategically, I didn't find that I needed to think too hard about it either way. A dozen or so units was usually enough for the pre-Samurai period.

 

[KMadCandy]

madscientist: i built the fort, knowing i could pillage it if i changed my mind. so far i think it's helping me.

Edit: And no oil, ouch..then I discovered the Mech Inf. don't need it. A new day, a new revelation.

in warlords i played a game where i needed to get a time victory but i also needed to leave all victory conditions enabled (HoF QM purposes). my approach was to stick around forever, duel map, with one opponent, playing OCC. one opponent, and force him to play OCC too by not by his choice. i was shaka, and i did have copper (yay dancing impis!) and elephants in my BFC, iron within a couple border pops. i never had ponies, oil (one tile out of reach waaaaah!), or uranium. conveniently i was playing Settler level so that wasn't a major problem but it was definitely educational. i'm now convinced that making marines and mech infantry resource-less units is a great and necessary design decision; if i'd been playing on a normal level i'd have been squished. that game was ridiculouly fun.

i'm playing a version with this map, but altered so that it's not comparable. i debated and debated how to set it up as a scenario; my goal was to get the challenge/excitement of the bad guys teching and producing with deity advantages, with at least some hope of sticking around for a while, but not an "i win" button. so i altered my .xmls to give myself some advantages for survivability. i'm not a deity level player but i am the queen of rationalization . mine's not a deity difficulty game any more. it's custom "oddball hard but not nearly as much as it should be level" i guess. so with that disclaimer, progress on my game is in a spoiler box if anybody wants to read it. short summary: i'm having a blast so far, thanks for the thread! no idea how long i'll last.

Spoiler :

i altered the .xml files to add imperialistic to hannibal's traits without taking the others away. now that they're fighting me fairly consistently (but with enough breaks that i win), i think i didn't need to do that, the GGs have figured out my address. but it did take them what seemed like a long time. for a while they'd come over with 30 troops, hit me with 10 and move the other 20 away, really frustrating. it probably wasn't as long as it felt like, i was just wanted exp so badly it was like waiting for water to boil or something. now they're getting serious, yay!

probably the biggest change was to globaldefines.xml; i took away the limit to national wonders, so that i wouldn't have to make the "globe vs. heroic epic" choices. even after reading the thread i couldn't decide which would better fit my style and be more fun/less frustrating. i love OCCs but most of mine were in warlords/vanilla where you didn't have to make those choices, i still haven't adjusted. i turned off random events, thinking the bad guys would get more useful ones than i would. i also used Turinturambar's spoiler to get 3 hut techs; i misread it the first time and didn't get them, so i restarted it and got them the 2nd time; ain't i shameless? later i got a scout, sent him to go down and find some AI cities while that was still safe-ish; he lucked out and got ironworking from a far away hut that they hadn't opened yet!

as part of the "no limit on wonders", i added critter health resources to the valley (outside of the BFC). i think increasing health cap by 3 will be quite big for taking advantage of the no-cap-on-happies, but i still haven't made globe yet, for fear of great artists. i've had 2 or 3 already grrrrrrr. and for safety purposes, i turned hannibal's "AI playable" flag to false, and changed my screensaver to a screenshot of "change the .xml files back!" so that i don't mess up my next game. i can't let him be imperialistic and his usual traits, that would be overpowered ! he's not a permanoob, he doesn't deserve it.

it's way too much fun! i literally fell asleep at the pc last night "one more turn"ing. the most surprising thing is that Toku of all people has the tech lead for now. they're at the stage where they're starting to learn gunpowder, Toku and Miss B (the 2 that have attacked me the least) just got it. i double-checked that i left "No Tech Trading" on, thinking maybe Toku's lead was in part because the mutual-military-lovefest has him trading techs far more than usual. but no, he's just teching faster than the rest of them, not something i see everyday. he's not at the top on score or any F9 graph, but on that "can research" and "can't trade" screen he's scariest of them all. he's not the richest. just like in the OP's game Hamm founded buddhism and built the shrine. in my universe every AI except Toku the hindu is buddhist, and Toku only made his shrine recently, so he's not a millionaire. i think it's partly because Toku has sent by far the lowest number of troops my way. i both look forward to and dread the day he does!

thanks so much for posting about this, and to the others who've contributed. way too much fun even with my cheats. i'm a permanoob, that's how i rationalize the tweaks to make it easier . very interesting to see how fast they tech and pump out those troops. and awesome to see how my super warlords can handle all those troops. now that they are finally attacking with their troops instead of being frustrating spectators, i think i probably didn't need to add imperialistic. figuring out who to have fight, who to pull out of the fort to have someone else defend, etc, to min/max promotions is tedious for some but i have always loved the "who would the promo for this fight be best for?" mini-game inside the game. i get a kick out of it and here it's really important.

imperialistic was overkill i think, but adding the health has been great, the higher health cap helps me play the way i'm used to (yay big healthy pretty cities with no clouds!) which adds to my fun and lessens frustration.

to help decide how i'd approach it, i did a test run beginning at the "okay, time to go on offense" save. it was fun being that powerful, and i played to the points i got the UN razed. that gave me confidence i had a chance if i could get myself set up right, so i decided to tweak and increase my chances of getting set up right . thanks for giving us saves at different stages, quite cool. it's interesting to see even the little things, like where they put their cities. Shaka's city just south of the pass in my world is one tile to the west. Hamm's city that caused the problem with the fighters just got settled a few turns ago, same spot as the original game. and there's no Roskilde (Shaka's city right up against the western mountain ridge) in mine. at least not yet, the tile still belongs to no one so he could put a city there.

 

[Winged Monkey]

Seams to me the biggest problem is the catapults.

That's what killed me the first game too. I got complacent with my unit-building and military tech researching, since my highly promoted axemen in the pass (and a few spearmen for the mounted units) seemed invincible. Then came the War Elephants and cats. I could withstand a single onslaught from a single civ, but once I got one of those massive dual onslaughts from Boudica and Shaka, it was game over.

The solution? The second run I went for a very focused strategy:

- Needed early techs: Mining, bronze working, agriculture, pottery, masonry.
- Build the Great Wall asap.
- Beeline to priesthood (Oracle) and get CoL. For this to work you might need to get one of the prerequisite techs from a goody hut or get lucky. I'm not sure.
- Beeline on to CS (Bureaucracy!) and Machinery (Samurai!)
- At this point you should have something like 3 highly promoted warlord axemen in the pass. Upgrade for free to samurai. These will hold the pass until rifling and get an insane number of promotions. If you've done well, this should coincide with when the AI starts to throw larger number of cats at you. They're no match for the mighty Samurai warlords! You'll quickly get Combat VI and Drill IV to make them even more invincible.
- Prioritized techs later: Rifling, biology, assembly line, robotics.
- Cheaper techs that you've neglected, can usually be researched within 1-2 turns at this time, or preferably, be obtained for "free" with spies. To keep ahead in the arms race until robotics you need to shave every turn you can. I recommend avoiding unnecessary or only marginally useful techs. For example, I avoided animal husbandry/HR altogether in my game. Who needs horses?
- GG strategy: When I got samurai, I had something like 3-4 axe warlords in the pass, and 20 additional axes and 5 spears. Instead of turning down the science slider to get gold for upgrades (you'll be filthy rich later in the game, but at this point you want to maximize research) I went for a strategy of allocating each new GG to the most highly promoted axeman. You'll get so many GG's that in time you'll have 14-15 of them. Free upgrades! Once my 2-3 best warlords started to run out of beneficial promotions, I started a tactic of moving them away to give my less experienced warlords promotions. Of course, if there was a nasty looking stack at the doorstep, I'd move in my top warlords to stay safe. Seemed to work well.

I built the SoZ as well; don't know how much it helped, but the size of AI cities seemed to indicate happiness problems (war weariness) on their side, so I think it made an impact.

Also, I used one of my early generals on a warrior and gave him full medic promotions. The guy never got upgraded obviously. With some other med promotions here and there, the stack at the pass NEVER got harmed.

Of course, in my case, all this became moot since Genghis Khan won a diplo victory in the early 1700's!

Also, One question regarding this game. Is it wise to build a fort at the choke point? I can get CG promotion to man it but that opens me up to CR attacks (which cats typically have).

Perhaps by the time you have riflemen it'll be worth it. Someone should do the math I'm too lazy to do

Noticed that the cats always seemed to have CR I + II. But they don't do too much damage anyway when you start to have super-warlords in the pass.

 

[madscientist]

That was another question of mine, I setteld teh GGs but I see it would be better to have several GG-attached units rather than a slew of mildly promoted units.

Also thinking of rotating our units. Get some fresh one sin there and keepr several as backup to swap out after the cat damage.

 

[LlamaCat]

That was another question of mine, I setteld teh GGs but I see it would be better to have several GG-attached units rather than a slew of mildly promoted units.

Also thinking of rotating our units. Get some fresh one sin there and keepr several as backup to swap out after the cat damage.

that's exactly what I am doing... I think 4 great general axemen is all you need for ages and ages, and you upgrade them to Samurai for free once available. rotate then off the tile at times, but be careful because sometimes a big enough stack comes by to get lucky and kill one of your generals sometimes.

I bumped myself down to Monarch and so far it feels so easy after a few failed attempts on Deity and Emperor, but then I haven't pushed out of my corner of the world yet.

 

[madscientist]

that's exactly what I am doing... I think 4 great general axemen is all you need for ages and ages, and you upgrade them to Samurai for free once available. rotate then off the tile at times, but be careful because sometimes a big enough stack comes by to get lucky and kill one of your generals sometimes.

I bumped myself down to Monarch and so far it feels so easy after a few failed attempts on Deity and Emperor, but then I haven't pushed out of my corner of the world yet.

I cna change the difficulty of the game I downloaded? I thought I was stuck with the save as is.

 

[CocoLoco]

You can change the difficulty and a few other things if you go into WorldBuilder and save it as a WorldBuilder file. Then go to the main menu and start a custom scenario. You should see the file you just saved. Select it and you can change the difficulty and victory conditions.

 

[Turinturambar]

Regarding fast teching: Here is my turn by turn playthrough for the initial oracle slingshot. I´d be curious if you find something to improve:

turn0: research hunting, build worker, move warrior to goody hut, work rice.

turn2: Pop goody hut for mining, move warrior to second goody hut

turn 7: Pop goody hut for masonry, move warrior to the north hut

turn 10: hunting finished, research agriculture


turn 11: buddhism founded in a distant land

turn 13: worker finished, start another worker, start improving deer

turn 14: pop bronce working, warrior goes south to hunt scouts

turn 19: deer improved, move worker to the corn, start chopping the forest

turn 21: meet ghenghis' scout

turn 22: meet shaka, focus espionage only on him.

turn 25: worker finished, start another worker, so he gets the hammers from chopping.

turn 26: agriculture finished, both workers improve the corn, switch production from worker to great wall, so that the city can grow, research pottery

turn 27: meet hammurabi

turn 28: war chariot quest: yeah very likely that I will do that as it requires you to stay in the classical age

turn 29: corn improved

turn 31: both workers start chopping the gold mine.

turn 32: city grows to size 2, switch production back to worker

turn 33: worker finished, goes to chop the copper hill

turn 35: warrior kills hammurabis scout

turn 36: gold mine finished, wheat is the next tile to get improved

turn 37: city grows to size 3, meet tokugawa

turn 39: pottery in, change production to granary, research writing

turn 42: change deer tile to unimproved silver so that the city grows after granary is finished.

turn 43: granary finished, wheat improved, work all 3 improved high food tiles. workers improve gems next.

turn 44: city grows to size 4

turn 45: copper improved, worker joins the others to improve the gems.

turn 47: city grows to size 5

turn 48: GW finished, start axemen, move warrior to the top to pop the last hut for a chance on mathematics once writing is in.

turn 49: gems improved, switch production from copper to gems, workers start chopping rice.

turn 50: city grows to size 6

turn 51: writing in, start mathematics

turn 52: axeman finishes, start library, stonehenge built in a distant land, rice chopped, move workers to silver to chop wood, pop hut, gold.

turn 53: city grows to size 7

turn 56: city grows to size 8, library finished, assign two scientist specialists which were working unimproved land. warrior reaches city and takes over garrison duty, axeman goes archer hunting.

turn 57: rice improved, switch copper tile to rice, workers start improving the ivory.

turn 59: axeman wins against a quecha

turn 60: city grows to size 9

turn 61: meet montezuma, axeman finished, start pyramids, hinduism founded, workers improve the fur, work the improved ivory tile instead of copper.

turn 63: city grows to size 10, fur improved, gets worked, workers improve silver.

turn 65: mathematics in, research mysticism. Axeman kills an archer.

turn 67: mysticism in, research meditation, siwtch production to monument, silver improved, switch ivory to silver, workers head towards the marble.

turn 68: axemen kill two scouts, city grows to size 11, work ivory again.

turn 70: monument finishes, resume pyramid build.meditation finished, research priesthood.

turn 72: priesthood in, research code of laws.

turn 73: great scientist born, builds academy, one scientist specialist switched to copper mine.

turn 74: marble hooked up, start building cottages.

turn 75: switch production to oracle

turn 76: city grows to size 12, citizen works as a science specialist.

turn 77: cottage finished, starts getting worked.

turn 79: second cottage finished, second science specialist removed to work it, workers start chopping forests.

turn 81 1975 BC: Col finished, oracle finished, research metal casting, pick cs, revolt to bureaucracy, switch production to conf temple, delete missionary.

 

[Gliese 581]

in warlords i played a game where i needed to get a time victory but i also needed to leave all victory conditions enabled (HoF QM purposes). my approach was to stick around forever, duel map, with one opponent, playing OCC. one opponent, and force him to play OCC too by not by his choice. i was shaka, and i did have copper (yay dancing impis!) and elephants in my BFC, iron within a couple border pops. i never had ponies, oil (one tile out of reach waaaaah!), or uranium. conveniently i was playing Settler level so that wasn't a major problem but it was definitely educational. i'm now convinced that making marines and mech infantry resource-less units is a great and necessary design decision; if i'd been playing on a normal level i'd have been squished. that game was ridiculouly fun.

Yes I would probably not have finished the game if I hadn't been able to get a resource-less unit with more than 1 move! Watching the replay was fun. At first one AI city after another grudgingly dissappearing, only to be replaced just as quickly as my infantry stacks moves deeper into enemy territory. Then in the 1900s when I spend 10k gold to upgrade my troops to mech infantry, the whole continent is cleared in a couple of turns. No need for siege units when you have mech inf. vs riflemen.

 

[Turinturambar]

Hmm seems there is always stuff left to optimize. Got a conquest victory in 1670 AD with a better tech path/buildorder. Biology in 110 BC.

 

[lovelyfunbags]

You can change the difficulty and a few other things if you go into WorldBuilder and save it as a WorldBuilder file. Then go to the main menu and start a custom scenario. You should see the file you just saved. Select it and you can change the difficulty and victory conditions.

lol i finally worked out how to do that last night - took me hours to work it out

it's quite a challenge getting even promotions for your uber defenders. i messed up my tech path first time but it's a fun scenario

edit: forgot to say that shaka and boudicia were at war for a far bit of the early game

 

[madscientist]

Thanks, I have been playing CIV since it came out and that was the first time I ever used worldbuilder (Yeah, I am a bit slow). Dropped the difficulty to my usual Monarch (probably too easy though), slingshot Fuedalsim from the oracle (I can within 2 turns of doing it at diety), and dropped a pair of longbows at the choke point (one up the drill line, the other up the hill defense line). Now I am using Samuri and teching towards liberalism and rifling. Also changed victory to conditions to Conquest only.

A very enjoyable game!!!

 

[Quotey]

Heh I finally got a perfect round: Here is
something you don´t see every day, biology in the BCs on Deity level.

Whoah. Can you do a walkthrough of that?

 

[madscientist]

Another question from my game, forgive me but OCC are a new thing for me.

Unfortunately my first three GPs were Spys due to the great Wall. How best to use them on a OCC with always war??

Isettled the first 2, then built Scotland yard. I figure the beakers were great (representation) and getting over 50 EPs which would be used later on a massive number of spies when the army rolls out. Seamed dumb to start GAs as I am ahead in tech and wonders (did I say Monrch is too easy for this game?).

 

[KMadCandy]

Unfortunately my first three GPs were Spys due to the great Wall. How best to use them on a OCC with always war??

I settled the first 2, then built Scotland yard....Seamed dumb to start GAs as I am ahead in tech and wonders (did I say Monarch is too easy for this game?).

yeah, you did mention Monarch being too easy . that's exactly why i tweaked stuff and made my own difficulty for this game. i wanted them to tech and produce at deity level still but i wanted to be around for at least a little bit to see it! you'll get more of a challenge doing something similar, or increasing difficulty; mileages vary of course, use your own definition of fun .

when they are set to deity, you have no hope of keeping up on EPs. just in sheer number of cities, if they build a courthouse in each one that's 2 EPs free right there, and then jail / security bureau / intelligence agency, and they will build those given time. and because they are always at war with you and only you (edit: see below for how lovelyfunbags got a lucky exception!), chances are they'll be aiming most of those EPs at you at some point. but the more EPs you do have, the more their spy missions will cost them and the more likely you are to catch them and not get sabotaged, so having EPs of your own is still a good thing.

so i'd settle the first 1, scotland yard #2. i didn't get any spies until quite late, so a spy bomb wouldn't have done me any good at all. 4500 points wouldn't even given me investigate city capability for most of their cities, they have that much of an EP lead over me. getting your first 3 great people as spies is bad luck, especially on a level where you can't spy bomb and steal useful techs, ugh.

sometimes i discover 3 enemy spies in my territory on the same turn. and most of them learned democracy only recently, and none of them have communism (?whichever tech gives GSpy to the first who learns it), so there are still 2 espionage buildings they don't have in their cities. they go EP crazy, i promise you . and because they're deity, they can still produce troops and tech fast while doing it! sploiters . too much fun!

edit: i didn't notice this at first:

edit: forgot to say that shaka and boudicia were at war for a far bit of the early game

that's awesome luck right there! the AIs don't know they're in an Always War vs. the human game until they meet you and you DoW them. in any game, once they're in a war, they'll never declare a new war unless they're bribed into it, or forced to by vassals / AP / something like that. so the only way to get an AI-AI war in an Always War game, afaik, is for them to go at it early, if one of them hasn't met you yet and declares on the other.

 

[Turinturambar]

Whoah. Can you do a walkthrough of that?

So here is how to get Biology in the BCS:

a) Get incredibly lucky, I wasn´t able to reliably hold the pass with this buildorder.

b) Follow this tech path: After CS, first go for metalcasting to get the +3 happy forge, then the path to literature for the great library and national epic. Afterwards research music to get the great artist for a golden age. That golden age finally allows you to adopt representation, caste system and confucianism immediately without anarchy. Research philosphy to make the switch to pacifism during the golden age as well.

After philosophy (should be about 1200 BC now) beeline to machinery and use the first great general that your axes have hopefully generated to make a free upgrade of your most experienced axeman. Once this is done the path to your valley is safe until massed flanking 2 horse archers show up, so focus on economy now.

Next tech goal is education, you will most likely generate a great scientist that you can use to bulb education and save a lot of turns. After education go for the printing press, then it´s a straight beeline to chemistry, research liberalism to one turn of completion, bulb another great scientist to partially research sci method and use liberalism to pick biology.

You might have to make a quick detour to drama if you have insufficient happiness at some point.

b) Focus on science buildings, e. g. monasteries are more important than an aqueduct. Only build the necessary and useful wonders ( e.g. great wall, oracle, great library, pyramids, hanging gardens). Use a minimum of axes(2-4) and build 2 musketmen with gunpowder to compliment your samurai general.

c) Always grow your city as fast as possible to the ever raising happy cap.The AI loves to assign a useless specialist when you want to quickly grow your cottages/city. The city should be size 20 in ~900BC.

d) You only need one great general to hold the pass reinforced by some woody3/guerrilla2 muskets. The others wouldn´t effectively fight anyway and would only get collateraled to uselessness anyway. Apart from the first you should settle them all for the beaker/xp bonus until you get railroad.

 

[Puzzlemaker]

Okay, so I was trying this, and I was trying a bit of an unorthodox way of doing things. I was trying to use archers as defense at first, due to the fact that they get a bonus on hills. Later I was planning to build a fort, so they get their city defense bonus also. However, that method doesn't work quite as well as one would hope.

New plan: Get axeman, defend with them, THEN get archers, move axeman out and let archers play with their nice little fort.

 

[PanzerEric]

I tried again and I think I have found the optimum playstyle now which gets me tanks buildable at 1300 AD and mech infantry at ~1550 AD.

Those three techs from huts really speed everything up drastically
CS slingshot finished in 1925 BC complete with golden age from a great spy, so that I could adopt confucianism/representation/bureaucracy/caste system without anarchy.
Second GA with another great spy and the music artist followed soon after so that I got pacifism without anarchy as well.

I almost got to biology in the BCs, but since my second gp was a great engineer my academy was delayed a little, so that I had to "wait" for biology until 145 AD.

I think finishing in the 1700s is possible but the conquering part gets boring pretty fast.

How do you get Bronzeworking to pop from one of the huts inside the "good guy" area? I have played this scenario so many times and have popped the huts in different orders, sometimes with a scout, sometimes with a warrior and the most I have ever got was Animal Husbandry. I have tried it by getting the two huts just outside the fortified pass but no matter what I do I cannot get BW to pop. How do you do this?????

Thanks for the help.