Alright, folks. I finally got through this game and have a first Deity victory under my belt. Granted, this is a pretty dirty victory given that I tried the map multiple times and I knew the layout, and I also had to reload twice to rethink a couple of poor strategic decisions. But hey, it's a start! I think I learned some valuable lessons that I will try to apply in my next deity play-through.
To win this, I started from the position above where I captured Scotland. I built cities to cover all remaining accessible space that didn't bulge too much into other civs' territory, using the city-states as a buffer. Per others' advice, I then immediately focused on catching up on infra: I aggressively chopped out campuses and, to a lesser extent, commercial hubs and theater squares, to quickly get up and running. I then focused on peaceful improvement with detours for some military techs to have a viable defense, prioritizing every scientific building (library/university/research lab). Finally, when I got close to winning, I got the Royal Society Government Plaza building, and started spamming workers to rush all the space-ship parts.
Main problems/mistakes:
-One mistake I made after my initial expansion phase is to go after one of the city-states between me and the Cree. This immediately resulted in all other civs denouncing me as a warmonger, and backfired 50 turns later, when I was at war with France and barely hanging on, and got DoW'd by the Cree in a war for territorial expansion. I went back to the point where I'd made this decision and just left the city-state as a buffer. This did take away slightly from my empire size, but I was able to eventually get Friendship declarations from Arabia, Mapuche, and Cree not long after, which was very useful for the rest of the game. To be fair, I had a gut feeling when I tried this that it was a bad idea.
-The biggest problem I had by far, was dealing with France: because of the giant border between us, I had to constantly maintain a relatively large and expensive army, relying on timed upgrades to try to keep the costs at least somewhat under control. I had to fight an Industrial Age war that I was able to survive by liberal use of Field Cannon and some Infantry, but it was definitely a struggle and I felt that it could have easily swung the other way. Then in the Modern Era, France started massing troops on my border, but luckily I seem to have been able to get just enough military (seems like airplanes did the trick - I got a message from her about it) to make her change her mind, and eventually actually declare friendship with me. I think this is the biggest area where I need advice in this match: how do I maintain a sufficient military force without bleeding unnecessary gold throughout the entire game paying for it (obviously, aside from using the correct cards)? I'm wondering if the only actual viable solution here is to force the other Civs to like you - a lot - by pandering to whatever their specific civ trait is (e.g. with France I should have focused more on espionage than I did), but relying on friendship declarations seems like a brittle solution. Also, what is your folks' take on using air-power as defense in the late game? I didn't have to use it, but it seems like having a large number of planes would allow me to tear into invading armies without taking any damage of my own (since AI doesn't seem to prioritize air superiority or anti-air).
-Another minor mistake which could have cost me the game if Arabia was more competitive was starting on a second spaceport too late. It seems like the best strategy here is to time a 2nd (and possibly 3rd) space port to complete shortly after the first one, so that I could parallelize the last 3 components of the ship, taking advantage of the worker boosts. In this game, though, I seem to have pulled it off.
-Finally, though I am not sure whether this is a mistake or just the reality of this particular map, I never quite ran away with the game - at least not in the way that I could run away with games in Emperor and below, where I would be an age or more ahead of the competition by the end of the game. Is this your experience as well? Or, should I have tried to be even more aggressive with science, to try to completely dominate?
So, in short, I think the main problem area here was managing my military/diplomacy after the initial expansion phase to act as a deterrent. Any and all advice here would be welcome.
I also attached a t285 victory screenshot for a rough view of my stats and final empire.
@Victoria, can you please elaborate a bit on this comment: "just not too many times or you can built false positives in your head"? Just want to know what I should be careful of, as I plan to use this approach on my next couple of games.
Huge thanks again to everyone on this thread, for the help here!
To win this, I started from the position above where I captured Scotland. I built cities to cover all remaining accessible space that didn't bulge too much into other civs' territory, using the city-states as a buffer. Per others' advice, I then immediately focused on catching up on infra: I aggressively chopped out campuses and, to a lesser extent, commercial hubs and theater squares, to quickly get up and running. I then focused on peaceful improvement with detours for some military techs to have a viable defense, prioritizing every scientific building (library/university/research lab). Finally, when I got close to winning, I got the Royal Society Government Plaza building, and started spamming workers to rush all the space-ship parts.
Main problems/mistakes:
-One mistake I made after my initial expansion phase is to go after one of the city-states between me and the Cree. This immediately resulted in all other civs denouncing me as a warmonger, and backfired 50 turns later, when I was at war with France and barely hanging on, and got DoW'd by the Cree in a war for territorial expansion. I went back to the point where I'd made this decision and just left the city-state as a buffer. This did take away slightly from my empire size, but I was able to eventually get Friendship declarations from Arabia, Mapuche, and Cree not long after, which was very useful for the rest of the game. To be fair, I had a gut feeling when I tried this that it was a bad idea.
-The biggest problem I had by far, was dealing with France: because of the giant border between us, I had to constantly maintain a relatively large and expensive army, relying on timed upgrades to try to keep the costs at least somewhat under control. I had to fight an Industrial Age war that I was able to survive by liberal use of Field Cannon and some Infantry, but it was definitely a struggle and I felt that it could have easily swung the other way. Then in the Modern Era, France started massing troops on my border, but luckily I seem to have been able to get just enough military (seems like airplanes did the trick - I got a message from her about it) to make her change her mind, and eventually actually declare friendship with me. I think this is the biggest area where I need advice in this match: how do I maintain a sufficient military force without bleeding unnecessary gold throughout the entire game paying for it (obviously, aside from using the correct cards)? I'm wondering if the only actual viable solution here is to force the other Civs to like you - a lot - by pandering to whatever their specific civ trait is (e.g. with France I should have focused more on espionage than I did), but relying on friendship declarations seems like a brittle solution. Also, what is your folks' take on using air-power as defense in the late game? I didn't have to use it, but it seems like having a large number of planes would allow me to tear into invading armies without taking any damage of my own (since AI doesn't seem to prioritize air superiority or anti-air).
-Another minor mistake which could have cost me the game if Arabia was more competitive was starting on a second spaceport too late. It seems like the best strategy here is to time a 2nd (and possibly 3rd) space port to complete shortly after the first one, so that I could parallelize the last 3 components of the ship, taking advantage of the worker boosts. In this game, though, I seem to have pulled it off.
-Finally, though I am not sure whether this is a mistake or just the reality of this particular map, I never quite ran away with the game - at least not in the way that I could run away with games in Emperor and below, where I would be an age or more ahead of the competition by the end of the game. Is this your experience as well? Or, should I have tried to be even more aggressive with science, to try to completely dominate?
So, in short, I think the main problem area here was managing my military/diplomacy after the initial expansion phase to act as a deterrent. Any and all advice here would be welcome.
I also attached a t285 victory screenshot for a rough view of my stats and final empire.
@Victoria, can you please elaborate a bit on this comment: "just not too many times or you can built false positives in your head"? Just want to know what I should be careful of, as I plan to use this approach on my next couple of games.
Huge thanks again to everyone on this thread, for the help here!