Deity level challenge: standard sized continent map, speed normal

[Snaaty]

I have been experimenting lately with deity level. Played so far only on large or huge maps but have been asked to try a map with the following settings:

Standard sized continent map with normal speed, everything else random.

As civ I handpicked Persia. Wasn’t for the strategy, was more because I like them somehow since civ I (Babylonians). They are not specially fit for this challenge (start without mining and their UU is more or less useless against the AI), but if we are lucky and have horses, we don’t have to bother of barbarian archers.

I don’t think we will win this, but so far it seems that we can put up a decent fight (already played some turns).


see you

Snaaty

 

[Snaaty]

1. Survive somehow the barbarian onslaught:
…


2. Expand ASAP:

For this, I will build in the following order:
- worker
- warrior
- worker
- (warrior if barbs are near)
- setter
I will try to build 4 – 6 cities. This will be quite hard on this map size, because the AI will start with:
- 2 settlers
- 2 workers
- 2 scouts
- 4 archers
I will place the cities after the following order and criteria:
- First city to get copper (better) or horses (worse)2 workers
- Next cities to block AI off
- Next cities to get happiness and money resources


3. Research order:

Starting techs:
I will go for mining & bronze working ASAP to be able to chop and to see copper. Next is animal husbandry (to see horses), then the wheel.

Trading techs:
The first trading techs are writing and alphabet. I will try to trade alphabet for:
1. iron working and mysticism
2. meditation & x
3. priesthood & x
Then cods of law, philosophy and civil service. I will try to trad them for:
1. math
2. currency
3. construction
4. calendar
5. monarchy
6. metal casting
When we still live, then on to paper, nationalism and military tradition. Trade them for:
1. Machinery
2. Feudalism
3. Music
4. Guilds
After that I don’t think we will trade any more, because we will be to far back in tech


4. Great Persons

When writing is researched, we will set 2 scientist to work. The first great scientist that appears, we will use to lightbulb philosophy. Then we switch government to pacifism to double the research and use the next great scientist to lightbulb paper. Then we don’t need any more great persons and put everybody to work on the feelds…


5. Wonders

No wonders


6. Military strategy

When we have found our cities, I will try to produce an invasion army containing mainly of swordsmen and try to conquer the nearest (and hopefully weakest) AI. It would be good if we would start near somebody like Gandy, who produces not so much army. We will attack in 2 waves:
1. Take 2 – 4 cities, make peace ASAP (even offer a tech or money for it). We will never survive any longer war, because the computer simply outproduces us…
2. Build more army in the peace period, focus on catapults this time because we will have to take on longbow men by then and try to take the same AI out completely

When we survive this quest and take some cities, we will try to do our next war with cavalry and grenadiers


7. Winning strategy

Loosing the space race. If we are lucky, we won’t finish last…


see you

Snaaty

 

[Snaaty]

Here we go:

Pic. 1_4000 BC:

View attachment 143993

Since there wasn’t much resources nearby, I decided to move the settler two tiles south (direction pigs). Scouted a little and met my nearest neighbor:

Tokugawa – argh – he will never trade, open border or do anything god to us. He will produce quite a big army, so that a very bad draw.

We have no copper in our visible range and happiness resources nearby, another setback.

But when we research animal husbandry, we see horses near the fat cross of our starting city. So our two workers and our warrior are commanded to go there and to bring them home.


Pic. 2_2560 BC:

View attachment 143994

The forest 2 tiles to the right of the horses seems a good spot to settle.

Our settler will also be ready soon and I end the first session here.


see you

Snaaty

 

[mice]

I just played on from the 2560 BC save and got killed by barbs. I dont know how you resist these onslaughts. But that's not surprising because I play at Prince.

Looking forward to see how you do it.

 

[futurehermit]

REALLY looking forward to this. Even if you lose, I'd like to see how far you can get.

I was the one that requested this, so thanks for doing it.

 

[Snaaty]

Barbs start appearing from 3000 BC on. Up to 2000 BC, the wont normally enter your territory unless you drag them in via an improvement near your cultural border or a road (only in about one out of 5 games, they come after my capital before 2000 BC, when I follow this rules).

So I build my strategy on this aspect.

At about 2300 BC you normally have two workers, one warrior and one settler ready. Even better, if you manage to settle your capital on a plain hill, because then you have them already by 2500 BC because of the extra hammer (even if you have to spent 1 to 3 turns to go there, do it).

In about 80% of the games you have copper or horses within a radius of 10 tiles from your capital. So pack everything in (workers, warrior and settler) and move to settle direct on one of those resources. Chop down 2 forests near this city and within 4 rounds you have two chariots, or 1, 5 axmen. You still have enough time to move one back to your capital for defense, before the real fun begins. No copper, no horse, GAME OVER.


In this special case it was different, because the horses were already inside my cultural border, but not in the fat cross of the capital. So I built a road towards them (2 turns) and built the horse thingy on them (2 turns). Then I chopped down a forest nearby (2 turns) and my first immortal was ready. Before that, only one barb archer appeared, already weakened, and I had fortified my warrior in the woods before the horses and won the fight straight away, so I had no real problem with the barbs.

…


2280 AD, we built the “horse city”, (Pasagarde), and 1760 AD we built one blocking city (Susa), because we had made contact with another neighbor, Huayna (lets call him Huy from now on) who seemed to live up there.

Not perfect, but a little better then Tokugawa (Toki), because he will trade with us, at least up to codes of law / philosophy and he wont backstab us, when we get him to friendly…


As you can see, so far only one immortal is stationed centered between our cities. That is enough for defense, because we would always be able to chop reinforcement within 3 turns (including the walk to the forest). But since we want to expand now a little further, Pasagarde builds one more.

…

I don’t chop down woods, unless it is absolutely necessary, because chopping was quite nerfed in the last patch. I try to keep as many woods as possible, until I have math, then I chop them down (here I really mean chop them down, ALL of them) to speed up army production.

…

We had to switch research down to 80 %, (will get worse) because still no happiness and wealth resources in reach. There is silver and fur at the South Pole, but this is quite far away from our capital and we will have to pay huge upkeep if we settle there (but I think we will have to). Additionally we have Toki who is nearer to this place with his border settlement…

What now is also clear: we will have no copper….

Pic. 3_1520 BC:

View attachment 144020


1440 BC we found our second blocking city (Arbela) to our north and are now save from Huy.

We are lucky. Near the South Pole, a barb settlement appears. The location is bad, we will have to burn it down, but at least it will prevent Toki from settling there. We build 5 immortals and take the city 1160 without any losses and burn it down. We earn 16 Gold, what is very unlucky (had hoped for something like 50-100 Gold).

975 BC our South Pole station (Arbela) is founded. Since the silver and the fur are still outside our territory, we will have to wait for our culture to grow and are now down to 60% in science and still losing money. We command two workers down there to prepare the roads for those resources.

Another barb settlement appears to the north, and we head there (to burn it down). But when we approach, we find diamonds and spices nearby (the diamonds are in jungle, so we will have to wait for iron working, and spices we will probably never harvest because we will only trade for calendar, when we have traded all the techs we absolutely need&#8230 but still they are there. We take the city (Yayoi) 925 BC, get 34 gold (again bad luck) and decide to keep it. Now we are running a minus of 16 Gold per round at 60 % science, but Alphabet will be through in 4 turns and we just have spotted one more barb city west of Yayoi (perhaps we get some money there)…

One more city has to be founded in-between South Pole station (Arbela) and the rest of our territory or Toki will squeeze a city in. Since we absolutely cant afford that, we just fortify a settler there and wait for Toki to appear with his settler.

Pic. 4_925 BC:

View attachment 144019

Our troops statistics:

6 immortals
5 workers (one captured from barbs)
1 settler (fortified and waiting for Toki to arrive)
1 warrior (our number one)


see you

Snaaty

 

[futurehermit]

Questions:

Why fortify a settler waiting for Toki to arrive?

Why build a city so far away initially? Doesn't that risk Toki in fact settling between your cities?

 

[LosBlack]

Why fortify a settler waiting for Toki to arrive?

i think Snaaty is putting off the costs of the extra city as long as possible. as soon as Toku tries to settle the spot, Snatty has to suck it up and bite the bullet..

 

[Snaaty]

Questions:

Why fortify a settler waiting for Toki to arrive?

Why build a city so far away initially? Doesn't that risk Toki in fact settling between your cities?

I fortified the settler on the spot where I planned to build the city so I would be able to actually build the city one turn (or better two turns) before Toki arrives there with his settler. I let him walk there, then I found the city, let him walk back. Anything that slows the AI is good. I wanted to build this city as late as possible, because I was already fighting with upkeep problems...



I built the city so far away to get access to fur and silver. I had to build this city first, because fur and silver were outside the initiall cultural border and I needed that to grow. I needed fur and silver ASAP because I wanted my other cities to grow larger

 

[Snaaty]

We are still alive (that good) and nobody had declared war on us so far (also good).

Bad news:

We got 17 Gold for razing the last remaining barb city (slowly I start to consider this as unfair)

Good news:

We met Hatshepshut (Hatschi, that is good, goes for city development, medium troop production, wont backstab us) and Victoria (Vicky, that is neutral, she produces quite a big army, but she is very trustworthy once friendly)

Best is, that both of them will normally trade with us up to the bitter end (which will be when we run out of trading techs…)

Right now we are researching civil service and are waiting for our first great scientist to bring home Philosophy. It will take 5 turns more before he appears. The alphabet trades we planned to do all went smoothly. Only Toki was faster in having alphabet but since he never will trade with us I tent to ignore him. He already has Codes of Law, the other don’t have it so far, so I decide to hold back that trade to the others since nobody has found Taoism so far. I will trade Codes of Law out one or two round before the GS appears)

Pic. 5_250 BC:

View attachment 144024

Gordium was finally found 900 BC when Toki and his settler arrived…

Since we have 6 workers working the land, we focus now completely on army production. All our cities have already build barracks and are now producing swordsmen. 5 Swordsmen are in so far, more in production. Still no woods chopped, since we are delaying our math trade in hope for getting philosophy first.


see you

Snaaty

 

[Snaaty]

Since I didn’t pay attention what the other civs were doing (as usual), I recognized to late that Vicky had declared war on Toki and was coming for him with a huge army.

The units of her I saw only on this screen were:
- 6 elephants
- 7 chariots
- 1 catapult
- 2 swordsmen
- 1 axmen
- 2 longbow men
- 2 crossbow men
- and a scout (?)

Pic. 6_125 AD:

View attachment 144026

We declared war on Toki this round and moved our troops for Satsuma, but we were coming too late. In fact we took the city defenses down with our catapults and Vicky took the city.

But what do I see:

She razes it. So we immediately chop a setter in Pasagarde and plan to build our own city there…
Accidentally I also set Susa to produce a settler, but this will prove a great thing later…

Our army in 125 AD:
- 13 swordsmen
- 3 axmen
- 2 spearmen
- 3 catapults
- 2 elephants
- 5 immortals
- 2 warriors (nostalgic reasons)

The elephants we got out of a horse/elephant deal with Huy who is now a close friend…

We set our own troops to march for Toki, finish the troops in production (2 catapults, 1 elephant) and set our towns to build up infrastructure. So far, we have none…

Again we are too late and Vicky takes Osaka. But again she burns it down…

So we move first settler to where Osaka has been and found Baktra (and I found out, that you get no advantages when settling on a ruined city…) and we will use second settler to replace Satsuma.

We simply overrun Tokio in 275 AD and advance deep in Japan territory (together with Vicky).

Right now (350 AD) our troops are laying siege to Kioto together with Vicky (I think I will have to marry her) and we hope that this time we are able to take the city for our self.


Pic. 7_350AD:

View attachment 144027

Oh and BTW, we made it for Taoism, as you can see in this screenshot. The planed tech deals also all went through and I could make lots of money with them. Only some turns left we have to spend in Pacifism till next GS appears, so we will stop loosing that much money. We are also doing some resources for money deals that help us funding this little war.

…

So that’s it for today (haven’t played on). All played out much better then I would have expected. It seems that it is easier to mass troops in normal speed than it is in epic speed. Perhaps we would have even been able to take out Toki by ourselves in one go, since he didn’t have that much troops then I had expected.


Still I think we will lose in the long run, but good news is, that we won’t be last

see you

Snaaty

 

[Jet]

Thanks for giving this a shot, good luck.

 

[Jorunkun]

Heya,

thumbs up for doing this. Great challenge, and like your offhand writing style as well. Interestingly, I would have played this in a similar fashion thus far - sketchy, cutting corners, take what you can get ... but do you really reckon you stand a chance at winning this? I mean, I don't care either way, just curious what your expectations are.

Bonne chance!

J.

 

[Snaaty]

Heya,

thumbs up for doing this. Great challenge, and like your offhand writing style as well. Interestingly, I would have played this in a similar fashion thus far - sketchy, cutting corners, take what you can get ... but do you really reckon you stand a chance at winning this? I mean, I don't care either way, just curious what your expectations are.

Bonne chance!

J.

Like I wrote in the initial post:

I base my strategy on deity games I played epic speed, large or huge maps (continents or archipelago). There I finished only 1 game domination victory, 1 game I had to abort shortly before it because my computer couldnt hadle it no more and I paused one game which I think I could win...

 

[Snaaty]

Ups, just posted half the message...

here the rest:

With about 10 to 15 tries that makes a 10 - 20 % chance on winning in those settings (large map, epic speed)

Something like this:

normal speed, standard map I havent done before, so I think we wont make it, although it looks not so bad right now...


The big thing would be, if some of you peoples would take the actual save and give their own tries so we can compare strategy and results.

Like this we could possibly stand a small (maybe 5%) chance of making it or we proove it to be impossible to win on this settings



See you

Snaaty

 

[Snaaty]

Since there hasn´t been any feedback (and I sort of couldn´t wait any longer then 10 hours or so...) I desided to play on.


And here comes the funny part:

Never the less we are still alive and still doing much better then I had thought...

Meanwhile I even start to think that we could have even a small chance of making it to the top in the end (in some strange and mysterious way)


Since it´s quite late now, I will post the save (played a quite long session and would have played on if I wouldn`t be so tired now; save is something inbetween 900 and 1000 AD) and some screens tomorrow...



See you

Snaaty

 

[Snaaty]

When I started this turn set, I checked again the possible tech trades I would be able make when my GS would be ready to lightbulb paper. There I had to see that everybody already had paper. So I had to put my thinking cap on and come up with a new plan:

I switched civics to Bureaucracy and Caste System in lack of a better plan and used the GS to build an academy. I hadn’t tried this before, but since I hadn’t played on this settings before there was not much to loose…

…

We are running a minus of an average of 50 gold per turn at a research rate of 60% now. This is mainly due to our big army and the pacifist settings in our civics. Switching to Bureaucracy and Caste System didn’t to anything to help in this, but at least it didn’t get worse.

Then we experimented a little with setting some scientists to work and ended up having 5 of them in our capital and none in all the other towns. That sort of doubled our research rate and nationalism is down to 20 turns. Additionally we are producing 30 Great Persons Points (GPP) each turn, what would bring us the next GS in 10, one more in 14, one more in 17 one more in 21…

Since our capital had gone stinky and was losing food, we had to trade marble for bananas to stops this (when you actually write it down, you reckon how strange this concept in real life would be).

Pic. 8_475 AD:

View attachment 144145


Now a good idea would be to try to get literacy somehow, because when we would build the National Epic, we would end up with 62 GPP each turn, what makes… umh lots of great scientists.

Cool… ...we will pave the road to our palace with them.

500 BC we met Washington and guess what we traded? Yes, literacy (and compass) for philosophy. We sold literacy immediately to Huy for 470 gold because of our little money problem, set Persepolis to build the national epic immediately and went on stomping down poor Toki.

Now the combined warfare with Vicky was going much better. Our common concept from now on was something like Vicky took the losses, we took the cities. This mainly worked out, because our army was much greater now then Vicky’s, because of her brave (but utter senseless) attempt(s) to take Toki`s hill capital from behind a river

Pic. 9_Vicky burning her troops:

View attachment 144146


Then our next scientist comes in and we plan to settle him in our capital, but then we find out that we could lightbulb optics now. So we change plans (again), lightbulb optics and sent a caravel out to make new friends.

Meanwhile we had divided our army in two troops to speed up conquering Japan (our people started to be a bit unlucky because of the war…)

In 640 AD Toki is finally down and we find ourselves with 15 cities.

Pic. 10_640 AD:

View attachment 144147


Since we are facing heavy culture pressure from Huy on our newly conquered (or re-founded because Vicky had razed them) borderland cities we set them to build libraries.

We change plans (again) and switch back civics to slavery and paganism because the people in our newly conquered cities are starving. Since we don’t want them to starve, we decide to better whip them...

That way we built some libraries and courthouses quite fast and set Kyoto to finally build the forbidden palace.


At 800 AD we discover nationalism. We are second in doing so. Only Hatschi was faster, but since she stopped trading with us some while ago we don’t bother. We trade it for music and feudalism with Vicky. Then we feel like changing our civics (again), so back to caste system and pacifism. Next round we trade music, nationalism and some gold to Washington for astronomy and set research to military tradition. When we then realize, that military tradition will be researched in 16 turns with this settings we finally bow before the power of caste system and decide to use it more often.

…

Since I never had used caste system before I was quite surprised how efficient this is to increase science greatly. I think I will use it from now on in most of my games, because it speeds up research in a way I hadn’t imagined.

Running 5 scientists early to midgame in a food rich city (combined with bureaucracy and pacifism) additionally grants you a horde of GS early on. This alone would be worth doing so but combined with the incredible research bonus it’s simply amazing what options you suddenly have.

…

940 AD we meet Frederick (Freddy) who is angry at us from the start, so we give him music as present. His mood towards us is now cautious. Seems that we hadn’t been second in researching nationalism but third, because Freddy already has it. This is some setback, because we had speculated in getting guilds from the last unknown civilization by trading nationalism…

…

At this point of the game, the timeframe is very important when playing deity. When you are too late in getting military tradition, all of the AI will already have riflemen to defend their cities and its impossible then to conquer anything with cavalry. To move out with grenadiers alone also does no good, because they are to week on the field when faced with cavalry. And producing enough cavalry and grenadiers at the same time just isn’t possible.

…

Then suddenly Huy asks to trade something for astronomy (didn’t now that he hadn’t had that, because hadn’t checked (as usual)). We are sort of surprised since he had quit tech-trading with us about 1000 years ago, but we politely say thank you, pick guilds, 90 gold, his maps and

… immediately start to plan the invasion to his lands (domination) or
… decide that he’s a friend and live in peace and harmony forever (diplomatic) or
… will ignore our neighours from now on and make every sacrifice necessary to increase science (space race)


...

Since it seems that we are in business now, I leave it now up to you to propose which victory condition we should try to pursue. From my experience I would say that domination is easiest, then comes diplomatic, hardest is space race.

If we should be going for space race, there are two possible alternatives in doing so:

- Still going after Huy to get some more cities (producing army now)
- Build only the units necessary for defense and devote everything to research right now

If nobody proposes anything (let say within the next 2 days) I will decide how to go on


See you

Snaaty

 

[luniz]

you had better go domination. you will never win space race when you're so far behind.

 

[BCLG100]

Interesting read so far

 

[Guardian_PL]

Yup, way to go Snaaty
I won't give any sort of advice, I'm getting pale thinking of playing Deity level . I'll be watching. Gathering experience etc.
Full support though, looks to me like You're going to kick AI's butts nicely
I have no idea how AI's behaviour is on that level, but it looks to me like Vicky and Capac could be Your good friends. Unless one of them would be easy to wipe I would remain peaceful and gently build spaceship.
How's the other continent? Relations? Maybe war there/domination??