Deity Science Victory

flarebomb21

Chieftain
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Mar 2, 2017
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was just wondering if anyone has ever won on Deity through a science victory without using a science based civ or a pre-planned god-tier starting location.
 
For Deity level; most science victories include conquering a neighboring AI or two along the way.

It can be taken so far as to be a domination victory by another name (as long as you avoid an accidental conquest-induced culture victory)
 
Yes it's the easiest way to win with any civ.
Just settle 3-5 city tradition empire, stay in your corner and you can win almost every game. It takes some really bad starting luck to lose, generally it'll be because your neighbor is a warmonger and he's just rushing you with his huge early deity cheat army.
But if you can survive that and just mantain an ok defensive army, you generally can't lose if you manage your empire well.
Even if you fall a little behind at the start, your spies will steal good techs from the AI anyway.

Where the AI really fails is the late game, where as a human player you can out-science them. They build trading posts on every tile instead of farms so they have infinite GPT but their cities lack growth and science production. They research military / navigation techs instead of science and they pop their engineers and scientists randomly. They also waste all their faith as soon as they can buy a thing with it. They also don't use internal trade routes to grow their cities, they just send them to you, and they don't aggressively take city-states.

Meanwhile your late game will consist of rationalism, research labs and mass bulbing of saved up scientists. That's not something the AI ever figures to do, if they stay competitive in science it's only through having a ridiculous number of bonuses all the time.

Even then, with a random civ, you can finish usually 10-15 techs ahead of the lead AI. I.e. it takes 75 techs to win space victory, the AI will usually stall out at like 60-65 as the increasing tech cost starts to hurt them a lot because they don't rarely open rationalism and they are generally just working gold everywhere instead of science, production or growth.
 
Here's a list of "hacks" to do it.

1- Always go Tradition. There's no room or point in settling fast cities against Deity AI. If you settle 5 cities fast, they will HATE you instantly and all gang up on you unfairly and stupidly.

2-Always pick Order ideology. All the AI only pick Order or Autocracy. If you pick Freedom ideology, you will suffer up to -43 unhappiness and all the AI will also war you and hate you in the late game. It's completely stupid. If you pick "order", then they will leave you alone and friend you.

3- You can almost always build the Sistine Chapel. I don't know why but the AI don't build this until turn 150+ It's the only wonder you can always get every game if you play well.

4-Always get first ideology by popping Radio with oxford or rationalism or a scientist. The AI almost never researches deep into tech trees, they just research every tech before they go deeper in the tree so this lets you reach information Era first. AI get ideology around turn 180-200 on standard, easy to beat.

5- Always use internal trade routes for food to your capital and then other important cities

6- Before ideologies you can usually bribe your neighbors into attacking someone else. After ideologies, if you didn't pick Order, they will all attack you nonstop no matter what. Great game design I know lol.

7- If you're feeling extra cheesy, park your lvl3 spies in city-states you want, try to flip it by doing a "coup" and then reload if it fails. The game is programmed to decide at the start of the turn if it works or not, so every turn you can try and it'll randomly work. This is definitely cheating though but this saves you like 30k gold.

8- Don't be afraid to take loans from the AI to rush buildings and buy tiles. On standard they will give you 25 gold for 1 gpt, 51 for 2, 76 for 3 etc ( if they're your friend). This is not always correct but can be very strong. For instance early you can be making 5 gpt and you're 100 gold away from buying a settle. If you wait, it'll take you 20 turns. If you take a loan from an AI, you can buy the settler right away. That city now gets 20 turns of free growth and production, and secures the settle spot, all for a net loss of 20 gold lol.

Anyway hope someone finds this useful. I just played a wide liberty game with Russia where I made 12 cities and went Order on a huge map. Won turn 234. Every single AI next to me attacked me and the leader even took one city from me. The crappiest city of all time, but still. Going wide is rewarding for how much science you make later on, but unless you're on a Huge map, there's no room for 12 cities and the AI will all try to murder you relentlessly lol
 
I find science to be the easiest, fallback victory. You can usually make it if you've played well on Deity as the AI does not prioritize well for the victory in the late-game and the human player can really zoom ahead. Here's an example series where I basically just expanded as big as possible with liberty and shoshone, then later worried about science. AI warred me all game tho for it lol, but it was a challenge scenario for me, first time I'd tried huge/wide/liberty/Deity:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/shoshone-deity-huge-empire-challenge-series.567073/

To the guy above: 234 is impressive for a huge map due to the larger tech cost penalties. gg
 
It was on NQ mod too, so no research agreements and nerfed rationalism. Was making 2600science per turn lol. Had 2 great scientists left over.
It was really fun to play a wide map but the turns were insanely slow, like 45 second turn transitions and everything was laggy : (

I rolled a random standard/standard map last night, got Portugal, my plan before the roll was just Tradition/Freedom science. OH BOY lol.

The game is literally just broken when you pick Freedom.
The AI always picks Order. Some will pick Autocracy ( like shaka ) but 90% of the time every AI will go Order so that means that if you pick freedom, you get basically -40 happiness and guaranteed constant late game wars and no gold because you lose all your trades and friends ( and city-states that were allied with the AI ).

But pick Order and you get the reverse. No penalties of any kind and eventually all the AI will be your friend and you can suck their gold dry lol.

Just absolutely broken in my opinion. How did the programmers not notice that the AI always picks only Order lol.
 
Just absolutely broken in my opinion. How did the programmers not notice that the AI always picks only Order lol.

I have a suspision that the AI tends to favor Order & Autocracy if they have a lot of cities. As the AI tends to expand at a fairly linear rate (they'll keep plopping new cities as the game continues) they are probably coded to favor Order.
I have noticed that Venice and other civs that have been pummeled in wars and have only a few cities also tend to go Freedom.
 
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