Deity, some questions, and more

[No.Dice]

"This is the ultimate civilization challenge, for those who think they've learned to beat the game." They sure weren't kidding I'm not talking about tiny and small maps, where you can pop rush a few horsemen and win the game before your empire collapses into ruins. But rather huge pangaea maps where all the wheat, cattle, and whip cracking in the ancient world won't save you.

Well i pretend to know what i'm talking about, but just how playable is Deity on huge maps?

Of course your science rate will be set to 0 and you'll be purchasing techs for quite awhile. Aside from that, due to the great advantage the AI gets, that leaves you a pretty passive role. If you stay in the passengers seat though, your opponents advantage only gets bigger over time, making an early war with your weakest neighbor a neccessity. Bringing us to the tried and true method of pop rushing under despotism.

Whats the balance between pop rushing and expansion? How many cities do you ususually have before you switch gears? Keep in mind, theres a lot of free land to settle and the AI builds much faster than you, and also techs much faster than you.

Speaking from experience, You have to hit the AI with those horsemen before it researches feudalism, which can happen awhile before the ADs. Those cities grow fast, meaning for an extra +50% defensive bonus for those spearmen your horses already fair poorly enough agaisnt.

I guess i'm kind of in between difficulty levels right now, i'm defeating everything on emperor handily, but getting trounced on deity. The difference is night and day! I prefer huge maps much more to small ones, the more civs, the merrier, making my deity experience much harsher.

 

[johnD]

don't worry about science. focuse on your economic development, diplomacy and resources. choose your wars. use fast units to save them. save leaders for rushing very important wonders (Hoover Dam).
i use population rushing in far cities crippled by corruption and newly conquested/built cities for building temples/marketplaces.
i never give more than 3 pops in that process. i tried in my current game deity/huge/japan to rush a factory by sacrifice of 9 workers. well it's tough, you need the 8 luxuries and military police under communism.
i m winning my second game with these techniques : diplomacy, economy and well-chosen wars.
don't waste anything on science except the start and the end of the game.
the ai builds faster but he wastes a lot, that's the key !

ps: sorry for my poor english

 

[Oswyn]

Like you, I was pretty frustrated initially when I was playing on Deity cause of the massive AI beginning advantage but, lately, I have actually found Deity pretty playable on huge pangaea map with the max no. of civs.

I think the key to winning on Deity on a huge map is definitely TRADING – its even more important on this level to be the “tech-broker” than any other level. During all of ancient times and part of the middle ages, you have to learn to swallow your pride until you can build a large enough military and a war-chest. I stayed out of wars totally by giving the rival civs whatever they wanted in the beginning. Instead, I concentrated on getting as much land as possible (especially land with resources and luxuries) and, more importantly, getting all 15 contacts and trading whatever I could (eg. communications, maps, luxuries, gold) to keep up with the tech race (tech rate at minimum at this point). Never overpay for tech unless value can be extracted from it by trading. Its fine to wait a couple of turns in order to trade for a tech that everyone else has as semi-outdated techs depreciate rather quickly. Once I’m close to being on par with the other civs on tech, I saved up cash to get that one tech that is only discovered by one or two advanced civs and traded it with every other civ whenever they could afford it. I keep doing this, checking with 15 civs on almost every turn to ensure that not one trade is left on the table (believe me, this gets rather tedious after a few hundred turns!). The idea is to force the other civs to allocate more resources in generating gold to pay you rather than on research so that you can stay on top of tech research.

Money will build up pretty quickly and that is usually when I would switch my focus to building up my military (usually with knights at this point). With a built-up military and a healthy cash flow from trading, I would look for a suitable civ to take over (which is usually the civ that is right next door to minimize corruption and culture flipping). It doesn't really matter how strong that target civ is as you should have enough money to form military alliances with other civs surrounding that target civ to pile on the pressure. In my last game, my Babylonians took on the Persians (who was the strongest and largest civ while I was supposedly the weakest) right next to me and managed to wipe them off with the help of eight other civs. I usually raze the cities that I conquer unless there is a useful wonder or if its close to my capital.

When I start to get on par on tech and to generate a healthy gold/turn from rival civs, I would crank up my tech rate to 100% and sometimes use espionage to steal tech (better to waste the money than to let the rival civ use my money on research). Always trade techs once the rival civs can afford them unless it is some key wonder-building or militaristic tech. In my last game, I managed to get more than 5000 gold/turn from the rival civs and launch my spaceship in 1440AD.

Hope that helps.

 

[Stradius]

I managed to win a game on diety on a standard map (in fact i dominated). I suppose a bit of luck helped, but its doable. THe key is to be AGGRESSIVE. if you think you can win a war, start one. Trying to beat a diety game on large although its very hard.. the AI has at least twice as much territory as me by time the map is filled.

One thing i forgot to mention.. Use MPPs to "distract" your opponents. THe japs (the no.2 civ, only behind a bit) attacked me but the MPP i had with a few other nations basically through the whole world into war. The war never ended, until i finally won the space race. The result is the AI spent resources on military, where my civ was powerful enough (under communism) to research in about 8-9 turns and managed to build wonders/city improvements and enough units to be effective in war. I headed straight to modern armor, and once i got modern armor (noone else had it), the **** hit the fan for the rest of the world =). A conquest wouldve been easy, as i nuked almost every major city in the world but i just won the space race because I was too lazy to attack the americans (who were on a different island).

 

[No.Dice]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

So far so good in my current game, its 450 BC and i'm playing my first game as the Indians on a huge Pangaea map. I've just begun to catch up territory wise to the AI, though my cities are significantly smaller than the Ai's. I've virtually no standing military, 800 gold in my coffers (spent quite a bit buying improvements), and 190 per turn rolling in from other civs. Been tech brokering like a fiend, checking all of the top civs nearly every turn, and its paid off big. Though it does get pretty tedious, the main thing was certainly intense trading and tech brokering. Thanks Oswyn

I think the key for me was getting out of that whole tiny map rush horsemen under despot mindset. I'm finding the middle ages a much more viable time to wage war.

 

[Cybernut]

The strategy I developed mirrors the one described above by Oswyn.

The one difference in my game is that I look to build only upgradable units. I look to wage war in the industial age, so I want units that are upgradable all the way: Spearmen - Pikemen - Musketmen - Riflemen - Infantry - Mech Inf.

This way, when the tank becomes available, I begin an all out attack on one of my neighbours - with Tank and Infantry (if you don't attack, they surely will if you're in a position to win!). This begins the expansion of my empire. Like Oswyn, I mix-up razing and keeping cities (no point keeping the big-uns unless the empire you're attacking is nearly destroyed). I like to keep settlers at hand to fill the ground.

When success is at hand I look to re-evaluate. I'll either continue with the war at this stage if I think I can press for a quick win, OR, I look to win by "peaceful" means (space race ... though rarely diplomatic as this is very unsatisfying) OR, I re-group my forces and direct my tech research/brokering into Mech Inf and Modern Armour advances. When they become available, I waste no time in pushing for a domination / conquest victory.

The cool thing is that I can now direct much of my cities resources' away from military production toward more profitable means - all the building has already been done by adopting a clear military strategy from the beginning - by only building fully upgradable units.