Deity Spaceship in under 200 turns - a brief guide

[Slowpoke]

Btw, martin, have you tried warrior rushing a CS? You can probably pull it off with as little as 3 warriors. as opposed to the 5-6 it takes for an eney civ. Obviously you wouldn't want to kill a maritime, but it's a massive quickstart otherwise.

 

[E66man]

Btw, martin, have you tried warrior rushing a CS? You can probably pull it off with as little as 3 warriors. as opposed to the 5-6 it takes for an eney civ. Obviously you wouldn't want to kill a maritime, but it's a massive quickstart otherwise.

I've tried it to no real effect, but I'm a Deity poser...

Even with reloading the same game and trying different tracks, I never seem to get anywhere even if I take the first city. The AI seldom wants to immediately give me peace, and I end up with too poor a military if I stop making troops to crank out the Settlers. Going for the early Construction also slows down getting military techs that might keep me alive while I get Construction...

 

[jorissimo]

The more I try it, the more luck-dependent this strategy seems. Even if I am able to do the rush on Deity, a couple turns later another AI DOWs and I lose a city or two. And on emperor when I build settlers from the start, it's way too slow.

EDIT: On emperor the AI doesn't start with any workers. The no worker steal makes things even slower.

 

[JudgeDeath]

Hasn't worked for me either, but with Babylon I've gone Scout/Warrior/Bowman and 90% my Scout has got upgraded to Bowman too (but one who can move quickly over rough terrain). With 2 Bowman and 2 Warriors you are much more effective than 4 Warriors. Even so you need some luck.

 

[Martin Alvito]

There are several reasons for the early Warrior rush:

- Worker theft. The city-states don't deploy them as early as I want them, and I can always (and do) steal a Worker from a CS later.
- Cripple the nearest AI. With some forethought on city placement and Settler blocking, you can often wall that AI in. By the time it gets Optics, it's too late for that AI to have a credible game.
- The way I see it, there's going to be a war with the nearest AI anyway because of your aggressive settling strategy, so you might as well have the war on your terms.
- Luxuries and big cash from the peace settlement accelerate your start enormously.

Executing the Warrior rush without loss relies on a several things. You want to micro your XP gain so that you have a bunch of Warriors ready for promotion after the first city attack. You must manage your attacks and positioning so that city shots can't pick off any of your Warriors. You should know the units each AI starts with and be sure that they are either dead or unable to come to the rescue before you attack. You need to deprive the AI of a Worker (preferably both) before it gets Hammer improvements up everywhere in both cities. And you should be prepared for losses if your opponent garrisons archery units in its city and you can't get the AI to bring the unit into the field.

If you cripple the AI's army, flip its city and have many Warriors still alive, the AI will recognize that you can take it all the way out and will offer you the farm for peace.

I hadn't thought about rushing a city-state, but the problem is that you can't burn it down. The beauty of taking a non-capital is that you can pump Settlers from there until your Happiness can't take it and then resolve the problem. I've done this strat taking a capital and using it as a permanent Settler pump. It works, but the Happiness hit costs you two cities early on, which is a lot to pay. If you pick up luxuries you don't have in the bargain, it isn't so bad, but a lot of times you either don't get new luxuries or need a lot of techs to utilize them.

I've had my share of games where I Warrior rushed, ate a DoW from the other two civs I'd met, and died horribly. If you start out in the middle of the action, Deity is rough no matter what you do.

 

[Venezianer]

Are you sure that works? I know I have received techs I'd been researching for several turns before, even one that I was due to finish that turn. Did they change that?

It's been working consistently for me. I suspect that you will get techs you have been researching if the tech tree bottlenecks and you have therefore worked on all available techs.

It appears that the overflow now goes onto a different tech that the computer selects if the agreement gives you a tech that you were researching.

Never sign two RAs in the same round.

Never ...
(I have made this mistake and ruined my research)

That produces a perfect bottleneck.

 

[EmperorFool]

I like how you're launching your space ship without the knowledge of combustion.

 

[Dactyl]

Some people are saying that this is a luck-dependent strategy. I wouldn't say that, but it is an incomplete strategy. A truly developed strategy will tell you how to accomplish a win in any starting position in which you find yourself, with any neighbors that might happen to be near you. For example, I may have missed it, but I haven't seen any discussion of how you play this strategy if you find yourself alone on a continent.

 

[jorissimo]

Some people are saying that this is a luck-dependent strategy. I wouldn't say that, but it is an incomplete strategy. A truly developed strategy will tell you how to accomplish a win in any starting position in which you find yourself, with any neighbors that might happen to be near you. For example, I may have missed it, but I haven't seen any discussion of how you play this strategy if you find yourself alone on a continent.

There are very few strategies in civ that work like that. That's why civ's so replayable. Some strategies work almost always, like the horse rush, some work a lot less often, like this one. But there's no guaranteed win strategy.

 

[KingMorgan]

But there's no guaranteed win strategy.

Not sure if thats true, it was for Civ4. I suspect nearly every diety map is beatable - at least with a replay.

 

[Dactyl]

jorissimo, it's not a question of replayability. It's a question of playing with what you've got. Let's say you start out using this strategy and, after a number of turns, you come to realize that you're alone on your continent. What do you do then? Stop playing? That would be like resigning a game of chess if your opponent didn't follow the moves you expected in the opening.

If this was a fully developed strategy, there would be options specified for the different situations that you find yourself in. The only fully developed strategy that I'm aware of is ICS. It seems that you can use it with success in most any situation that you find yourself in.

 

[JudgeDeath]

Well this strategy uses ICS - and that bit works fine. The problem is that on Deity you need other bits to also work, like you really need at least one Maritime CS ally, and you need to be able to take out, or at least severly handicap, your nearest neighbour, unless you are alone on your continent (but that has its own problems as I can testify).

 

[Flector]

Some luck definately is involved in the (or at least my) games. It's remarkable how sometimes I'm not happy with my own play and then reload the game from the initial autosave to play better. And even though I might play much better, this doesn't guarantee anything at all. Perhaps I did play much better, but then one of the AI's often seem to be completely running away on the other continent and (at least) tripling my score and completely out-teching me as well. This really hurts my motivation as sometimes I'm starting to think luck is more important than skill.

 

[JudgeDeath]

On Deity I certainly get the same feeling. I won the only civ on my continent game through poor AI (it had a tech lead but was too slow in building spaceship), so I retried it - I was doing much better, but this time it beelined for spaceship and beat me.

I'm trying my Bowman (+Warrior) rush again - and this seems to be working well, I already took out the Japanese 3 cities, eliminating Oda, and I have two CS Allies, one maritime and one military (this has been pretty useful early on - I'll drop it later probably).

But I had a favourable start - Oasis and Gold on a hill near Babylon, Oda not too far away, and I popped an upgrade, an increased pop and a tech from ruins. Best start I've had for ages.

 

[Slowpoke]

I hadn't thought about rushing a city-state, but the problem is that you can't burn it down. The beauty of taking a non-capital is that you can pump Settlers from there until your Happiness can't take it and then resolve the problem. I've done this strat taking a capital and using it as a permanent Settler pump. It works, but the Happiness hit costs you two cities early on, which is a lot to pay. If you pick up luxuries you don't have in the bargain, it isn't so bad, but a lot of times you either don't get new luxuries or need a lot of techs to utilize them.

Ah, but you can sell them! Unless you consider selling cities an exploit, you get much more worth from city selling than razing.

 

[HermannLombard]

I think you'll run out of happiness before the AIs have enough cash to make the sale worthwhile.

 

[jorissimo]

Ah, but you can sell them! Unless you consider selling cities an exploit, you get much more worth from city selling than razing.

good one, but you'll lose the city spot. If you conquer a city and raze it a couple of turns later, you can replace it with a settler of your own.

I think you'll run out of happiness before the AIs have enough cash to make the sale worthwhile.

AI's on deity have cash. Lots of it. And furthermore, it doesn't have to be worthwhile. You just need to get rid of the city.

 

[Martin Alvito]

If this was a fully developed strategy, there would be options specified for the different situations that you find yourself in. The only fully developed strategy that I'm aware of is ICS. It seems that you can use it with success in most any situation that you find yourself in.

Technically speaking, no strategy for Civ is ever fully specified. I don't want to think about even a stripped down game tree. Even ICS isn't a "strategy" by your definition. There are a lot of choices that an ICS paradigm doesn't inform you about. CC rush is probably the closest thing to a fully specified strategy, in the sense that you always know what you should be doing in order to generate a win on Deity. All you do is manufacture CCs until Military Tradition, and by that point the game is either won or lost.

The OP provides a gameplan. That gameplan contains the conditions that must obtain to generate the desired result, given the temporal constraint. If you want a more robust game, you have some options. You can play nice at the start, although in my experience the early ICS start isn't worth the lost Workers and lost development time when the neighbor attacks. You can play a more traditional ICS and expand further before going vertical. Again, this will cost you time but will yield a more consistent game. In short, if you just want to win you can gamble less. If you want to win in a big hurry, you have to roll the dice.

It may be possible to optimize the gameplan further than I have. Lately I've been messing around with a straight Writing beeline for an Academy in the opening. (It works best on a tile like Cows that you always want to share early on.) That generates some headaches, because Barbs become a real problem, but it does enable you to collect more techs very early on. I've also been playing with turn 25 Liberty, which delays Freedom and eliminates Humanism but lets you start on infrastructure many turns earlier.

As I come to some firm conclusions about those approaches I'll update. My play time has been limited of late, so it may be a while.

Ah, but you can sell them! Unless you consider selling cities an exploit, you get much more worth from city selling than razing.

While this is true, it also entails the sacrifice of a city location. The AI tends to settle its second city in a good spot that I don't want to relinquish, and since I'm pumping Settlers from there prior to the self-raze, I'm looking at future diplomatic problems with the civ I sell the city to and probably opening up another battlefront.

However, it's an interesting possibility in the case where you can use that city as your natural border and screen out your (former) neighbor, as well as keep your new neighbor from reinforcing the city.

 

[Gus_Smedstad]

Lately I've been messing around with a straight Writing beeline for an Academy in the opening. (It works best on a tile like Cows that you always want to share early on.) That generates some headaches, because Barbs become a real problem, but it does enable you to collect more techs very early on.

I'm surprised this is at all viable compared to popping a vital 400+ beaker tech later on.

I've also been playing with turn 25 Liberty, which delays Freedom and eliminates Humanism but lets you start on infrastructure many turns earlier.

Wait, your strategy for sub-200 Diety spaceship does not involve going for Meritocracy immediately? I missed that.

 

[Martin Alvito]

I'm surprised this is at all viable compared to popping a vital 400+ beaker tech later on.

Fast Libraries are fast. I haven't determined the conditions under which it's superior with any precision yet. What ends up happening is you get Construction a couple of turns later, but get stuff like Calendar that you want on the ground much earlier.

I've also been messing around with it on IW beelines as well; it really pays off there.

Wait, your strategy for sub-200 Diety spaceship does not involve going for Meritocracy immediately? I missed that.

Nope; I save all the policies and pop Rationalism, Secularism and Freedom upon hitting Renaissance. The OP probably wasn't clear enough about that. Sometimes it's worthwhile to delay settling second-wave cities to get Freedom immediately, and sometimes it's not. It depends on your GA situation at the time; you want to be in GA before taking Rationalism, or the ten turn GA is delayed.