Diety - Avoiding One-Shot Deaths and Getting More Science

[Rockafellar]

I'm just getting into Diety so I have to pay more attention to mechanics because I'm getting owned when out-teched. I play for the domination win. I got far with Germany but am now trying out Aztecs for the first time because it looks like easy-mode with the free builders and then using them for districts.

Early in the game I was taking Chinese cities with Aztec archers. I could have swore I took the capital down when it's city defense was 36. But then i went to other cities with defenses of 33 and they started one-shotting my archers.

Is there a general thing I can look at to realize when a city will one-shot my archers or other units? Right now i'm looking at a city Handan which I know can one-shot my archers. Here are some stats when I hover the mouse over it for an attack by my archer:

Handan: 26 Base Strength (Sword icon), 37 Combined Strength (sword icon) (with all bonuses), Garrison Health 200/200, Fortification health 50/50. It shows a sword next to this combined strength so does that mean it is doing melee damage on me?

Archer: 25 Base Strength (Sword), 10 Combined Strength (Ranged Icon) (with all negatives vs city), 15 Melee Strength (Sword icon)

So how can I look at these numbers to realize I'll be one-shotted? Is it because Handan's Combined Strength is 3x the Archers Combined Strength?

Also, how do I look at it when avoiding one-shots by enemy units as well?

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Science
On a different note, I'm finding it really difficult to avoid being outteched by civs especially those far away from me (Large map, Marathon time) that I can't poke at to stifle their progress. I find I have to find maps with mountain ranges and get adjacency bonuses with +3 to +5 to even stand a chance. Is this normal? Then obviously I hit the right civics to boost this, etc.

Most of the time lately there are no alive science city states even on the map to help.

I haven't messed with religion but realized if you have a religious district you can buy a university with faith and there are other religious perks for science.. but I can't discover one on deity most likely so won't even try.

I've also found lots of useful things here.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ned-how-to-earn-science-and-how-it-works-4879

Any other tips?

 

[Victoria]

So how can I look at these numbers to realize I'll be one-shotted? Is it because Handan's Combined Strength is 3x the Archers Combined Strength?

Have a look at the damage table in my signature... basically it’s about the difference. If there is 36 difference you are guaranteed to be one shorted but even 30 is nasty.

I'm finding it really difficult to avoid being outteched by civs especially those far away from me

You should play GOTM or basically just spam campuses and use chopping well (look at the chopping example in my signature)

 

[Rockafellar]

Thanks Victoria, that chart is great. So with with a difference in combined strength of 27 I see there is some chance of being 1-shotted. So i ran my archers through the meat grinder and here were the results.
Each time the difference in strength vs the city was 27. So according to the chart (I think) the dmg they inflict on my archers should be between 70 and 106 dmg and the dmg I inflict on the city should be between (10 to 16 dmg)/2 because archer damage is halved and melee dmg is 1/4 to a city (I think). But the dmg done to my archers always tended to be near the high end of the range oddly enough.
here are the archers getting hit in order:
-100 (I forget fortification health, Garison heatlh 100%) one-shotted
-100 (I forget fortification health, Garison heatlh 100%) one-shotted
-100 (I forget fortification health, Garison heatlh 100%) one-shotted
-95 (fortification health 62%, Garison 100%)
-99 (fortification health 62%, Garison 100%)

The dmg i did to the city was mostly in line with what I would predict ( between 5 and 8 dmg)
- 6
- 4
- 5


Also, is there a log somewhere I can find the history of combat hits. Also the hisotry of pop-up messages would be nice too.

I'll definitely look into Game of the Month eventually.

 

[Victoria]

there is a combat_log.csv in the log directory. This is discussed at the start of the thread with the damage table in it.
If you read the whole thread you will see how people got to those damage values.
These may have changed but not so I am aware, other people have mentioned about high roll values frequently, the windows random thing is not the best.

Also when fighting a stronger city with archers over many turns you will suffer bad war weariness.

 

[Chibisuke]

On Deity, you should only be using archers to take cities before they have walls. Once they have walls, you should be using battering rams and either swordsmen or knights depending on the age.

The thing to realize with Deity is that everything happens MUCH faster. The AI will get walls up faster than they did on other levels. You have to be planning ahead and figuring out how to speed up your own tactics as well. Chopping is important as Victoria mentioned. Figuring out how to maximize your gold output fast so you can purchase workers when they require a lot of time to produce is important too. If a worker takes 6-10 turns to produce and you are in a position to buy it rather than hard build, you should buy. However if the worker only takes 2 turns to produce, you should produce.

As for science, yes you need to spam campuses as early as possible, and get great scientists. I usually go for divine spark as my pantheon. AI doesn't take it that often anymore on deity, and if you get a bunch of great scientists it will help you to sped up some of the techs that are harder to boost naturally.

 

[kb27787]

I could have sworn city's damage (at least, the bombardment part) is based on the strongest ranged unit that civ has (factoring in corps and armies but not promotions, if I'm not mistaken). Chances are the civ has just produced it's first X-bow (and in my experience X-bows do one-shot archers... or come close; they could adopt the policy that increase bombardment strength or use Victor... if China has one crouching tiger then definitely your archers will be one-shotted every single time... try to lure the ranged unit in question out and kill it and see if the damage goes down). Melee damage based on the strongest melee unit minus 10 should only apply for retaliation against melee attacks.

 

[Victoria]

I could have sworn city's damage (at least, the bombardment part) is based on the strongest ranged unit that civ has (factoring in corps and armies but not promotions, if I'm not mistaken).

You are not mistaken but have not yet ratified on R&F. This also includes naval units and so a frigate really hurts at +40 but that's not the case.

An Archer has a Melee strength of 15 and a crossbow 40 so the difference is 25. Just enough if you are lucky however visibility of +3/+6 can change this.
But 27 is pretty close, not sure where the +2 is coming from without seeing the screen but 27 is 27 for whatever reason. The amount of one shotting being done seems part of RND on microsoft which has its ups and downs.

So the normal trick with archers VS walls if you do not have a RAM is to get as many archers in rang on the same turn, one dies but the others should reduce the wall a fair amount. in a worst case scenario it takes a few turns and you loose a few archers doing so to remove the wall. If the wall will still be there in a few turns you really should not be attacking the city at this stage. Get a RAM and a swordsman.horseman/knight to do the work and leave the archers the cleanup after the walls are down.

 

[Rockafellar]

On Deity, you should only be using archers to take cities before they have walls. Once they have walls, you should be using battering rams and either swordsmen or knights depending on the age.

The thing to realize with Deity is that everything happens MUCH faster.

Battering rams and melee sounds like a good idea. But unless one-shotted i've been making archers work and then upgrade them to X-bows using Mercs civic. This means I can take some cities up to a strength of 40 or so. I probably do this as a carryover from Civ 5. During this time at some point I rush as many catapults as i can only to upgrade them to Bombards. I often make things just to upgrade them later and will hold off on a tech just so i can make more of the cheaper lower-tech version before i upgrade them.

Ya Diety is tons faster. I play Marathon speed because I like to feel the era's as they pass by and play in them.. but on Diety the eras shoot by very fast. But in my current game I finally overtook the all civs in science so I'll probably win especially since I just put Gilgamesh in his place, took his capital, destroyed many of his cities and he's paying me handsomely to not finish the job.

Oh and meeting 2 science civs helped a ton too.