Early game after patch

[DrStroopWafel]

So, preceding latest patch my game plan on immortal used to be: build 4 archers + ~2-3 warriors --> take out 1-2 nearest rivals --> win from there.

However, since latest patch I have noticed that AI's ability to withstand this rush has increased significantly, to the point that it seems to no longer be a reliable way to obtain a winning position. Moreover, I (still) find that expanding peacefully leads to a game where it is difficult to keep up with the AI. So it seems to me that taking out at least 1-2 rivals in the early game is essentially the best strategy.

I wonder if any of you experienced the same issues, and I wonder how you guys approach the early game and whether your approach changed since the latest patch.

 

[Ferocitus]

So, preceding latest patch my game plan on immortal used to be: build 4 archers + ~2-3 warriors --> take out 1-2 nearest rivals --> win from there.

However, since latest patch I have noticed that AI's ability to withstand this rush has increased significantly, to the point that it seems to no longer be a reliable way to obtain a winning position. Moreover, I (still) find that expanding peacefully leads to a game where it is difficult to keep up with the AI. So it seems to me that taking out at least 1-2 rivals in the early game is essentially the best strategy.

I wonder if any of you experienced the same issues, and I wonder how you guys approach the early game and whether your approach changed since the latest patch.

What size map? What type of map?
Different strategies are needed for different types of maps and the likely opponents nearby.

 

[DrStroopWafel]

Right. Usually I play on continents map with 2-3 extra opponents, normal speed, standard size. Sometimes I choose Pangaea map, but then literally no one will ever get over my early game conquests.

 

[Victoria]

Immortal is tough but at least only has 2 settlers. This does allow more room but as you say you get stretched over time.

The game is now meeting the requirement of skill more

You can still do your rush and if your are set right you should get a city or even 2. Take out the odd CS is also an option. Do not expect in any way to steamroll though. Getting experienced troops you do not loose does make a big difference for the mid game. After the initial rush, recoup and get seige weapons and iron, do not give up because the longer you leave it the more ahead they will get. I tried japan and 3 encampments and it really helped, the general does help. If you can get through that first Civ early enough you are in with a chance but you need to remember you need to have 2 civs under your belt before you get cocky with your play. Even then there is often another civ with Anti tank armies, cossacks or similar hitting you when you are just not ready

From what I have seen so far science has become a lot more important early.. You just start slipping away too fast from the leaders otherwise. You do need to keep an era behind and rely on your troops and skill for combat. Terrain is much more important and the AI is much better at the counterattack which is nice and not so nice when you loose a level 3 troop to a knight xbow combo.

You have to combine the war side with your own growth better. Consider if you really need all of those commercial districts now...Some are better as a Campus IMO. get that adjacency working for you.

If you were not aware of it before you now need to understand how the AI plays more. They farm LOADS and have few districts. The build large armies that swan around aimlessly at times. They build monument/granary and lots of wonders. The more you act like them the less chance you have.

You need to fix districts early,build builders at the right times, use those 50% unit build cards more efficiently, consider the eureka. Keep your units getting experience.

Diplomacy is great, declared friends are handy, allies even better Joint wars are just too good to ignore. Attack the right opposition understanding how it will annoy other civs.

Most of all, do not take everything I say as gospel, we are all still learning but I will say that peaceful Deity is incredibly rare, my last game I had one mini war where Kongo forward settled on my bit of continent and I too the city, turn 320 cultural win after a long cultural fight with Peter playing as Gorgo and doing all of the above and more.

 

[Japper007]

Deity has moved it's aggresion up a lot.

This was basically my last game:

turn 2-3 Find Victoria, she shares full capital visibility with me and seems friendly.
turn 3 Victoria accepts my delegation
turn 4 Victoria declares war
turn 5 one warrior and a scout show up, nothing I can't handle.
turn 6 4 warriors!?
turn 10 ded

 

[gimper42]

I find that my previously established strategy still works very well. Maybe better now. On a normal continents map with a land army rush planned at start, it is still pretty simple to have your continent dominated by turn 150 or so.

First district is almost always a campus, followed by 1 or 2 more campuses in other cities before other district types are built. Then I try to get a couple of commercial hubs and encampments going. Industrial zones go up sparingly at first, just in good spots to get max coverage for factories and in key production cities. Entertainment districts are put off until they are absolutely needed (most cities showing -2 amenities or worse). Culture districts are usually not built until I pretty much have nothing else to build, and even then only in cities that have an advantageous tile available.

Early production is mostly military units. 4 or 5 warriors, 5 or 6 slingers. Build 2 or 3 war carts right before Stirrups is completed. Try to time the production of a battering ram with when you think city walls will start going up, or, if walls are already up, just whenever you think your army will actually cross into enemy territory. I don't build siege weapons until bombards unlock, and even then I usually just do it for the tech Eureka. If you kinda beeline to Ballistics, your field cannons should rule the battle field for a while. Between those and muskets supported by the battering ram, you can smash city walls in 1 or 2 turns max. Your siege weapons will get maybe one shot each at the already heavily damaged city walls by the time they're in place and able to fire. I find them to be rather redundant until much later in the game when city strengths have increased to 70+. Even then if you have well promoted Infantry, they can double attack the walls every turn, turning them to rubble in no time. Keep your tech beelined on the relevant military techs and you should cruise to victory.

Get monuments up sooner rather than later. This really makes a big difference is how long it will take you get to The Enlightenment. If I can make it to The Enlightenment and I have a pretty decent snowball rolling, then it is pretty much game over for the AI at that point. Try to get there by around turn 140 or sooner. Do that and you're kicking ass.

Victoria has a lot of good advice in the above post, too.

 

[Victoria]

Early production is mostly military units.

It is very easy to go slinger x5 at the start with a few clubmen/chariots scattered in. This is simple stuff. What is more to the point is the word mostly in @gimper42 's statement.

For example quite a lot of start terrain will benefit from a builder and this gives you craftsmanship bonus but building a builder first does not allow for 2 techs you normally need... Animal husbandry and mining while throwing a slinger/scout/monument.barbarian in first is about the right timing. Also getting the eureka and extra 10 turns early is no additional benefit. With craftsmanship you them build your other units a lot faster... well not chariots but thats too much for a few lines here.

Gimper's strat shows that Campuses are the important first builds, the tech just slips away from you otherwise because the AI is growing faster than you and has more cities. You cannot compete with that and the only real way to make that up is with campuses.

Also for seige weapons, you do not need everything, just a seige weapon of some type. Rams are fast and simple while the end game artillery comes from catapults so the upgrades are important whether you build them earlier or later in an encampment or just be able to use them more (hard because of their slow speed) Terracotta army can be a great help as well and not to be underestimated but it does take time out of your precious city builds which should be aimed at getting districts in asap to counteract the AI. This I cannot press enough, districts are what counteracts the AI bonuses to some degree. Science, then gold then .... Meritocracy is a great card because it is pretty useless to the AI as they do not have many districts, adjacency cards also, all district cards help you more.

Monuments are important to get better cards faster and be able to hold more cards. This is sadly an area you will have to mimic the AI as is granaries to some degree unless in Jungle where a few chops will put you at 7 pop even with no water.... love that jungle, especially with hills as they will always be plains hills, by far the best general terrain in the game.

Nice to see the turn 140 measurement in there. You do need general targets to judge progress.

 

[Victoria]

Deity has moved it's aggresion up a lot.

I had this with Japan in December but they were forced to as they were in a mountain funnel, all 5 turned up at once. Now the AI has been programmed to come after you more is all.

 

[gimper42]

I like Terracotta Army and the Colosseum. I will often try to build both of those in the same city after things have cooled off on my home continent a bit and my highest production city is probably running out of things to build. Start transferring trade routes to that city after I start the TA and chop whatever is available. If I've waited until after turn 100 I usually don't get beat to those 2 wonders, assuming they are still available.

I threw in the turn 140 benchmark for The Enlightenment since that is about 10 turns later than I have been getting there in my most recent games and I'm steamrolling the AI by that point. I've been using the civics card that gives a city +1 culture for every district and that has been a total game changer in a domination game. It is usually adding 40% to my culture output by itself. Current game it took me from about 60 cpt to over 100 cpt just by adding that card. Never worry about culture again after adding that card. After reaching The Enlightenment you have so many good cards to choose from it can be hard to know which ones will benefit you the most. I prefer the one I just mentioned, the +100% to campus buildings output, and the +1 amenity to a city with at least 2 districts card. When I can I'll find room for the +100% to commercial hub buildings card. This is where I think the Merchant Republic government can really shine: it can allow you have 4 economic cards in play at once. I think that is maybe more powerful that being able to buy land military with faith. Maybe.

 

[Nigel_Tufnel2]

Since VI was released, I've always seen the AI's Military Strength nosedive at some point or another during the game. It seems like only certain leaders like Tomy rebuild quickly. So far, when traceable, it has seemed to be due to war/losses, or possibly to disbanding from lack of gpt. (Trades become very difficult to get because so few AI have positive gold.) But in my current game, 2 neighbors suddenly lost a lot of units. One I hadn't been tracking closely - he does have a Barb Camp nearby (protected by Cliffs), and has 43 gpt and I don't recall any recent wars, but his Mil dropped to about 1/2 what it was.

The other Civ is modded Ramkhamhaeng, who gets insane bonuses, including gold. He had 3 Chang Suek (Elephants) swimming in my gulf and suddenly they were gone. He is in a war in the other direction. They were clearly disbanded, even though he has well over 100 gpt.

Has anyone else seen any evidence of randomly disbanded units? I am running quite a number of mods, but I believe most are pretty stable (other than some weirdness with YnAMP, whose development I follow closely).

 

[gimper42]

Has anyone else seen any evidence of randomly disbanded units?

I've not seen this behavior conclusively, but I have witnessed AI player military scores drop dramatically due to some unseen events. I just always chalked it up to 2 or more really bad AI generals feeding troops into the proverbial meat grinder.

 

[Victoria]

I have had 3 situations of modern units disbanded when an armada or afew sea dogs come near them, very weird and frustrating.

 

[EpicWestern]

So, preceding latest patch my game plan on immortal used to be: build 4 archers + ~2-3 warriors --> take out 1-2 nearest rivals --> win from there.

However, since latest patch I have noticed that AI's ability to withstand this rush has increased significantly, to the point that it seems to no longer be a reliable way to obtain a winning position. Moreover, I (still) find that expanding peacefully leads to a game where it is difficult to keep up with the AI. So it seems to me that taking out at least 1-2 rivals in the early game is essentially the best strategy.

I wonder if any of you experienced the same issues, and I wonder how you guys approach the early game and whether your approach changed since the latest patch.

On deity I'm becoming more and more solidified in the view that slinger, slinger, slinger into archery is the only viable strategy early on. One of my recent games I spawned close to both Russia and Arabia, and had a general gameplan of taking out one of the two. I got my 3 archers and warrior and declared war on Russia early on since at the time they were sending a couple warriors here and there to my capital while Arabia was looking more threatening. Of course, Arabia declares war on me anyway so my 3 archers and warrior were basically outnumbered by 2-3 Russian warriors and 4-6 Arabian warriors. Simply being surprised and out of position cost me 2 units, so it became my 2 archers vs ~8 warriors (with the difficulty and oligarchy combat bonuses) which was hopeless. So I think the early game isn't so much archer rushing as it is archer defending. In many cases you need to archer rush, have your units placed perfectly, not declare war if its possible to be involved in two conflicts simultaneously, micro perfectly, and perhaps even get lucky on top of all that just to survive. If you do, then you can start thinking about moving out and taking a few cities.
.

 

[Nigel_Tufnel2]

(Apologies - I missed the "early game after patch" in the title. Good discussion so far!)

 

[gimper42]

So I think the early game isn't so much archer rushing as it is archer defending.

Given a choice I would much rather defend against an early attack, wipe out or nearly wipe out their military in the process, then proceed to take all of their cities with very few units to deal with. Then their cities fall faster, my units take less damage in the process and things just generally run more smoothly. This is one of the reasons that I really prefer to play on deity difficulty, the AI aggression is through the roof and you can count on an early DoW unless you are really isolated on the map.

 

[Victoria]

I judge my position in the first few moves and if need be will swap to a slinger, getting a +3 prod square and some extra food and agoge is worth the risk to me. Its a personal choice.

 

[gimper42]

I really like going slinger - builder now whenever I think I can get away with it, for the reasons you give. If I go slinger - slinger - builder it means I might delay mining and get sailing or writing as my 2nd tech instead. There are advantages both ways and it just totally depends on what shows up.

 

[Victoria]

Last game I played, slinger, builder, monument settler slinger slinger granary slinger slinger slinger warrior, upgrade joint war, I waited for trajan to move toward freddy and then stole a city and a settler. I was quite happy with that start as the city had awesome hills. The point is I still won, I was on a coast so safe from barbs and I took out yerevan next and with another settler I had the same cities as any other civs. Then it was navy redcoats win.

There is no one strat, even deciding what is most efficient is near impossible with terrain and civs to consider. Also in the game above Trajan I knew woukd start liking me at 5 cities to his 3 and so was a great land buffer for sea invasions.

 

[DrStroopWafel]

In my last immortal game going slinger --> settler slinger slinger warrior I was able to obtain a winning game on a continent with Teddy and Victoria by forward settling Vicky, who had little room for expansion and wiping out Teddy who was having a hard time with crazy barbarian spams and had a lot of flat, unforested land. While all this was going on Vicky decided to use her units to attack a city state instead of me despite having denounced me for slaughtering Teddy, giving me time to get up walls in my southern cities and some more archers. Then I transitioned into my usual campuses/commercial districts --> space win.

It seems from this limited experience that early slinger/archer rush can still lead to a winning position, but may be more dependent on how the game is going for the AI and other situational factors. Therefore scouting and adapting game strategy based on scouted information seems more important now, which is great IMO

 

[Bro]

I've been doing a lot more slinger-settler-monument/builder/settler/slinger lately. Only once have I been dowed during the first 30 turns.