Great Zimbabwe + spies = OP - science vic strategy

[FornaxTorak]

Hello!

Just did deity science win twice in one day using this easy strategy. Standard/standard/continents(pangea).

- Build only slingers/archers until you have 8-10. Use them to conquer your neighbours while you have no penalty. On Deity civs forward settle you, and this is good. Fill in the holes with your own cities afterwards. You should end up with 8-12 cities. Peace out and play defensivly.
- Beeline for great zimbabwe tech. On 2 out of 3 starts you got cows in your cap, otherwise take over a city with cow and com district. Plan early and mark your zimbabwe spot and build it asap. Usually your cap has alot of bonus resources, so zimbabwe gives you +10g pr trade route.
- In ALL cities, build com district first. Need those trade routes.
- Beeline spies tech. Build spies as soon as you get them. Use one to protect your capitals com district, and use the rest to steal techs.
- Buy trade routes as soon as you get a new one. Of cource chose trade republic for cultural, then democracy.
- Use +4g policy card, and if you lack some science use the +1c+1s card as well.
- Instead of producing stuff you simply buy it. +250g pr/turn after zimbabwe is built is not uncommon.

Prepare your cap for massiv production. Plan out your industry zones. Buy the great people you need for space race, and ezy win.

 

[Callduron]

That's awesome.

 

[cazaderonus]

yeah great zimbabwe is just insanely good. And "easy" to get in Deity as the AI wont plan for its very specific placement conditions. A must have no matter your strategy.

Imo, the best use of great zimbabwe is to get it in a newish city. Keep all forest for chops, grab the policy card that boosts production for wonders and start chopping. Even with a low prod city, you can get GZ quite fast by just chopping and sending half a dozen TR from the city.

What's great with that is that you then get a very productive city with all the TR that will originate from it. And you keep your capital and other already strong cities to help your empire progress while building the GZ.

 

[sa1vy]

Just making sure: the +2 gold doesn't apply for strategic/luxury resources? Just bonus?
I'll try this out next game. It's been ages since my last science game. I almost always go for culture. It's an interesting strategy. I think that campuses and science buildings would benefit you more than the spies would, but it might make for an interesting victory route. I never build spies except to sabotage spaceports to keep the AI from winning.

 

[Victoria]

250 GPT is not excessive and is not enough to buy everything you want by any means.
Cows seem a bit rarer than 2/3 starts, maybe it's just my bad luck.
Admittedly I tend to play England and gold is pretty high anyway.

It's a fair strategy and seems along the lines of the people that sing the praises of the Petra strategy and so on. It's an option and good to point out but by itself will not win you a game. Personally I think Kumasi is a stronger option for trade routes, you will still get good gold but a tonne of culture also. Both sacrifice some good internal route production.

 

[FornaxTorak]

Just making sure: the +2 gold doesn't apply for strategic/luxury resources? Just bonus?
I'll try this out next game. It's been ages since my last science game. I almost always go for culture. It's an interesting strategy. I think that campuses and science buildings would benefit you more than the spies would, but it might make for an interesting victory route. I never build spies except to sabotage spaceports to keep the AI from winning.

+2 only from bonus resources yes. As far as I recall I always get 5 bonus around my cap. Might have been lucky tho... I do of course build campuses as well. Build the campus, buy the buildings. I use spies to sabotage AI at the end game also.

250 GPT is not excessive and is not enough to buy everything you want by any means.
Cows seem a bit rarer than 2/3 starts, maybe it's just my bad luck.
Admittedly I tend to play England and gold is pretty high anyway.

It's a fair strategy and seems along the lines of the people that sing the praises of the Petra strategy and so on. It's an option and good to point out but by itself will not win you a game. Personally I think Kumasi is a stronger option for trade routes, you will still get good gold but a tonne of culture also. Both sacrifice some good internal route production.

Well, you start out at 250, and it increases towards the endgame. Think I ended up around 500 or so in my last game. Imagine you get zimbabwe around 150 (I don't remember actually, tried to look it up) and you win by 260 ( I did at least), then you get 110 turns with 250-500 gold. (thats 40k+ gold) You can buy most of the science buildings, industry buildings, builders and maybe even settlers. Districts you of course have to hard build, but since you get fast infrastructure with buying most other things, they usually build districts kinda fast.

This strategy does not depend on a specific civ, tho the civs with +stuff for trade will benefit more. Petra is hard to get, Zimbabwe you get 100%. Don't even know what Kumasi is, so can't compare those strategies.

 

[sa1vy]

Started a new game. *9* bonus resources.
It'll be fun.

 

[whacker]

If you manage to get it on a foreign continent, use the 25% cold card. With decent planing and a good 8-12 bonus resources spot, it can easily provide +500 gpt. IMO it is the best/vesatile wonder.

 

[sa1vy]

Yeah so I did this, but the results weren't super impressive for me. Turn 252 science victory, Victoria, Continents, Standard, Standard. I had planned out my districts so I could manage to get Great Zimbabwe, Big Ben, and Ruhr all in my capital. Saladin beat me to Big Ben by a fair amount, and Trajan got Ruhr before I even got Industrialization, so that was a bummer :/. I still ended up with 197 production/turn in my capital, because of 20 trade routes with globalization. I could have had more if I turned my farms to lumber mills, but didn't have time to get conservation. That was an expensive, out of the way civic.
So, most of the game I felt behind in science, and really far behind in culture. I only picked up more science once I got Great Zimbabwe, so I could buy science buildings, but that was like turn 155-160, already pretty late. The gold was very nice, but didn't make up for my slow start. I definitely think going districts first into commercial zones, with a couple theaters/harbors would be better. The late campuses just felt like they really hurt me. The spies seemed totally useless offensively, because by the time I got them up and rolling, I was already getting science through the buildings I bought, and I had a couple alliances to do research boosts. I just used them on defense and sabotage Rome's spaceports. He was probably 30-40 turns away from space victory after me.
I do think Great Zimbabwe is very strong, and I definitely plan on using it again in the future, but going campuses first would be a much better route.

Here's my 197 production/turn city, and the save file if anyone's interested.

Spoiler 197 production :

Production

• sa1vy
• Apr 28, 2017

 

[Frostburn]

this would be especially effictive as Persia or England if they got a lot of harbors up. Definitely trying this.

 

[Unconquered Sun]

Hello!

Just did deity science win twice in one day using this easy strategy. Standard/standard/continents(pangea).

- Build only slingers/archers until you have 8-10. Use them to conquer your neighbours while you have no penalty. On Deity civs forward settle you, and this is good. Fill in the holes with your own cities afterwards. You should end up with 8-12 cities. Peace out and play defensivly.
- Beeline for great zimbabwe tech. On 2 out of 3 starts you got cows in your cap, otherwise take over a city with cow and com district. Plan early and mark your zimbabwe spot and build it asap. Usually your cap has alot of bonus resources, so zimbabwe gives you +10g pr trade route.
- In ALL cities, build com district first. Need those trade routes.
- Beeline spies tech. Build spies as soon as you get them. Use one to protect your capitals com district, and use the rest to steal techs.
- Buy trade routes as soon as you get a new one. Of cource chose trade republic for cultural, then democracy.
- Use +4g policy card, and if you lack some science use the +1c+1s card as well.
- Instead of producing stuff you simply buy it. +250g pr/turn after zimbabwe is built is not uncommon.

Prepare your cap for massiv production. Plan out your industry zones. Buy the great people you need for space race, and ezy win.

Did this in my very first Civ VI game for a breezy Deity victory.

However, there isn't a way to say if this is actually a great strategy or not. Deity is just so easy there are 100 ways to win a game. This is a sharp contrast to older Civs like IV, where the majority of Deity games could be won only by masterful strategizing.

 

[Victoria]

Lol, I disagree, some games are just not winnable, I am not the only one to come across this. Also this game is still being created so you are comparing an adult with a child.

Of course using an OP civ, restarting until you find a winnable map, reloading games and playing on Pangea all help to say it's easy which I am comfortable many do and did do in earlier versions.

I love the GOTM not for those that do it in 3 turns but those that screw up and are honest about it, love them guys.

I'm not disagreeing 100%, just saying somewhere in your statement there is something that makes your reality different to mine.

This game is what you make of it, I play deity enough to be pretty aware of the reality. My personal choice is to crash and burn occasionally.

 

[Unconquered Sun]

Lol, I disagree, some games are just not winnable

Yeah, you'll have to post a starting save for that. At least for all Standard/Continents/Deity there are no unwinnable. It's about as hard as Monarch back on CIV:Warlords, it's laughable to think the best players back then could lose on Monarch.

 

[Victoria]

Wow, you really do save restore then, your choice

 

[Unconquered Sun]

Wow, you really do save restore then, your choice

Speaks volumes about your mentality.

I've never seen any of the great players of the awesome Strategy subforum CIV had speak like that.

 

[Victoria]

I have no idea about such a sub forum and I do not consider myself a great player But I know how deity plays, just saying it as I see it.

I have lost on about turn 14 when Japan was forced to move all 5 warriors my way. That alone gives me the right to dispute your claim.

 

[CorneliusBrutus]

Unconquered Sun seems like he would be fun at parties.

 

[Leyrann]

I actually got some 400-500 gold per turn last game without even having Great Zimbabwe and while having only internal trade routes... Granted, it was on a huge map and I was quite big because of some early conquering.

 

[Shorlin]

Great Zimbabwe is a nice wonder for increasing income but I don't see it as game changing, I would say Big Ben is a better candidate for that.

Having many stock exchange commercial hubs + free market policy card is all you need to end the game with 1000 g/p. Having 2-3 commercial city states at 6 envoys is also huge.

 

[trendy]

Some quick calculations:

It costs 3.3 gold/hammer with merchant republic.
With 6 bonus resources, and 8 trade routes, you gain 101 gold per turn from Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe costs 920 production on standard.

So, you need to earn 3036 gold for it to pay for itself, or about 30 turns for this scenario of a fairly mediocre Zimbabwe setup. After that, you enjoy 30 free production every turn for the rest of the game.

To put this in perspective, you'd get about 30 production per turn from a fully built up industrial zone within range of four cities. Except that you can't get that online all at once, it'll come later than Zimbabwe, and the combined production cost of the buildings alone are more than Zimbabwe's.

What I'm really trying to say is that... Zimbabwe should pretty much always be a priority build unless you're expecting to have a really short game, or you simply don't have the right land. Considering production is always an issue in this game, the gains from building it are really good. And you can still do conquest if you want. You can still do a knight timing attack while teching, which is kind of the strongest attack you can do for medieval era anyway.