I do not think the issue is an aversion to creativity. I think many here regularly push themselves to try unconventional strategies. I just know from my experiences on deity, which are certainly not extensive compared to the more active posters here, much of your strategy runs counter to my own experiences and testing. I will caveat the following with I play standard settings. I cannot speak credibly to the impact of the proposed advice on Marathon games.
In particular, a few pieces of advice seemed strange:
1.) Pursuit of the Great Library - In my experience, the GL is frequently unachievable on Deity, and the hammer loss in such a critical early game strategy (not to mention the beaker loss) can be extremely damaging to long-term development
2.) Your proposed use of the City Governor - Because you are advocating pursuit of perhaps the most difficult Wonder to grab, I cannot imagine failing to maximize the growth mechanics that allow for extra hammers to be gained (specifically the use of Production Focus with manual tile selection)
3.) Automated Workers - Similarly, with early turns being so critical, it is strange to see advice indicating workers can be automated successfully so early in the game. Perhaps you are more talented than most around here, but frankly few can afford to be so loose in how they approach tile improvement. There is absolutely no strategic advantage to automating workers (unless you are worse at selecting tile improvements than the AI - in which case you have no business playing Deity), so it strikes me as odd advice to give others
Now none of this means your strategy is one that never works. It is just difficult to imagine, at least from my experiences in the game, the advice resulting in consistent success. That is why some are asking for save games/videos/screenshots to demonstrate why this unconventional strategy works for you.
Thanks for your constructive post, I'll gladly answer all your points.
1) GL is a good chance to get a major advantage, with a guaranteed money return the few times it goes wrong.
As a gamble it's definitely all in the player's favor, therefore I'd feel bad for not even trying.
If one is very concerned with not wanting to fail wonders (which is quite strange, because if wonders were a 100% thing it would kind of defeat the whole point of Wonder Racing, no?) one can always roll Egypt.
2) I personally feel manual governor is not necessary, stopped doing it long ago.
The difference in the big scheme of things is so minimal compared to the the time investment and calculation you need to do.
Furthermore, this is a guide to non-deity players so they might not be good at manual-governor, and the default settings might actually do better than such a player could do.
When you take into consideration player mistakes (i.e. city grown but player focused on war and skips a couple turns of manual governoring the new tile), bad decisions on tile choice and allocation of mental focus, it's probably detrimental in the long run for most people.
3) I deleted that point entirely because I've grown bored of reading "omg auto workers".
As a matter of fact, once your first manual worker is done creating the necessary manual upgrades (lux, mines), if you make auto-workers they are just going to build farms/roads which you don't really need to do manually anyways.
Look at the upgrades on my screenshots, does any improvement seem wrong to you?
Beside Lux and Mines, everything else on that pic is automatic worker job.
This whole anti-autoworker stuff seems more like a recurring gag to me (which had a point a few patches ago), but as you can see they work fine once your manual settled the important stuff.
To answer your closing comment, the reason this strategy works is mainly heavy employement of defensive military tricks coupled with quick city booming and freeteching.
For domination games that is an extremely efficient way to play as you can beat armies tenfold your size while also keeping the tech gaps closed with the AI.
So, Falconiano, how do you feel about Polynesia and Piety?
I assume you're talking about Moai spamming combined with the effect of Piety completion?
I have yet to try that as I haven't really gone into cultural-anything (I'm a warmonger at heart
) but that sounds interesting and might work great within a turtling strat.
I'm definitely going to give it a shot in my next game, you stimulated my curiosity.
