Hiawatha doing what he does best

[fyar]

But you really haven't proven how the Iroqouis would be a poor Civ to play for humans who are sort of just clicking next turn and are unfocused or rather, 'less' focused in their planning. It requires far less planning and specific gambits and slingshots than many other Civs to do well in. That is my point. It's hardly disingenuous to point this out. There are plenty of other Civs that anecdotally I feel the AI tend to do well with that I have not said would be an easy romp for the human player who don't first pick up someone's guide on the optimal tech path for those free tech slingshots and other UA niceities. You also actually seem to walk back your critique by noting that the Iroqouis isn't a bad civ to play, if the map is not stacked against it, but that applies to other Civs too, and I would argue it's less fatal to the Iroquois who can find forests pretty much everywhere and can sort of work with heavy jungles through a heavier focus on a different set of SP and a different Pantheon.

dexters, I'm playing an Immortal game as Hiawatha right now on a Large Pangea map. Granted, it's the first time I've played as the Iroquois, but so far I have to agree with those who say that it's a bottom-tier civ, or if not bottom-tier at best slightly-below-average-tier. The game is actually going pretty well, but mainly because I have 7 wines in my first 3 cities, and my religion Catholicism has the +1 / for wine pantheon as well as monasteries... in other words, nothing to do with any of the Iroquois' traits.

The UA has been mostly useless. My capital had forests to the north, but my first expansion was south for strategic reasons -- wine, copper, river, mountain, and it was towards the AI. It's a highly defensible position, so I needed to get there before the AI did. My second expansion was north through the forests, and in principle would make great use of the UA. But since it only applies to forests IN your territory, and the default cultural expansion avoids forests, I haven't been able to use it at all yet. I could buy those tiles, but considering the UA is supposed to save me money, that seems like a waste. I'll probably have to build the roads anyway, then just destroy them after my borders finally expand there, then rebuild them again when I need railroads (at which point there's no more benefit to the UA). This UA would be a LOT more useful if it applied to forests not in my territory, like the Incas'.

I haven't gotten to Mohawk Warriors yet, but it's looking like the warring will be with Persia to the south or Egypt to the east, and in both directions there's no forest/jungle, so it doesn't seem like they'll make much of a difference. I guess it'll be nice that I can sell my iron instead of using it, but if there's no forests anyway I'd rather build crossbows and knights. As for the Longhouse, I think I'd rather have a regular workshop. My first expansion seems like it'll be my strongest city, and there's only one or two forest tiles there. You could argue that I should've expanded more towards the forest instead, but that site was really important strategically, whereas the forested region up north was going towards tundra and not a strategic location towards other civs. Even my capital and my second expansion, which are in the midst of all those trees, aren't expanding into them, except for the luxury tiles which I had to chop to obtain.

As others have mentioned, I think the AI is strong with Hiawatha not so much because of his uniques, which are still weak, but because his AI flavor is programmed to go wide, which is a winning strategy with the AI and all its happiness bonuses.

 

[Dr. D]

Can anyone verify that the AI will indeed rush buy a settler?

 

[Horizons]

The AI cheats like a b@stard.

 

[pthmix]

...

The UA has been mostly useless. My capital had forests to the north, but my first expansion was south for strategic reasons -- wine, copper, river, mountain, and it was towards the AI. It's a highly defensible position, so I needed to get there before the AI did. My second expansion was north through the forests, and in principle would make great use of the UA. But since it only applies to forests IN your territory, and the default cultural expansion avoids forests, I haven't been able to use it at all yet. I could buy those tiles, but considering the UA is supposed to save me money, that seems like a waste. I'll probably have to build the roads anyway, then just destroy them after my borders finally expand there, then rebuild them again when I need railroads (at which point there's no more benefit to the UA). This UA would be a LOT more useful if it applied to forests not in my territory, like the Incas'.

...

The Iroquois UA does provide railroad connections in BNW. I just rolled an advanced Information Era start to check this. You do not need to build railroads on forest tiles to get the bonus. The devs must have stealthily changed this.

 

[fyar]

The Iroquois UA does provide railroad connections in BNW. I just rolled an advanced Information Era start to check this. You do not need to build railroads on forest tiles to get the bonus. The devs must have stealthily changed this.

Ah, that's good to know pthmix! I never even played the Iroquois before BNW, but I had seen or heard or read somewhere that in vanilla/G&K you had to build railroads over your forests in order to get the railroad benefits, which seemed like it would just completely waste the UA after Industrial. That actually moves them up a little bit in my book as a civ. Just to be clear, do you get the railroad benefits to both movement and production?

 

[pthmix]

You only get the production bonus, not the movement bonus.

 

[andymant]

Every time I play a game with a Hiawatha AI, he is a friendly neighbor that I inevitably have to rescue from a warmongering AI. Every time. I will say this, it was actually fun when I was rolling in doh as Venice and kept buying super pumped up units and gifting them to him. It was funny to watch him steamroll back from the brink of death with my little mercenery troops.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I'll give this a go with IGE(to add a worker and remake the surroundings to fit that of the screenshot) and on settler later =) I guess that seeing that both of his 'middle' cities are 2, he may have produced a settler in one of those.

Yeah, I wondered if its possible he hard-built one in a second city.

How much gold do Immortal civs start with? I also wonder if buying a settler is a realistic option.