How do you play tall?

kitfox

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 29, 2018
Messages
21
I'm interested in knowing any strategy tips for playing tall on the higher levels in VP. Myself, I tend to be aggressive and expansionistic, mostly because it's the only strategy I've found that works. It seems that around the dawn of the classical era, everyone wants to kill you and the only way to field an army fast enough is to open with Authority. You then take a few of their cities to stop them from doing it again, and now you're pretty much committed to playing wide.

Tradition and progress look interesting, but I don't know how to make them work. I think you'd have very limited faith too, so is founding a religion possible? What pantheons are good for a tall strategy? And will you have enough production to build enough units to defend yourself?
 
Here's a few of my thoughts.

Progress: Don't think of this as Tall. Authority is wide by definition because you're conquering, while Progress you should think of as wide by natural expansion: making buildings gets you culture and food, so you want to have more cities to build more buildings to make culture and food, and later to generate more population to generate gold. If your infrastructure is solid with a Progress civ, you can easily go to war anyways and conquer more territory. Sometimes it's situational whether to take Authority or Progress depending on the Civ you choose: Authority commits you to war, but Progress doesn't. Carthage is a good example of this: sometimes I pick one or the other, because its early gold and boats make for easy pickings early on and you can carry this on forever; but it's also easy to expand and pop an enemy city every so often using Progress as well.

Now for Tall, you're (usually) committed to Tradition to make this work as well as possible, and in my case I tend to run anywhere from 3 to 5 cities total. Pick the places you want, and if possible choke points where opponents simply can't push their whole army through against you - then you don't need to be building all kinds of military really quickly to fend off attacks. Of course, if you have no choke point, you may just need to hammer out some military and deal with it. In any case, depending on your military prowess - I'm usually able to handle an AI army of twice the size without any meaningful losses come mid game (and late game is a joke), so keep your units upgraded with a defender and a backup each and in my experience you'll be fine.

Regarding Pantheons - One of the policies gives +4 Faith, which certainly helps for founding a religion. Certain civs also have faith bonuses which makes that easier. Otherwise - if you make your initial couple expansions quickly as you might in any other situation, you'll be no further behind than anyone else. Rush a Shrine everywhere and get your proper Pantheon resource going - you might fail, but with 3 cities working you're bound to succeed.
 
Tradition and progress look interesting, but I don't know how to make them work. I think you'd have very limited faith too, so is founding a religion possible? What pantheons are good for a tall strategy? And will you have enough production to build enough units to defend yourself?
I play Tradition for CV or SV if there are civs with too much culture output. The goal is to generate as many Great People as possible for tourism, themeing bonuses and bonus tourism from events.
I always get Goddess of Beauty for Great People points, it also gives some faith. I build monument->shrine in all cities (4-5), so I might not found a religion, but it's not a big deal for me. I could just get neighbor's religion to have a positive modifier with them.
I don't have any problem with defense. Small amount of units with defensive structures are enough. It's important to not lose units, though.
For policies I go Tradition -> Artistry -> Rationalism -> Freedom. It's geared for Great People generation and getting more techs, which unlock important tourism buildings and make SV a solid alternative.
Usually I don't have production to spend on diplomatic units until very late game, so my main source of influence are quests. Rewards from CS quests are more valuable for a tall civ. You won't have many votes, so if World Ideology is different than yours and you are about to influence all civs then you might consider changing your ideology to unlock CV wonder.
Remember to send at least one TR to all civs that you haven't influence yet for tourism modifier and rest of TR send to the civ that is the hardest to influence. Also use diplomats for tourism modifier and 1 spy to your capital to prevent tech steal and GP assassination.
 
I haven't had anything I'd call success for about two months playing truly tall.
Playing tall is definitely harder now. Or at least it was 3-4 months ago.

As for the advice - playing Tradition is about having a very strong capital that shall fix your secondary cities weaknesses. I think for Tradition ideal number is 5-6 cities, not sure how to live with 3 or 4, it seems not enough for me.
You should build all units in your Capital because other cities have very low production.
You should build your cities quite far away from each other (like 5-6 tiles between cities) because you need your cities to have a lot of good tiles. Tradition borders grow fast.
You should compensate lack of hummers with population growth and gold. You have less cities, more gold and more happiness. Grow your cities and grab your hammers from land tiles.
You should build 1 Worker per city ASAP. Usually i build worker 2nd after Shrine or 3rd after Monument. Improvement of a tile takes 10 turns and growth of a new citizen is usually also ±10 turns, which means that with 1 Worker per city your city always works improved tiles.
 
Not sure. Just feels so. When i play conquest - i'm usually in the middle of the pack compared to AI, when i play Tradition - i always behind in everything.
IMHO it's because a player is much better with warfare than AI, while in terms of production/policy choices that gap is much smaller. However, I don't know why tall is harder for player than 3-4 month ago.
 
I'll also state that tall playstyle is rather weak in VP's current state. It just doesn't feel good to me unless I'm pushing out new cities for the empire.

That said it can also depend on map size tall playstyle gets increasingly weaker the bigger the map you play on and stronger on smaller maps due to availability of space (because tall tends to focus more on specialists meaning you can do more with less cities/tiles).
 
Specialists used to eat 2 food, not 3 like they do now
Happiness is much harder for tall around renaissance era
Unit supply changes
Slower policy unlocks.

Freedom has less food as well. Civil Society used to halve food consumption from specialists which meant -3 or -4 by the time you unlock it. Now, it only reduces by 2. Also, less happiness to cover for massive cities.

I'd blame happiness. Before, we could overgrow some core cities, and the raw population plus lower costs made it possible to compete. Now, having too many people in the same city is punishing.

I blame food. I'm feeling Tall's shortcomings even as Brazil, who has an easy time managing happiness.

Problem is, lower population growth is taking a tool on Tall's supply cap, not just on its yield production. Nowadays, you also want wonders that provide supply cap. Great wall, Himeji Castle and Branderburg Gate actually feel more impactful to me when playing Tall than when being a wide warmonger. I've also valued great generals/admirals more lately for the extra supply they can provide. It wasn't always like that.

And Hanging Gardens remains a powerful wonder for Tall for good reason; whenever I manage to snipe it, I keep feeling its strength even on later eras due to that extra +10 :c5food:.
 
I agree, the tradition is my least favourite policy tree (out of all, not just ancient ones). While the policies aren't bad per se, I think Tradition needs more bonuses towards food/food consumption to allow more populated cities (since there are fewer cities):
 
Food cost of specialists is just taxing, that is why I don't play tall :crazyeye: even on later era, tall seems hard to obtain food, I hope there is a version of agribusiness that does not require horses.
 
I think the best strategy for playing tall is probably to get a patch from about a year ago and play that version instead.
 
Well the issue with Tall before was that it was too strong because of insanely powerful specialists. Now it suffers for food because of new specialist values and a change to Freedom for later on. What if one of the policies gave a bonus to growth or food for each non-specialist in the city? Tall empires are easier to micromanage, so this would give the player an opportunity to do either growth spurts or specialist spurts and have generally speaking a higher population overall without overpowering it too much.
 
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