How do you win on Vostok or higher?

[AcetyleneLamp]

Hi, first time poster. I've been playing Civ BE for about three weeks now (my previous Civ experience is briefly playing Civ 2 back in High School and playing a couple of really bad games of FreeCiv), and I've made several attempts at winning a single player game on the Vostok level, but something always seems to go wrong (my previous two victories were a Domination victory in a Sputnik game with one other AI and a Contact victory in a Mercury game). I'm getting rather frustrated with the seeming damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't nature of the gameplay past the easier levels. If you don't expand too much and stay peaceful, you get left in the dust by the AIs and get beaten to one of the technological victories. If you do expand, you get hit with health penalties (that building health buildings and biowells and doing the propaganda project with most of your spies in HQ only goes so far to compensate for) and eventually provoke one of the AIs you expand close to into steamrolling you with their much superior army (and sometimes when you try to set up a couple of extra cities early on, it's hard to find a good place due to swarms of aliens or a worm hanging out nearby). On my last couple of games, I've tried to build up my affinity as quickly as I can so I can upgrade my military units (I've favored Supremacy so far), but the AIs get there way faster than me (even when I do all of the affinity quests and send out explorers to find Progenitor ruins), and of course, when I do build up an affinity, it gets about half of the AIs mad at me (the Harmony people seem to be the biggest dicks about this, which has biased me against that affinity a little). I even tried setting the game pace to Epic instead of Standard to see if that makes any difference. What am I doing wrong?

 

[a space oddity]

It's hard to tell what you're doing wrong from just this post alone. It might help to watch a few let's plays in this subforum.

You'll get more directed info if you start a game, report what you're doing here, so we can give you hints and tips along the way. Way back there where training-day games, those are usually very helpful too. In those there is one experienced, high-level player and a group of interested players, playing two or or three levels higher than they are used to. Everybody plays 10 turns and reports. Those are fun to read, but I'm afraid there is no such game running at the moment.

 

[Ryika]

A few roughly related things:
- Don't worry about negative health early on, just keep on expanding (within reason of course). Biowells will get you back into positive health.

- Why do you worry about aliens? Don't attack them, send Settlers only with escort and they shouldn't really annoy you that much.

- First virtue you should aim for is almost always the free Settler from Prosperity. After that, change to one of the other trees, depending on what you're planing to do.

- You don't need high affinity or many military units early on, just make sure you have "some" and defend within the range of your cities if a Civ decides to attack you.

- Scouts are awesome. Depending on the map type you should probably start with building ~2 of them.

And of course: Don't automate your workers. And assign your Citizens manually, the AI does a HORRIBLE job at choosing tiles once you're dropping in health (by avoiding food). You want to grow as much as you can without hurting your building progress too much.

 

[liv]

And do not ignore trade routes. They are very helpful both internal and external ones.
To make your trade routes safe from the aliens you need to research ecology and build a Ultrasonic fence. Then wait till you get a quest that lets you "reverse the polarity" of the fence and all trade is safe.
Building your cities up, focussing on growth and science is important so you want workers early.
Chemistry science has a cheap science building (laboratory) that yo want to get to early and if you are doing Supremacy head for Cognition so you can build some academies on some of your good food squares to get more science.

 

[Elz Majesto]

Make sure your start with the free worker, on the higher difficulty it makes a difference.
Scout for city placement and locations! Makes planning out the city location easier. Go prosperity to get the free settler, and then forward settle him so that you can claim a bigger piece of land later!
For health, either beeline prosperity for the 3rd tier health bonuses, or beeline industry for their bonuses. And of course, build bio-wells were appropriate, just be sure you can afford them!

If you like supremacy, go for the 2 easy leaf techs in the begining (Autonomous and Power system), then go into Robotics, mine your firaxite, and then go for CNDR tech.

 

[ionize]

And do not ignore trade routes. They are very helpful both internal and external ones.
To make your trade routes safe from the aliens you need to research ecology and build a miasma fence. Then wait till you get a quest that lets you "reverse the polarity" of the fence and all trade is safe.

Have to chime in and correct this to "Ultrasonic Fence". Don't want AcetyleneLamp to search the tech web in confusion. Apart from that great point.

I would like to add a few personal observations as well:
* When setting up a new game think about grabbing artists for the culture boost early on. This can be a great boon.
* Additional consider revealing Petrolium, Titanium and Geothermal (forgot the name of the setting) to be able to make informed decisions about city locations early on. Alternatively, MadDjin made a good point in one of his Let's Plays to go with the broader starting zone, this has two major benefits: 1. you can pinpoint a great location for your capital and 2. you reveal a large chunk of the map and maybe some early Pods to grab with your explorer(s).

 

[AcetyleneLamp]

Responses to a few things:

* I do get a trade depot going asap in a new city and do as much trading as I can (but I usually avoid trades with AIs that benefit them more than me, especially if they're direct competitors), and I do get an ultrasonic fence built asap to make my trade units alien-proof.

* There have been a couple of times when I made the dumb mistake of sending out a colonist with a worm hanging out nearby that kills it (and the lower level military units can't really do much to defend it against a worm). There are some times when I can't really expand that much due to being surrounded by worms until I get my rangers upgraded to gunners, since that seems to be the minimum you need to be able to kill a worm reasonably fast.

* I don't set my workers on auto (I did for a little while at first before I knew what I was doing), but I have been letting my cities kind of go on autopilot with how they assign workers aside from putting a few citizens into building specialist slots when I need more energy or science. When I do play around with the citizen placement a little bit, I usually end up mostly going back to the default since I end up not producing enough food with my modified citizen placement.

* My settings I usually use when starting a new game are Scientist/Reveal strategic resources on map/Free worker. I haven't really settled on a favorite sponsor yet, maybe the KP since I like the advantage of city borders expanding faster. I like doing as much spying as I can, but the ARC's spying advantage hasn't seemed like a big help thus far when I choose that one.

I played the game I was playing when I started this thread a bit more, I ended up doing pretty good aside from getting left behind in the tech victory race. The #1 AI is well on their way to a Promised Land victory, and I'm probably not militarily advanced enough to go invade them to prevent it. One big mistake I probably made was going for Supremacy instead of Purity when I had lots of floatstone around but only a little bit of firaxite. Would you say that the availability of floatstone/firaxite/xenomass is a pretty good rule of thumb for which affinity you should concentrate on?

 

[liv]

maybe you should post a more detailed outline of your game so that people here can come up with some constructive suggestions. I am guessing that for most of us who played civ5 before will not find ourselves behind in science and affinity on the lower levels of this game.

I generally would say that
since worms only move one at the time you can probably avoid them most of the time.

I would say that the specialists slots are not very good. If you need energy build generators and some energy buildings. Use policies in the Industry virtues. They are very good.

Opening up sqaures to your nabour early and using your explorers is very important early one. If you are behind on science at least some of your cities should be able to find trade that benefit you.

I usually decide my affinity based on resources. But you can win without a lot of them

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Try this Strategy:

Sponsor: African Union
Colonists: Artists
Spaceship: Tectonic Scanner
Equipment: Laboratory

Build Order for the capital:
Trade Depot -> Convoy -> Recycler -> Worker, then start building Settlers and Trade Convoys until you have 5-6 cities total, depending on terrain.

Invest your first SPs into Prospertity and unlock the free settler asap. Afterwards grab Industry SPs and make your way to the bottom of the tree.

Scout with your inital explorer and move your free settler on a decent spot 3-4 hexes away from the capital (use scout to cover if needed). Use your first Trade Convoy to speed up outpost development and getting more hammers in the capital.

Use your first worker to improve some basic ressources and a hill or two near the capital, then focus on developing a few tiles at your outpost.

In general you should try to settle next to mine ressources (most importantly Titanium) and already improve those tiles while the outpost is still growing.

Tech order:
Chemistry -> Ecology -> Genetics -> Cognition -> Engineering -> Alien Lifeforms
(I usually go Genetic Design -> Transgenics -> Physics -> Robotics -> Bionics after that)

Building Priority for new cities:
Trade Depot > Recycler > Vivarium > Laboratorium > Health Buildings > Rest

Make sure you build a new worker for each new city and get your trade network up and running asap. Keep an eye on your budged, build Thorium Reactors to offset the Academy cost. Build Academies, Mines and one or two Biowells for each city.

I usually prefer to go Harmony (regardless of ressources around me), but that's just because I am lazy and hate the Purity / Supremacy victory conditions.

 

[Aldor]

While you shouldn't ignore your opponents' affinity levels, don't worry about them too much. More important are the victory updates you see for them. I've see AIs go to lvl 15+ affinity without getting much in the way of victory updates.

Best you can do is to check their progress every few turns, especially once you reach the mid game. If you see someone going up up in affinity steadily, then focus your own research more. Also do the affinity quests...they really help you.

 

[ionize]

Responses to a few things:

* I do get a trade depot going asap in a new city and do as much trading as I can (but I usually avoid trades with AIs that benefit them more than me, especially if they're direct competitors), and I do get an ultrasonic fence built asap to make my trade units alien-proof.

I played the game I was playing when I started this thread a bit more, I ended up doing pretty good aside from getting left behind in the tech victory race. The #1 AI is well on their way to a Promised Land victory, and I'm probably not militarily advanced enough to go invade them to prevent it. One big mistake I probably made was going for Supremacy instead of Purity when I had lots of floatstone around but only a little bit of firaxite. Would you say that the availability of floatstone/firaxite/xenomass is a pretty good rule of thumb for which affinity you should concentrate on?

I would suggest you send trade convoys and vessels to the AI again. The science per turn you can get out of a few trade routes can make the difference in keeping up with the AI on higher difficulty levels and it gives you time to focus on different things in your cities, if you need to (i. e. military, growth).

It could be helpful to take your available resources into account when picking your dominant affinity. Yes, you can stick to one affinity in the majority of your game, like GAGA Extrem does with Harmony, but you might not have enough strategic resources to support an army or the unique buildings you might want.
That is one of the reasons why getting out a couple of explorers early and scouting the map is crucial: you reveal the map, find routes to AI cities and stations (making them available for trade routes as long as there is no miasma blocking the way [convoys only!]), you scout out valuable city locations and - of course - you can get lucky and grab a ton of goodies from pods and excavation sites. I usually go with 2-3 explorers early on, sometimes even more depending on the map size or what the RNG is throwing at me.

 

[AcetyleneLamp]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I think I have a better understanding of how to win now. I finished playing the game I was on and did pretty good aside from the #1 AI winning a Promised Land victory. I thought I might be able to pull out a Contact victory since most of the other AIs were Supremacy people on my side who declared war on him (he was at about level 15 or 16 Purity), and I attempted a last-ditch invasion to prevent the Promised Land victory, but it didn't work. I will probably have better luck next time. Managing to survive long enough for one of the AIs to beat me to a tech victory and not getting steamrolled by an enemy AI was an improvement, at least.

 

[AcetyleneLamp]

I won my first Vostok game a few days ago, so yay for me (Promised Land victory, reached max Purity level, conquered one AI and came close to conquering another one). Thanks for the tips everyone.