How to get Babylon to work well?

[Haig]

I get that the eureka bonus is likely their most powerful tool, but I havent been able to get the super early airforce etc. That some write about.

Do you actively plan to do stuff to trigger the eurekas? How quickly you settle, should I avoid wars?

 

[Alex Vance]

Yeah I think the whole "Bombers in the Medieval age" is just a load of bullfeathers.

 

[Enfant_Sauvage]

I am not an expert with Babylon but you can check this thread to learn more about their potentials : https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-settings-deity-science-victory.649761/page-7

One thing is to delay the activation of great scientists, boost every techs you can boost and pillage some campuses and industrial zones to get the other ones you can't boost.

 

[Vargas1]

In my experience, they can be a very strong domination civ through the first few eras, but the way to go about it depends on your map and what particular strategy you want to use. The key is to pick what tech(s) you want to aim for and then make sure you have enough production/gold to take advantage of them. A couple of strategies, though I'm sure there are more:

• One of the most straightforward is simply rushing to crossbows - kill someone with a slinger to get archery, pump out a couple more archers using Agoge, and save your gold to upgrade them. Works well if you're near other civs and can get to that point before they're even building swordsmen/horsemen
  • Building off of this, two crossbowman unlock pike and shot, with no resource requirements. Will probably take you a while to build one, but if you have a 55-strength melee unit and a couple of crossbows going up against anything pre-musketmen, you're in good shape
• Another simple one - build three mines to get apprenticeship, which means you can unlock men-at-arms crazy early. Need to get a little RNG lucky to have enough iron around to make them, but if you can get even one in the ancient/early classical era you can steamroll neighbors
• On water-heavy maps, settle two coastal cities, build some fishing boats, and get to work on two harbors. Have a few galleys kicking around and save your money to upgrade to caravels. Since the AI is generally inept at naval combat, you can pick off any coastal cities and make them your own
• Not domination, but early flight for a cultural victory if you have a citystate with a tourism-granting improvement - get to apprenticeship quickly, build two IZs (one of which comes with a free workshop), build the workshop in the other, and you end up and industrialization (and should have pretty good production by that point). Then build Ruhr Valley to get flight - won't take all that long if you can get some of the early wonder-boosting great engineers. I've never managed to use early flying units (the resource requirements got in the way) but you can definitely get to flight in the medieval if you play it right.