How to quickly win standard settings Deity

[Unconquered Sun]

ciV is a pale shadow of greater games; and not because it's easy (I beat Civ III deity right out of the box too), but because it is bad and wrong in too many ways to describe.

Anyway, the guide is for all standard settings/continents. Stronger civs like France, Greece, China, Rome, Babylon, Persia will do insignificantly better than the rest.


1. Rush your continent any way you like (this is also the entire, extra-quick, pangea guide)

2. Disband all your military but barbarian police, burn your GGs for GAs, improve trading posts, build markets/mints/libraries and not much else; specialize a city for wonders (building the few decent ones for GAs and trade is optional)

3. Beeline the UN and build it. By that moment the other continent(s) will be snowballed by a couple of AIs. Now bribe all the city states. As even the biggest snowball AI is awarded as much vote as a city state, you get a winning screen like this:

Spoiler :

 

[uberdubersoldat]

this only works because of subpar AI obviously. The game mechanics in place dont enable this, but rather the lack of any real opponent...

 

[Unconquered Sun]

this only works because of subpar AI obviously. The game mechanics in place dont enable this, but rather the lack of any real opponent...

It's not the AI's fault a civ of 30 cities is given the same votes as a civ of 1 city.

 

[aimlessgun]

Diplomatic victory is a tricky thing though. If you base it too much on population/size it becomes domination lite. The current mechanic where a city state is worth as much as an empire of any size is ridiculous though.

As it stands it could almost be considered an economic victory condition, and could play fine in that regard if the AI were programmed to aggressively bid on city states.

 

[Rohili]

Yes. This is a major flaw in the game IMO. The diplomatic victory requires no diplomacy at all; it is a mere matter of amassing enough gold (and making sure that enough city states survive to be bribed).

I don't think a civ should get more votes based on the number of cities it has - that would make diplomacy too dependent on expanding and founding/conquering more cities, which is not what diplomacy should be about. Also, that is not realistic since in the real UN General Assembly, all states have one vote each. Rather, a good fix would be giving each civ 4 votes compared to the 1 vote each city state gets.

 

[Roxlimn]

This isn't a fool-proof win plan. I've been in at least two, three games where there weren't enough City States to make a win by the time I got to the other continent with enough money to bribe every one. I had to assemble a continental invasion to liberate them.

This is doubly so when you're stuck in a crappy little peninsula with no rivers, no maritime CSs, and 4 lousy luxury resources. Require Optics to embark your Horsemen? Yeah. Easy game.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Sigh...+1 to OP.

There are a lot of feature level flaws that create balance issues in the game. I'm not talking about civ vs civ balance, I'm talking about at the strategic returns level. It doesn't take our elite Civ IV deity crowd to notice it, either .

I never even tried to play civ III for more than a few hours here and there, but diplo has been broken since AT LEAST civ IV, though generally it wasn't THIS bad until BTS unveiled the Apostolic auto-win "feature" .

I'm not a big fan of interface lag/time between turns (on small-standard maps with WAY above "recommended specs"), balance of rush opportunity cost, complete lack of AI execution, or really the tradeoffs in this game in general. It seems like it has a lot of potential...it's not there yet. I hope we get more effort into this game than late BTS patches (3.13 through 3.19 were a joke) or something like AP/Vassal mechanics/Diplo resolution logic (Civ IV AI called resolutions from those available at random regardless of situation just as an example).

 

[Martin Alvito]

Don't forget to aggressively Research Agreement your way through the Renaissance to speed things up.

I haven't cracked the 200 turn barrier on a Diplomatic win yet, but I suspect that I will in the game I am working on. If you're fast enough, there will still be city-states on the other continent, and a Diplo win is more or less assured.

Also note that liberating your continent keeps the endgame costs way, way down.

 

[Surgeon]

Thanks for pointing out this game flaw. It hasnt been pointed out before.

 

[pi-r8]

Well the diplo victory is obviously broken, but you did kinda lucky here. First you were using Greece, to make things extra imbalanced. Also it's usually just 1 AI that snowballs the entire other continent, and they kill the city states too, so you have to go liberate some if you want a diplo victory.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I think the AI should be taught to more vigorously pursue city state allies. At the moment the diplo victory is only possible in cases like this because it appears AIs do not even recognise you are getting close to victory (or if they are they're doing practically zero about it). Only in one or two of my games so far have I noticed a city state that had been an ally, get given more by a rival and lose my ally status. Of course, in those cases I just boosted some more gold into them to get them back again, and I didn't get any trouble from the AIs. If there was real competition for a city state ally, perhaps diplo vic would be made more difficult.

I've seen AIs with pretty big pots of gold, so it's not as if they don't have the resources to be pursuing the city states. And I have noticed them taking a greater interest in those that are under their 'sphere of influence' as they say, so it's not as if there is no AI logic on this at all. It just needs some serious work.

In principle I like that the AIs no longer vote for anyone but themselves. EDIT... comment removed. nvm

Another thing I think could help, is to make influence degrade slower for city states that are closer, or conversely make it degrade faster for states further away - whichever works better. Whether this should be based on distance to the capital, or distance to the average of your empire, or some other measure, is a matter to decide.

EDIT
One more thing, as a way to combat the effectiveness of simply buying up all the city states at the time of the vote, perhaps there should be some mechanism where influence gained with them in the past gets banked and accrues interest at a very small rate over time. There needs to be a way whereby someone who helps out city states during the entire game, especially early, is rewarded more than someone who simply burns 750 gold on each one at the end of the game.

And by the way, Unconquered Sun, I hope you will join me in nicknaming this the bribery victory.

 

[uberdubersoldat]

It's not the AI's fault a civ of 30 cities is given the same votes as a civ of 1 city.

but it is the AIs fault for not easily recognizing a simple thing such as:

an opponent is allied with 13 city states

the mechanic isn't broken per se, but you obviously play against supremely inferior AI in terms of tactics....

 

[CultureManiac]

I'm also surprised the AI doesn't bid as aggressively on city states when a vote is pending, even when they are sitting on wads of gold. I have been in the situation, however, where I was trying to buy my last city state, which happened to be next to the biggest civ on the other continent. I dumped more than 2,000 gp into its coffers and it still wouldn't rank me higher than friend. The other city had built up so mch reserve standing I couldn't flip it.
So buying all states at the last minute doesn't always work, and if you help out states you will get more influence with them over time - or you can liberate them for a permanent vote.
Just wish the AI would be a bit more aggressive trying to mess up my plans - while still failing to stop me in the end.

 

[UncleJJ]

This is an extremely easy way to win.

CultureManiac, in my game most if not all the remaining CS were at "permanent war" with Bismark as he had attacked and conquered too many CS. It is not possible to bribe a CS then, so having pots of gold won't help.

 

[qhash]

why after building a great mechanics in Civ IV they ended up in equalizing the vote of 30 city civ which a vote of 1 city civ I do not know but I am really really upset :/.... i played a new Civ for maybe 10-12 times and I am bored :/

 

[CivBeaver]

I was playing against ramssess who built the UN. We had about half the city states each, and so were roughly tied on votes. Then I noticed he had 13000+ gold stored up, but did he buy the remaining city states for an easy diplo victory? No He kept building it up for god knows what!

 

[Unconquered Sun]

Well the diplo victory is obviously broken, but you did kinda lucky here. First you were using Greece, to make things extra imbalanced. Also it's usually just 1 AI that snowballs the entire other continent, and they kill the city states too, so you have to go liberate some if you want a diplo victory.

I've stomped my starting continent with civs as weak as the Americans. The only intrigue was not losing a single unit.

So far continents map has played with two landmasses with civs/city states (aka 2x "Old World") and a landmass/archipelago of city states only ("New World") for me. Between cities on my landmass and the New World landmass I never had a problem with votes. Also, I don't think facing only one AI in the vote makes it harder, on the contrary the AI share of the vote is even smaller.

Of course, if there is only one AI left, and its capital were seaside, it's insta-win. If the capital were inland you have a choice between diplo cheese and spearhead for the capital cheese.

 

[yanner39]

A UN win was my first win on my first game at Civ 5. The level was Prince. My first impressions on this game at that point made me nervous because of how easily I won the game. And if I would have made a few better decisions, ie choice of social policies, and tech/build choices, the win would have came sooner than it did.

It made me nervous because I was a Civ virgin when I started playing Civ 4 two and a half years ago. I never played a Civ game before. When I started Civ 4, Warlord level gave me some trouble. That's why I never got bored. I came to the forums, watch TMIT's playthroughs and made my way to Monarch when Civ 5 came out. I was as much in Civ 4 when 5 came out as I was at the beginning. I find that I can already see that Civ 5 is different.

A few things I still can't get I head around:

1. Ridiculously slow production at the beginning. Why build a granary? It takes way too long and I'll just get a Maritime CS to give me food.

2. I still have trouble with the population fuels research. Because there is a hard happy cap, essentially research is capped as well.

3. I use to like the diplo part of the game, but I find it difficult to see determine what the relations are between the other civs.

Question to the civ vets. How does the release of Civ 5 relate to the release of Civ 4 Vanilla? Some of you played Civ 3 alot and was your reaction the same when Civ 4 came out as it is now with Civ 5?

How long should it take for Civ 5 to be "acceptable"?

 

[r_rolo1]

Another ode to the Conan strategy, I guess ... this time with a mass bribe twist in the end. Lovely...

 

[shpeka]

I've stomped my starting continent with civs as weak as the Americans. The only intrigue was not losing a single unit.

So far continents map has played with two landmasses with civs/city states (aka 2x "Old World") and a landmass/archipelago of city states only ("New World") for me. Between cities on my landmass and the New World landmass I never had a problem with votes. Also, I don't think facing only one AI in the vote makes it harder, on the contrary the AI share of the vote is even smaller.

Of course, if there is only one AI left, and its capital were seaside, it's insta-win. If the capital were inland you have a choice between diplo cheese and spearhead for the capital cheese.

Welcome back to the forums, U.S.

I was, too, on the verge of completing my deity AI-whoop but suddenly it didn't feel like a challenge.

It seems I am too bored to finish that game.