Is it possible to win on Deity Level?

[Wardog]

I consider myself a good civ3 player, have won on emperor level and I'm trying on Deity now but it seems impossible to beat the AI.

You found your first city, you're growing fast and about to create your second settler, but then you met the greeks and guess what? They already have 3 cities, 4 workers and 10 warriors. When you found you third city, the AI has almost 10. A joke. The AI settlers team take away the pleasure of playing.

It's incredible but I tried a bunch of times with different civs without success. How can you use the known strategies if the AI even don't let you build your own cities? No matter how good you are on applying strategies, none of them will work if you don't have a good number of cities. Sometimes your opponents grow so fast that they place a new city on the exact square you would put your second city near your capital!

Some tips and comments regarding first turns on Deity level would be great.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dr Alimentado]

yep, it is possible. I win about half my deity solo games I reckon... the other half I usually get crushed pretty quickly!

basic tips (others will have much more detailed/better advice i'm sure - and apologies if this is kids stuff to you but it's what works for me )

use a 60% ocean map for more space, and a good civ obviously.

use a dense build, a city every 3 tiles is extremely effeicent at using the available tiles (until sanitation anyway). and mm the hell out of your cities.

beeline for alphabet/writing on min-sci, the ai often researches the other techs first as they give units/buildings and u can hopefully trade these high value techs for whatevers going. trade every round too... being a canny trader is essential.

be a warmonger, it's hard to get the timing right (ie. be strong enough) but if you can carry off early 'limited' ancient age wars it is very rewarding (get workers and techs for peace). I also will often buy a tech for a gpt deal and then ask them to leave my lands knowing full well they will declare war (some may consider this an exploit)... only works if you can hold them off though obviously.

ermm... can't think of anything else for now, I'll think on it

 

[Wardog]

Thanks a lot, Dr Alimentado.

 

[Kaiser_Berger]

I have to agree with Dr Alimentado. The only thing I have to add is that it isn't totally necessary to go to war. On the contrary, you might want to totally stay away from war. Another option, especially if you're on a large continent, is to declare war on someone far away, and ally the world against them. The AI loses some of its great tech pace if they're bogged down in war.

Keep at it though, don't give up. I won my first Deity game just this month after having the game for around a year. Your day will come.

 

[frekk]

Well, I'm playing an Earth map on deity with 16 civs and raging hordes and it's 1802 right now. We're the Aztecs and everyone was in accurate starting locations. By some miracle, neither the Iroquois or the Americans showed up so I had all of the Americas to myself.
For the longest time I was pretty scared, alright. By the time I had pikemen the Egyptians, French and Germans had been running around with tanks for a few turns and everyone, except perhaps the Japanese, was way ahead of me in tech. They started colonizing the Americas but I played a pretty diplomatic game, allying myself mainly with the most powerful three. When the Greeks declared war on me and began to move riflemen against my pikemen I managed somehow to start a huge world war by bribing the Egyptians into attacking the Greeks. Most of this war took place in Eurasia and the heat was off. The Greeks were driven out of the Americas and I just played it cool. At one point we might have gone down when the French, who had (have) a huge South American empire came after me. Fortunately I had riflemen by this time and a fort on a hilltop where Central America meets South America, with rail access. A great chokepoint. And the Egyptians were fighting them across the Meditteranean so they were distracted, navally speaking. I lost about 10 riflemen keeping that fort against modern tanks before I managed to broker a peace with them (which was extremely pricey).
Since then we've advanced and now cover most of North America. I play the diplomacy carefully, never signing mutual protection but only paying for military alliances when it's necessary to distract an aggressor. I was also very fortunate in an abundance of natural resources in my territory and only import a couple of luxuries, in return for other luxuries of which I have a wide variety. We're finally catching up technologically and just recently added paratroopers, tanks, and mech inf to our military and I'm feeling alot safer now. Safe enough that I declared war on England and took all her North American and Greenland colonies (since they seem to lack rubber, aluminum, and oil - they are at the end of the tech tree but can only field riflemen and ironclads).

Time will tell but we've moved from bottom score to 3rd. This is also a Conquest only game, no spaceships, or I'd have lost ages ago. I don't have a single wonder.

On a side note, the Zulus wiped out those nasty Greeks a few turns ago. (hehehe).

 

[NewDestroyer]

no u can't, the programmers purposely put into the game to keep u playing forever, lol look at past gotms at the diety level and look how many people won........ U need to get ur first city into a settler factory somehow, that helps alot. If u can survive to the industrial era ur in great shape because u can easily industrailize faster then ai and get a tech lead that way and all u gotta do then is get the united nations and sign mutual protection pacts before the voting and ull win easily.

 

[Wardog]

I'm sure it will take some months, even a year for to win o Deity Level. For sure it's a very big challenge.

Thanks everybody for the comments, it will help a lot.

 

[Snaproll]

Make sure you check out the Succession Games Forum - there a lots of people playing Diety games there and they win all the time. They are much better than I am!