Kuriotates Strategies

[nealhunt]

A tip I saw somewhere recently and haven't had a chance to use is using Priests to build temples in settlements. They can't build anything but you can pop buildings. Since some of the temples add flat benefits they are supposedly able to have your settlements actually produce a little bit in each. Since they don't have maintenance, it's pure profit.

That said, I recall that even when there was something produced in a settlement it was zeroed out, so that might not be true.

As far as production, the important thing in overcoming limited production slots is to max commerce and use gold to rush and upgrade.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

K... got frustrated with Kurio (kept getting boxed in), did a game with Khazad and then went back... and got lucky with land. Just enough space for 3 full cities and lots of forested grasslands.

Turn 209, FoL, all 3 cities are about size 30... and my capital is starting to get unhealthiness... the capital was the only one that started with forests in 1/2 the BFC instead of most of it.

What do you do at that point? I'm also starting to run into a deficit, my tech slider is at 70% or so. Cottage more? or keep more forests for health/happiness?

 

[heisenberg]

well its kind of a lil' balancing game with forests/cottages. Both enclaves and ancient forests make very high yield tiles. Personally 30+ pop is already a very huge city. I try not to mine at all though, since you probably sacrifice only a measly few hammers for food/happiness/health from forests, or lots of gold from enclaves.

tech slider @ 70-80% is pretty respectable, I suppose spreading your religion to your other settlements could help boost gold production a bit in your holy city and possibly help to keep the culture going.

Hmmm... seeing that your cities are already 30+ pop its probably pretty late in the game. My usual solution for a budget deficit is to start a war lol~ Then you could keep the deficit there while running your economy with your spoils of war. I hope you did build the Go9, backup merc troops for garrisonning/fodder are very useful during wartime.
With the kurios you could almost keep every single city you capture as settlements, and maybe leave 1-2 mercs in it while your main army rolls on. (if those mercs spot an invasion force, they could call on a merc each, and by the time the force reaches the city you get an exponential number of merc defenders hehe~ str 7 mercs with iron is a very respectable defending unit, even if they are green)
Since settlements do not cost maintenance you would be able to control huge tracts of conquered land with key resources easily--that would also somewhat help in your happiness/health problem in your cities.

For me, since I go calvary heavy for my main force, I'd be able to get some highly promoted centuar chargers by mid-lategame. Then I'd try to finish up stirrups-warhorses fast, to upgrade those chargers to centuar guards, which are 14/11 with iron. I find that to be a huge leap in strength compared to those centuar chargers and archers. Thats when you basically could mop up almost any unit on the field, and could almost even kill garrisoned units with impunity. I'll try to get drill up fast for them to get blitz, once they reach blitz the XP would keep rolling in =P For "harder" garrisoned targets I'd just throw flanking centuar archers to soften them up before I send in the guards.

Of course there's the other peaceful option of going for cultural/tower victories, which are also a highly viable strat for the kurios, since they have mega-sprawling cities to build wonders for cultural, or be able to get a tower victory after a period of warmongering to grab nodes.

 

[DrPepper836]

Here is what I've found works the best for Kuriotates: a city with 2 - 3 food resources, at least 7 hills, and a lot of grassland that is preferably on a river.

Cottage the grasslands, mine the hills, and farm/pasture/whatever the food resources. When the cottages turn into enclaves, that will help with growth and provide enough food to work grassland hills. The food is for growth, health, and plain hills. I never try and get my cities above 25 population unless I get really really lucky as it doesn't work well due to health, but I always run the Public Healers because you get it for free. Also, blasting powder is a big tech that should be gotten ASAP, as the production boost is awesome.

With these guys, I normally go arcane/divine for my army.

 

[heisenberg]

yep that could work too, but I assume you went for some non-FoL religion?
Blasting powder is such a late tech that if I went for FoL I would fill my BFC solely with cottages and ancient forests, since ancient forests do not lose out much to mines pre-powder and has other beneficial side-effects.

Hmmm... that reminds me...
@fuzzybunny: Just remembered your point about Order, well actually once your major cities has the amount of ancient forests you want, there is always the option of swapping religions. The ancient forests would still provide the same amount of health boost anyway, and still provide the huge amount of food/hammers. And afterall I never ever go down the recon line far enough to be able to build FoL's heroes anyway, since I usually focus on calvary/metal for kurios.
However though that means that there would be a long period of time before you can get your high priests to be able to cast unyielding order, so you might need some stopgap measure like social order to solve the happiness problem. In fact, I never quite found the need to cast unyielding order in my key cities when I had Order, because most of the time I'd be running social order anyway and I could afford to keep spare random troops garrisoned to keep my main cities happy. I'd really rather use high priests in the front lines with command etc lol.

 

[DrPepper836]

Yeah, I normally run the order with them. The ability to pop your garrison troops without building them is priceless with the Kuriotates, and between the -40% maintenance from a basilica and -10% maintenance from the law mana that comes with the Code of Junil, you pay almost nothing for each settlement. And that doesn't even include the +1 gpt from the Code of Junil. I never go CoE, AV, or OO, but that is just more personal taste than anything, as hell terrain is relatively easy to manage with 3 - 5 cities that you actually need to care about. I think that a FoL kuriotates would be impregnable and would lead to a good AoL victory, because if you ring your core cities with settlements and bloom everywhere in them, then you couldn't be attacked because of all of those treants. And the extra food would lend itself toward running a lot of priests for the alter.

 

[heisenberg]

You already pay nothing for your settlements if i'm not mistaken, for the kurios the main source of expenditure is the upkeep of your army, so really the law mana doesn't really make that much of a difference if you only have a few cities after all.

I don't really bother blooming around settlements though... I just let whatever forests become ancient and just bother linking up my resources.

@nealhunt:
I went to the WB and placed a settlement, and a RoK priest. The priest was able to build the temple, and it seemed to give the income from the temple, though the other income from the actual city was set to 0. So if I'm not wrong, sending out priests to spam temples in a large empire could very possibly lead to very nice income--a standard empire with ~8-10 settlements should net easily 20 gpt. Only main problem I don't like about RoK is that the settlements would not pop their borders, which are kind of annoying.
On the other hand, AV would provide both the culture AND the beakers in settlements. ^^
I think I'm gonna have to give AV a try in my next game, however much I hate dealing with that red devil and having hell terrain. On the bright side, other than that potentially HUGE research boost from AV, StW is such a powerful civic that its really worth considering, and that I simply love ritualists.

 

[Zechnophobe]

You get any raw bonus that your settlements provide. This can come from specialists, or buildings in them.

For example, you can use Liberty to assign a pair of specialists to each settlement, perhaps being enough to give a nice bit of income or science.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

Hmmm... seeing that your cities are already 30+ pop its probably pretty late in the game. My usual solution for a budget deficit is to start a war lol~ Then you could keep the deficit there while running your economy with your spoils of war. I hope you did build the Go9, backup merc troops for garrisonning/fodder are very useful during wartime.
With the kurios you could almost keep every single city you capture as settlements, and maybe leave 1-2 mercs in it while your main army rolls on. (if those mercs spot an invasion force, they could call on a merc each, and by the time the force reaches the city you get an exponential number of merc defenders hehe~ str 7 mercs with iron is a very respectable defending unit, even if they are green)
Since settlements do not cost maintenance you would be able to control huge tracts of conquered land with key resources easily--that would also somewhat help in your happiness/health problem in your cities.

For me, since I go calvary heavy for my main force, I'd be able to get some highly promoted centuar chargers by mid-lategame. Then I'd try to finish up stirrups-warhorses fast, to upgrade those chargers to centuar guards, which are 14/11 with iron. I find that to be a huge leap in strength compared to those centuar chargers and archers. Thats when you basically could mop up almost any unit on the field, and could almost even kill garrisoned units with impunity. I'll try to get drill up fast for them to get blitz, once they reach blitz the XP would keep rolling in =P For "harder" garrisoned targets I'd just throw flanking centuar archers to soften them up before I send in the guards.

Well, that was turn 200... normal speed. I dunno, for me that was mindblowingly fast to hit size 30. Maybe I'm just normally slow... even then though, the cities were still growing at one pop per... oh... 4 turns or so. All 3 cities capped out at size 40-41 not long after. I switched and beelined guilds so that I wasn't capped at my building specialists which seemed to help quite a bit.

As for units, I had a hard time keeping everyone in use I had Yvain, the Baron and Kithriel (the mounted hero), 2 priests, 4 mages and 4 centaurs. I don't think I actually used the centaurs since I usually wanted to attack with Yvain first to hopefully capture a defender, then the Baron to hopefully get a free werewolf then the priests and sometimes mages to boost their exp.

Good idea with the mercs though, I *just* finished go9 and was putting one more there... didn't think of using multiples to multiply defenders. Sweet.

Hmmm... that reminds me...
@fuzzybunny: Just remembered your point about Order, well actually once your major cities has the amount of ancient forests you want, there is always the option of swapping religions. The ancient forests would still provide the same amount of health boost anyway, and still provide the huge amount of food/hammers. And afterall I never ever go down the recon line far enough to be able to build FoL's heroes anyway, since I usually focus on calvary/metal for kurios.
However though that means that there would be a long period of time before you can get your high priests to be able to cast unyielding order, so you might need some stopgap measure like social order to solve the happiness problem. In fact, I never quite found the need to cast unyielding order in my key cities when I had Order, because most of the time I'd be running social order anyway and I could afford to keep spare random troops garrisoned to keep my main cities happy. I'd really rather use high priests in the front lines with command etc lol.

Yea, I think I revise my thoughts on Order... as mentioned above, I never really hit an unhappiness cap with 3 cities and no settlements... I managed to find buildings to fill the hole when I needed it and hit my food cap at around pop 40. I guess FoL is the way to go...

@nealhunt:
I went to the WB and placed a settlement, and a RoK priest. The priest was able to build the temple, and it seemed to give the income from the temple, though the other income from the actual city was set to 0. So if I'm not wrong, sending out priests to spam temples in a large empire could very possibly lead to very nice income--a standard empire with ~8-10 settlements should net easily 20 gpt. Only main problem I don't like about RoK is that the settlements would not pop their borders, which are kind of annoying.
On the other hand, AV would provide both the culture AND the beakers in settlements. ^^
I think I'm gonna have to give AV a try in my next game, however much I hate dealing with that red devil and having hell terrain. On the bright side, other than that potentially HUGE research boost from AV, StW is such a powerful civic that its really worth considering, and that I simply love ritualists.

Hrmm I'd be interested in that... it seems like the massive unhealthiness from AV would cripple your most important production cities, wouldn't it?

PS anyone thing its kinda buggy/irritating that you can't use a great prophet to build a religious capital if its in a settlement? What happens if you found a religion and it pops in one of your settlements? In my case it was captured religious capitals but still....

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

PS anyone think its kinda buggy/irritating that you can't use a great prophet to build a religious capital if its in a settlement? What happens if you found a religion and it pops in one of your settlements? In my case it was captured religious capitals but still....

agreed, I guess you should post this in the bug thread

@everyone: nice thread with very useful info

 

[heisenberg]

Hmmm... Sac the Weak is really what AV really shines in imo
who cares about the unhealthiness when each of your pop only takes 1 food instead of 2? =P
When running StW usually the wall you hit first is the unhappiness cap, but you'd grow really fast, possibly even faster than FoL. Running AV I usually just stay on slavery and keep whipping out the excess pop, and Pillar of Chains could help mitigate the happiness cap (somewhat).

No idea about the holy city part though, I suppose its a bug we should report. But usually I'd definitely make those holy cities (real) cities instead of settlements hehe~

 

[nealhunt]

@nealhunt:
I went to the WB and placed a settlement, and a RoK priest. The priest was able to build the temple, and it seemed to give the income from the temple, though the other income from the actual city was set to 0. So if I'm not wrong, sending out priests to spam temples in a large empire could very possibly lead to very nice income--a standard empire with ~8-10 settlements should net easily 20 gpt. Only main problem I don't like about RoK is that the settlements would not pop their borders, which are kind of annoying.
On the other hand, AV would provide both the culture AND the beakers in settlements.

Ah. Thanks for the information. Don't forget RoK generates a gold just for having the religion in the city, so that's 3 per (1 for religion +1 from temple). Looks to me like RoK and AV would definitely be the best choices. OO would be okay if you were trying for a culture crush of some kind.

With Zechno's tip about specialists, it seems like civics with free specialists, temples for innate bonuses and specialist slots, and specialist boosting wonders would be a good general plan.

===

Zechnophobe: Thanks for the specialist tip as well.

 

[Chrispy]

Ah. Thanks for the information. Don't forget RoK generates a gold just for having the religion in the city, so that's 3 per (1 for religion +1 from temple). Looks to me like RoK and AV would definitely be the best choices. OO would be okay if you were trying for a culture crush of some kind.

With Zechno's tip about specialists, it seems like civics with free specialists, temples for innate bonuses and specialist slots, and specialist boosting wonders would be a good general plan.

===

Zechnophobe: Thanks for the specialist tip as well.

I am a big fan of that method with Kuriotates, especially with Runes. While working a high yield plot doesn't help, you can turn that lone population into a merchant with the Temple of Kilmorph, turning that 3 per settlement into 6 per settlement. With those numbers and low city maintenance due to limited cities, you can afford to specialize science and production in the cities. Once you use the priests to build temples in your settlements, you can also afford to switch religions to whatever you prefer and still get 5 gold per settlement from the temple and merchant.

You can do the same with science and AV, but I find the gold in many settlements without multipliers and a large science city works better for me.

Losing the border pops isn't great, but that's why I would consider leaving Legends until you have a few settlements up and ready for it. You definitely want it to get your 2nd and 3rd cities to full border pop, but it helps the settlements as well.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

So, started a new game but on Emperor... going the FoL route but everyone is developing so fast. I had the Horde infringing on my land from the west because it took so long for my megacities to grow out to fill the holes. Did my plan of popping 2 sages while philo, then going spiritual and popping out a bunch of disciples to store for exp, then went arcane to do the same with adepts.

Unfortunately, going by the stack of units sitting in their nearby cities I didn't think I could wait to tech up to wizards and fireballs so I started going centaurs and catapults. My cash dropped precipitously though so I was down to 30% tech.... my score was still the highest but I think that's because my cities were gigantic.

Still not a big fan of centaurs... they were getting creamed attacking that city. When you use centaurs, how long do you wait before using them to attack? IE I was using a stack of centaurs with flanking promotions, should I have used a strength promo instead? I figured that flanking would help soften stuff up but even though their flanking was high, they usually ended up just dying.

 

[heisenberg]

I usually just mix them up, flanking to soften and some with raw combat for the kill.

However, if you're referring to how early I attack with them, I usually go in around the same time I make my first trait change so ~turn 100. You'd want to pick a neighbouring target that hasn't obtained copper yet preferably, so you'd be dealing with str 3 warriors with str 4 centuars.
Early on though, I usually just forsake my flanking promos and go straight for combat I > shock I. Before you invade just farm up some barbs for a few promos.
And yea they usually have a large stack sitting in their capital, but by this time they usually have a second city set up so you could easily crack that first, while baiting out most of their defenders to attempt to counterattack/defend that city.

I usually try to scout around to look for the easier civ to crack, and somehow try to check their defending units and promote up the centuars to counter. (usually just shock I at first helps)
I'd try to find a non-copper civ to hit their warriors with centuars.
By the time they get copper you'd possibly need trade/construction/bronze for 6/4 copper centuar chargers+cats. Then again the raw productive strength of the kurios early on is strong enough for you to simply just churn out a massive number of centuars to toss at their cities. They'd be barely able to match you 1:1 in warrior production even.

I find that taking out a neighbouring civ early is useful, since it nets you usually a very nice second city spot. (if you haven't already built a 2nd)

Hmmm... Since you mentioned that you already swapped traits 2 times to spiritual+arcane that means you're probably on turn 300ish. By then if you wanted to go calvary heavy you'd probably need stirrups for centuar archers. They have 35% base withdrawal, and if you run apprenticeship+conquest and maybe even the Titan, you'd be able to pop flanking II archers right off the bat for some 75% withdrawal. Then try to hit warhorses asap to upgrade your high level chargers to guards.
imho, try not to deviate too far off the mounted line if you wanted to use them as a core army. The mounted line is kind of weak early on w/o the metal upgrades (except chargers), so you'd like to tech up the mounted line fast. Not to mention, it is also an economically viable line, since you get to pick up trade on the way, so you could easily trade for those cheaper techs you skipped for utility purposes.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

hrmm ok I think that was the problem. My army usually consists of a couple heroes, a bunch of mages/priests and then something like 4-5 highly promoted melee units that mop up after being weakened by everything else. Usually I just go with swordsmen or the other melee unit because my direct damage is slow anyway... so having a 3 move horseman doesn't help too much. While the strat with the 2 civic changes gets me some nicely experienced support units, my main melee bulk is missing until fairly late.

In this case, I decided I better take a quick trip down one of the melee lines to pick up some shock troops before going back to priest/mage. My attack was VERY soon after the 2nd switch so around turn 210 or 220... but at emperor they had copper axemen and archers in their cities (one reason why I wanted to attack them, they snuck in and took the only copper in my general area).

Looks like I need to focus more. What do you all think about skipping most of spiritual with FOL and going centaur/mage focus? Only thing I would miss here is Yvain... but generally I don't think FoL priests/high priests are all that useful (secondary abilities that is)

 

[heisenberg]

Well if you went FoL, I usually just go up to priesthood for blooming priests, not really to use them much in offensive manners, though tigers can be good fodders. So the way I use them doesn't really justify the necessity to swap to a full 100 turns of spiritual.

I find that a mounted/metal approach works well, picking up copper for your chargers to make them 6/4, and str 5 axemen for some defensive units in your stack. (though basic centuars do get defensive bonuses and are decent stack defenders pre-copper axemen)
I suppose an mounted/archery approach would be very strong defensively, and you'd need to pick up archery anyway for stirrups. But I do find that having at least copper for your chargers is pretty important for you to have a good offensive punch midgame. (By the time you need archery for stirrups, since you already hit trade, you usually could find someone to trade for it if you went mounted/metal--usually Elohim has it )

I'm somewhat reserved about a mounted/mage approach mainly due to a couple of factors.
Usually focusing on the sorcery line you'd want to do it pretty early, to churn out enough adepts to sit around so that they'll mature to hit mages once you hit sorcery. That could possibly delay your mounted rush, and as I mentioned in my earlier post, I find that an early mounted rush is a somewhat strong suit for the kurios, hopefully before your rival picks up copper (or that he hasn't built too many copper weaponed warriors before you pillaged his mine).
Same like archery as a secondary line, you'd still want to hit copper for some decent offensive chargers, thus more delay somewhat.
They'll be also lacking defensive units around midgame, when the defensive strength of your centuars become obselete.

I do certainly believe that the mounted/sorcery approach does have some interesting possibilities. Don't get me wrong because I certainly think its worthwhile to invest in KoTE, just that swapping over to arcane and trying to tech up to sorcery early would mean a huge delay in building up your army.
However, just picking up KoTE is very useful for the kurios, for utility adepts. Their palace mana are sun, spirit, water. Spirit adepts are very useful for courage for healing in enemy territory. Water lets you get rid of unwanted deserts to plains, letting you settle in those floodplain rich areas with a few desert tiles mixed in. And supposing you founded FoL and built the Song, Nature is good for treetop defense, making it very difficult to even dislodge your str 4 centuars in enemy forests.

However, I do understand that the strategy of going FoL + Mounted/Metal do mean that you basically forgo both your religious heroes. Your core army would consist of centuars/chargers/axemen early on, and chargers/centuar archers later on, before you get that huge leap to centuar guards. But by the time you get guards which are promoted from your high level chargers, which are 14/11 with iron, you should be able to cut down most units in the field that you don't really need those heroes. They should pick up cover II as well so they could even destroy most garrisoned city defenders save maybe crossbowmen.

But yea, I sometimes do miss Yvain He can be such a beast with enough nature nodes. (Kyriel on the other hand is such an underpowered hero for such a late tech) Though should you decide to go down the recon/spiritual line instead to pick up both heroes, swap over to a religion like OO to get back to neutral before going to FoL, so that you could benefit from druids while you hoard nature nodes to pump up their nature affinity str.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

They arrived one day in the spring, a dark shadow hovering over the peak of the nearby mountain. Everyone pointed and stared but no one knew what it was and no one could reach it. It looked like a ship but floating high in the air. The next morning, the ship was gone but so were some of the guards that were manning the palisade.

The next month, the slaver ship arrived again. The lookout in the tower rang the bell but he was found dead at the bottom of the tower after inexplicably jumping to his death. More citizens were missing and there were no other volunteers to be a lookout.

Although normally hoping to avoid all contact with their vampire lords, the citizens noticed that the manor house has been strangely silent ever since the slaver ship started appearing. No one dared to check, however, for fear of being "invited" to dinner.

Months pass. One by one the city's militia vanishes. Soon there are no more volunteers and everyone wonders if they are the next to go.

One day, a young boy shows up at the gates. He wears a golden robe is and is flanked by powerful wizards. He tells us his name is Cardith Lorda and that we are under his protection now and that we are all invited to experience the wonders of Kwythellar ourselves. It does not seem to be a suggestion. As we pack to leave, the city is a ghostly shell of its former glory, abandoned buildings lie untended everywhere. Strangely enough, the new guards look oddly familiar...

Sorry, had to get it out, had that story bouncing around my head from all weekend

Switched to Emperor over the weekend and got hit pretty hard. Playing Erebus so managed to seal off the passes to my valley but was constantly being attacked by a stream of barbs from the north and the Calabim (who kept declaring war) from the south. Was running FoL and had a hard time keeping up with defenders (warriors) so switched to aggressive at the first opportunity to get the free promo which actually helped quite a bit.

Switched to Arcane next and cranked out a few adepts but then started getting hammered with more advanced barbs and another Calabim war. I had to overbuild defenders which left my tech rate at 0% even though I had relatively big cities. I couldn't really afford an offensive army.

Despite overall economic woes, Kwythellar was still doing quite well as a research and production powerhouse (built the great library and settled a bunch of sages with an academy there). Eventually my tech was at 0 with 30 gold in the bank and -1 gold per turn. I had to switch to RoK to get the gold from the temples which made me solvent, but barely (I never exceeded 100 gold at thsi stage with 0 to 20% research) and built the mines of Gal-Dur.

I took a couple ironed swordsmen, centaurs, priests and wizards with fireball and conquered a large chunk of the Calabim and vassalized them (sorry, the above story just sounded better with the Calabim being afraid of Cardith... literary license!)

Free iron also meant a viable beeline to airships and archmages which got me started on actually trying a strat I've always wanted to experiment with. My Potent wizards had plenty of exp and money was starting to roll in from my cities. Upgraded my wizards, 3 with maxed domination and meta, the rest with assorted other abilities + fireball. Unfortunately, due to the long time it took to get going, everyone was highly teched up (phalanxes, crossbowmen). I targetted the Ljosalfar next who were on their own entrenched continent and above me in score.

I didn't have my strat fully fleshed out at the time so also had a couple swordsmen and a couple centaurs but it turns out I didn't really need them. I looked for all the Ljos cities that were next to mountains and parked my airship on them. Spent a few turns dominating all the defenders then just walked the dominated defenders right back in once the city was empty and sailed off to the next mountaintop.

The first city generally takes the longest because they'll keep reinforcing the city but eventually they'll run low or you'll have so many units banked that you can just walk in and take it and be confident of holding it. Plus you usually end up getting their best units so its not THAT hard to hold the first city.

This also works on ships from the shore but what makes it difficult is that units that aren't actually on a ship get teleported to the nearest shore at the beginning of the turn. Units that end up on mountains can stay on the mountains as long as they want and just walk off which means you can bank all your new units next to the city until you're ready to conquer it. In hindsight, I should have built a couple frigates to defend the airships then I could have gone the ocean route but the Ljos continent had plenty of scattered mountains for me to use and TONS of privateers and frigates.

 

[slowcar]

My very first game of FFH2 was with the kuriotates - and i was quite pissed off when i discovered that there were no more cities to build. a few pages of reading i was smarter

The big pro of the kuriotates is that you have very little micromanagement.
The cons are a lot, in fact i don't consider them to be on the strong side of the game.

Due to the trophy hall i played them with culture victory as a target (on immortal). FoL was a no-brainer for me, even with only half your fields being forests you get a huge plus of health and happiness from it.
Centaurs are nice in the beginning because you don't need horses, i used them to scout my neighbourhood. Decided to play all-peace and built my cities myself.

Imo you need to stay on par with techs to be able to repel your enemies, best make friends with the very strong ones. piling up huge stacks of gold and relying on the guild is a valid strategy, chariots+mages are similar (strong) as with all other civs.

Winning by culture is quite easy, you need a few wonders and lots of bard specialists. And some army to keep your neighbours in check.
The world spell is one of the worst, just push the button when you have your cities up.

Priests and settlements are a good thing, you can also use disciples to pop their borders if they secure important resources against the neighbour. free specialists are icing on the cake.
You do pay for settlements though, the maintenance of your other cities grows (because of the total number of cities), its not very expensive in the beginning though.

Enclaves are pretty nice, if you happen to have flood plains or grassland you can spam them, but have some farms ready to supply all those hungry singers.

Winning by Luonnatar is similar easy i guess, huge cities make huge number of priests.

 

[lordrune]

I'm no expert on strategy, but I'm playing an entertaining Kurio game at the moment. I found a really nice grassland/plain valley on an Erebus map, with two great non-overlapping city sites, one with the coast on one corner (sea access, just in case I want it), otherwise with just about every tile productive for each one. I settled my third city in a second desert/plains valley to the north with several floodplain tiles. I proceeded to build and tech up, found and spread my favourite religion Empyrean (for the music ), and subsequently dominate almost half of the map - the Calabim, Malakim, and Amurites offering to be my vassals - and conquering initially the Illians, then the Doviello. (Yes, I need to step up from Noble badly). My weapons of choice were first Mages and Champions, later the Empyrean hero and the power of Archmages.

God King works really great into the mid (even late) game with Kurio, because you're never going to be paying too much city maintenance, as all your territory-grabbing settlements are free. This means your capital can be a real production monster, especially if you've got a good smattering of hills around.

For fun, I like actually building up that one super-city - my capital was up to size 40, and still growing - with the Crown, the Great Library, and many Scholarship sages, it was fueling substantial research, even with my slider on full cash (to help rush production). And from a RP perspective it's kind of cool knowing that you rule that one truly legendary vast city - I acknowledge from a gameplay perspective that it's an unnecessary luxury to stack up life mana to add health to your cities. I took that luxury.

The late twist in my current game came when I started building the Tower of Mastery, and I was surprised when every civ except my three vassals DOWed me (Yes, I'm new to the mod) It would have been easy to settle in for a cultural victory, but not nearly as fun. The fact that I've already got three vassals to fight for me is a plus, and I am the only player with Mithril. There's no question I can hold off the enemies and finish the Tower - but I think I'm going to try and win the war, and save my vassals, although Varn Gosan in particular is going to be hard pressed, he is on a separate continent to me and there are two enemies civs there, including the Svartalfs who are the runners-up in the game.

Anyway, more generally... I think for the Kuros you get an early advantage in that your cities get big faster (thanks to +3 happy from sprawling), if you combine that with agrarianism grassland plains + mines, you'll have substantial productive capacity from the early game. It does to some extend depend on finding some good city sites early.

I think though if you can't get into a dominant position early on, it might be harder in the mid-late game, especially if you're challenged by a foe with technologically equal or better weaponry.