Let's Talk Deity (dominant strategies, openings, etc.)

[JamesCivFan]

Hello, everyone. Being a veteran Civ III, (somewhat Civ IV) and Civ V player, I am trying to get into Civ VI now. Still playing on Emperor, watching Let's Plays and reading up threads, I am trying to get up to Deity, like I always do with every Civ game I play.

I've seen various threads that talk about opening strategies, war strategies, etc., but they all were asking about what you'd do in general, not specifically on Deity.

So, with that in mind, I created this thread to ask specifically about Deity.

1) What are the most used opening strategies right now? For example, in Civ V, most players would open up with a scout, or even double scout, depending on the terrain, map, etc.
2) What are the most common and important eurekas/inspirations that a player should be aiming for in each victory type?
3) What are the most dominant strategies on Deity to win each victory type? For example, in V, you'd prioritize getting the National College with 3 cities + pick Tradition most of the time, if a peaceful path was the optimal one, or maybe do a CB rush, followed by NC + either Education beeline or Machinery, depending on the situation. The first 150 turns were vital in V, and I assume they are just as vital in VI.

I'm aware that there is no "1 best answer" to those questions, so what I am basically asking for, is what do people mostly do, given the situation/type of Civ/type of victory they're going for.

 

[EpicWestern]

1) Slinger, slinger with tech starting into archery is IMO the only real viable build for deity. Barb rushes, and warrior rushes, let alone double warrior rushes, are simply autolosses if you're initial warrior is out of position and you were stuck building monument, scouts, builders or whatever. My one exception to this rule is if there is only one viable land route for your warrior to take, in which case you can just move him back for defense if an encampment or enemy civ is discovered. Usually a builder will be the next item up, but monument and settler are also possible.

I mean I know you're looking for specifics but you really asking too much for one post. Generally though, you really want to expand quickly rather than focusing on districts regardless of victory type. One deity space is at a premium, if you don't take an area another civ will. Expand as much as possible, get your monuments up and start on victory districts which will be expensive at that point. Mid/late game is just too radically different depending on victory type, civ, map, city-states, etc.. to really comment.

 

[JamesCivFan]

1) Slinger, slinger with tech starting into archery is IMO the only real viable build for deity. Barb rushes, and warrior rushes, let alone double warrior rushes, are simply autolosses if you're initial warrior is out of position and you were stuck building monument, scouts, builders or whatever. My one exception to this rule is if there is only one viable land route for your warrior to take, in which case you can just move him back for defense if an encampment or enemy civ is discovered. Usually a builder will be the next item up, but monument and settler are also possible.

I mean I know you're looking for specifics but you really asking too much for one post. Generally though, you really want to expand quickly rather than focusing on districts regardless of victory type. One deity space is at a premium, if you don't take an area another civ will. Expand as much as possible, get your monuments up and start on victory districts which will be expensive at that point. Mid/late game is just too radically different depending on victory type, civ, map, city-states, etc.. to really comment.

As I said, I know there's not 1 specific answer to those questions, so your reply was exactly what I was looking for. A couple more questions:

1) Which type of victory is usually the easiest to pursue on Deity, so that I can get a better taste of that difficulty setting (observe AI general behavior, etc.)? Maybe there's no answer to that, but I thought I'd still ask, regardless.
2) What wonders can the human player usually get on Deity? In other words, what are realistically the easiest/best wonders for each type of victory a player could beeline for? I'll give an example again. In vanilla Civ V, the AI would almost never go for the Hagia Sophia, so the player could capitalize on that and get it pretty much consistently. In BNW, I think wonders like Big Ben were almost always doable and very helpful, regardless of victory type. Are there any such wonders in VI, on Deity?

 

[EpicWestern]

1) Which type of victory is usually the easiest to pursue on Deity, so that I can get a better taste of that difficulty setting (observe AI general behavior, etc.)? Maybe there's no answer to that, but I thought I'd still ask, regardless.

Its not culture. Culture is by far the most difficult victory on deity just since the other civs can get up theater districts and buildings so fast and just steal so many great people. Its hard to gain an early lead, so you'll be playing catch-up all game until late when you'll be faced with spaceports building everywhere and your biggest threat is not having time to pillage them all. The other victory types are pretty even in terms of difficulty, again a lot depends on civ and map type. If you don't mess around, a religion is actually pretty easy to get even on deity, you just have to get your holy site up ASAP (with 2 slingers for defense) and spam prayers. If you dilly dally building a monument, scout, settler, granary, or whatever there's a good chance you won't get it in time. Once you do however, I've found religion to be the quickest victory type.
Domination is nice and straightforward though, and might be the best way to learn deity. One major advantage is that unlike other victory types you don't really get caught offguard without units since your always have a decent standing army. In plenty of non-domination games I think I'm cruising to victory with a ton of expansions up and building districts when suddenly there's Japanese cavalry in my base or roughriders or Cossacks and its gg. Science is perfectly fine for a beginner too though. You can still get caught off guard if you forget to build units, but generally you won't be far outteched compared to religion and cultural victory tries. So basically anything but culture is fine.

2) What wonders can the human player usually get on Deity? In other words, what are realistically the easiest/best wonders for each type of victory a player could beeline for? I'll give an example again. In vanilla Civ V, the AI would almost never go for the Hagia Sophia, so the player could capitalize on that and get it pretty much consistently. In BNW, I think wonders like Big Ben were almost always doable and very helpful, regardless of victory type. Are there any such wonders in VI, on Deity?

There really aren't any wonders on deity in civ6 that I consider musts. Good beginner advice, though boring, would be to just not build any wonders. Unlike games like Beyond Earth though, I'm not at all saying they're worthless. There is a thread floating around this forum somewhere which gives a list of wonders based on attainability. Again, situational. Ruhr valley for science, Eiffel tower for cultural are two of the bigger ones.

 

[JamesCivFan]

@EpicWestern, you seem to know your way around Deity. Great advice. I shall take it into account, as it will apply to Immortal as well, till I hit Deity myself. Too scared to try it right now. Since Domination is probably the easiest, I guess I'll pick Alex and try to go for it, when the time comes. Maybe Tomyris.

 

[Victoria]

I am finding @whacker GOTM posts of great interest and have been playing around because what he does clearly makes a difference.

Scouts are an interesting opener he uses. They are more flexible than people may appreciate. Beyond the standard reasons of goodie huts and finding CS's the early intelligence for planning is a benefit of efficiency, every extra tile visible is an extra chance of finding that all so important iron which most of a decent early aggressive game hinges upon. And scouts Do move faster. If its a single clear tile and a wood tile the scout will do that in 1 move while a slinger will do it in 2 turns. All of this movement roughly evens out to 1.5 times as fast as a slinger... or 3 movement points instead of 2, and that's without promotion. Much more importantly people have discovered the AI targets scouts hard, scouts will misdirect an attacking force (as will a great general) and archers will target a fresh scout over a badly damaged archer. An enemy swordsmen will happily chase an archer around a city while the archer within will shoot it to bits.

The mention of wonders above is interesting. Most wonders have some use but are not super useful but the pyramids and great zimbabwe are both very useful. Great zim is a super gold producer you should always keep in mind when looking at cattle tiles and the placement is irrelevant, a badly placed commercial with no adjacency pays off far greater when great Zim kicks in later. The plus one charge pyramids does not seem like a lot but the cost of builders increases and if we are talking about being efficient and only using charges where they are needed you can keep builder costs down a lot. Chopping is very powerful, especially if held off until you have a lot of techs and civics in place as they are based on the number of these. Not using many builders until later means the power of each increases. So what do we need builders for? Eurekas, every one you can get, they are quite important. As many mines as your city is going to work and as many luxuries as you are going to use... do not have 5 salt mines if you are only ever going to trade 1 salt resource. Do you build farms?... well not really, the feudalism civic is important and if you cannot get 6 farms by conquest you certainly will need to consider building these to get to knights (their eureka is the feudalism civic).

How large should your cities be?... well no larger than you need for your victory. I have started placing cities anywhere, I really do not care about fresh water and sometimes avoid it as I do not want my cities larger than 7 normally... a city of 2 can house a campus or a theater and have 2 plains hills for the workers to run projects against the district for the rest of the game... do you need more pop in that city?... why? Amenities requirements mean you then end up have to build many costly entertainment districts... to what end?... because you grew your cities too large. You some commercial districts but just how many? MOAR? why? great Zim will get you a lot of gold, sure you need some and you need them for eureka s but one in every city is just greedy and slows you down. Industrial is great? well you need 3 factories for eurekas so 3 industrial... do the rest really pay off? unlikely.

What is most efficient to build early? Settlers and troops to get cities. An early settler will give you a good kick start and an early builder for the early eurekas. If you can get away without building slingers until Agoge... why not? That's one of the benefits in a scout... I am surrounded by city states or mountains so I will not be attacked by barbs or civs. In this case a settler may be best first but of course you do need to think about how the hell do you clear a camp and kill 3 barbs for eurekas. Every Eureka is important. A eureka not gained is speed lost.

The best Army?... well no doubt knights with a great general and a ram can take lots of cities very very quickly while an army of archers is just so slow and cumbersome. You can start with bows and hope for iron and that's the best approach IMO. As soon as you know you have iron (bronze working is important to get early) then its how do I get to knights quickly?... and thats by getting to Feudalism quickly and thats a culture push. Monuments... you need them. lots of monuments or any other way you can get culture. getting a T60 Feudalism is great... if you do not push it you will likely get it T100 and your knights will be useless. Of course you can ignore Feudalism and just push knights but thats a big eureka. its a huge monus to get in a goody hut (goody huts are times to give better rewards after T30 so if you can hold off opening them you may get lucky)
If you get horses then horsemen are a good option also and also affected by a great general so make a good early knight army. The +2 GG point card comes with Military tradition as does flanking, support and cheap horsemen/chariots.
Swordsmen with a ram are also very powerful and fast but at 12 less than a knight and slower they run out of steam earlier in the game and cannot take cities as fast. Speed of conquest is rather important.
Gold is a bit issue with an early army and your conscription card is also one to consider early. It allows for a larger army if need be and preparation building of chariots for knights (do not do too early)

Its a hard choice whether to go military tradition route or early empire route, those cheap settlers have good value and if you have no-one nearby you you should go early empire, but of you want to strike early with military then you need to go the other way.
Eary pushing tachs and civics are these, Political Philosophy for the government, Feudalism/knights, bronze working, Machinery if you have no iron as the very least and you also cannot forget apprenticeship for industrial districts but more importantly +1 on mines. On the way you get writing and currency and placing districts early is important. Every tech researched add roughly +8 production to the cost of a district... or if you have a larger push on civics.. they are around +10 each.

I am in no way and expert player in these areas and just finally getting to grips with it all and see how it all fits in... its quite hard to juggle it all... to stop a non eureka'd tech at 50% rather that 65%. We just want to rush through the turns. Gold seems to be the early limiter so an early gold CS or settling on a luxury you can sell on can make a bigg difference. Make peace with a civ for good cash if there is an alternative for 10 turns.

So much more I could type. I love this game, its a lot more complex to get 'right' that civ V. I am more of a relaxed player by nature which is why I struggle in this area but I also love understanding so being able to get at least withing 10 -20 turns of a whacker victory is nice to have.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

1) People will tell you to get Slingers early, or an early Worker/Mon, but my queue, ever since Civ V, has always been the same. I pick the double Scout opening in 99/100 games because I think it is just plain superior to every other opening. If you are playing on small maps then single scout is fine, if on large then I almost always go triple scout, one bought or from ruin. Of course BO depends, but right now I like either:

Early settling (if capital is really good strong on food/hammers/doesn't have good tiles to improve early like horses etc):
Scout / Scout / Slinger / Settler / Mon / Worker (you delay Craftsmanship and rush for Early Empire if you can do it, otherwise Worker instead of Slinger is completely fine)

Early culture opening (if your capital isn't as strong in hammers/food and/or has lots of good early tiles to improve/if barbs are near/if you want to rush):
Scout / Scout / Worker / Mon / Slinger (Worker and Mon are interchangeable, the crux is that you get to Craftsmanship really fast and then spam units)

The first will give you slightly superior development because settling early is kind, the second one is perhaps more consistent, realiable and safe.

2) See my thread

3) I think violent SV is by far the most popular strat for fast wins right now, but violent religion or culture can also be good. I doubt they're that great on Deity though.

Domination has and always will be the fastest way to win if you're really good at it. I have always preferred SV myself.

 

[myclan]

I am finding @whacker GOTM posts of great interest and have been playing around because what he does clearly makes a difference.

Scouts are an interesting opener he uses. They are more flexible than people may appreciate. Beyond the standard reasons of goodie huts and finding CS's the early intelligence for planning is a benefit of efficiency, every extra tile visible is an extra chance of finding that all so important iron which most of a decent early aggressive game hinges upon. And scouts Do move faster. If its a single clear tile and a wood tile the scout will do that in 1 move while a slinger will do it in 2 turns. All of this movement roughly evens out to 1.5 times as fast as a slinger... or 3 movement points instead of 2, and that's without promotion. Much more importantly people have discovered the AI targets scouts hard, scouts will misdirect an attacking force (as will a great general) and archers will target a fresh scout over a badly damaged archer. An enemy swordsmen will happily chase an archer around a city while the archer within will shoot it to bits.

The mention of wonders above is interesting. Most wonders have some use but are not super useful but the pyramids and great zimbabwe are both very useful. Great zim is a super gold producer you should always keep in mind when looking at cattle tiles and the placement is irrelevant, a badly placed commercial with no adjacency pays off far greater when great Zim kicks in later. The plus one charge pyramids does not seem like a lot but the cost of builders increases and if we are talking about being efficient and only using charges where they are needed you can keep builder costs down a lot. Chopping is very powerful, especially if held off until you have a lot of techs and civics in place as they are based on the number of these. Not using many builders until later means the power of each increases. So what do we need builders for? Eurekas, every one you can get, they are quite important. As many mines as your city is going to work and as many luxuries as you are going to use... do not have 5 salt mines if you are only ever going to trade 1 salt resource. Do you build farms?... well not really, the feudalism civic is important and if you cannot get 6 farms by conquest you certainly will need to consider building these to get to knights (their eureka is the feudalism civic).

How large should your cities be?... well no larger than you need for your victory. I have started placing cities anywhere, I really do not care about fresh water and sometimes avoid it as I do not want my cities larger than 7 normally... a city of 2 can house a campus or a theater and have 2 plains hills for the workers to run projects against the district for the rest of the game... do you need more pop in that city?... why? Amenities requirements mean you then end up have to build many costly entertainment districts... to what end?... because you grew your cities too large. You some commercial districts but just how many? MOAR? why? great Zim will get you a lot of gold, sure you need some and you need them for eureka s but one in every city is just greedy and slows you down. Industrial is great? well you need 3 factories for eurekas so 3 industrial... do the rest really pay off? unlikely.

What is most efficient to build early? Settlers and troops to get cities. An early settler will give you a good kick start and an early builder for the early eurekas. If you can get away without building slingers until Agoge... why not? That's one of the benefits in a scout... I am surrounded by city states or mountains so I will not be attacked by barbs or civs. In this case a settler may be best first but of course you do need to think about how the hell do you clear a camp and kill 3 barbs for eurekas. Every Eureka is important. A eureka not gained is speed lost.

The best Army?... well no doubt knights with a great general and a ram can take lots of cities very very quickly while an army of archers is just so slow and cumbersome. You can start with bows and hope for iron and that's the best approach IMO. As soon as you know you have iron (bronze working is important to get early) then its how do I get to knights quickly?... and thats by getting to Feudalism quickly and thats a culture push. Monuments... you need them. lots of monuments or any other way you can get culture. getting a T60 Feudalism is great... if you do not push it you will likely get it T100 and your knights will be useless. Of course you can ignore Feudalism and just push knights but thats a big eureka. its a huge monus to get in a goody hut (goody huts are times to give better rewards after T30 so if you can hold off opening them you may get lucky)
If you get horses then horsemen are a good option also and also affected by a great general so make a good early knight army. The +2 GG point card comes with Military tradition as does flanking, support and cheap horsemen/chariots.
Swordsmen with a ram are also very powerful and fast but at 12 less than a knight and slower they run out of steam earlier in the game and cannot take cities as fast. Speed of conquest is rather important.
Gold is a bit issue with an early army and your conscription card is also one to consider early. It allows for a larger army if need be and preparation building of chariots for knights (do not do too early)

Its a hard choice whether to go military tradition route or early empire route, those cheap settlers have good value and if you have no-one nearby you you should go early empire, but of you want to strike early with military then you need to go the other way.
Eary pushing tachs and civics are these, Political Philosophy for the government, Feudalism/knights, bronze working, Machinery if you have no iron as the very least and you also cannot forget apprenticeship for industrial districts but more importantly +1 on mines. On the way you get writing and currency and placing districts early is important. Every tech researched add roughly +8 production to the cost of a district... or if you have a larger push on civics.. they are around +10 each.

I am in no way and expert player in these areas and just finally getting to grips with it all and see how it all fits in... its quite hard to juggle it all... to stop a non eureka'd tech at 50% rather that 65%. We just want to rush through the turns. Gold seems to be the early limiter so an early gold CS or settling on a luxury you can sell on can make a bigg difference. Make peace with a civ for good cash if there is an alternative for 10 turns.

So much more I could type. I love this game, its a lot more complex to get 'right' that civ V. I am more of a relaxed player by nature which is why I struggle in this area but I also love understanding so being able to get at least withing 10 -20 turns of a whacker victory is nice to have.

I think bigger cities are usully better unless there's no fresh water and force you to limit your city size.

In the early stage of the game, what limits your city size is usullay housing instead of amenity. Also it's usually better to have a city of 8mines instead of 4 cities of 2mines, settler is not cheap. When you want to build 3 districts, it is also better to have each of them in 3 turns instead of having them all finish in 9 turns. And when building workers, it is usually better to build them in high production cities so don't have to keep the bonus policy a long time.

Great Zim are good but I don't think it is so strong. You need a city to have at least 4 bonus resouces in its territory to make it really good and it servely limit your trade route choice, it's also a bit expensive. I think they are good when you don't have envoys in commercial CS, don't need domestic trade route to supply your other cities and don't have a very good destination to send all your traders to.

Sometimes AI are born in a bad place and they have to expand in your direction. Which makes the game a lot easier for you can grab their poorly protected settlers and try to rush their new built cities with archer+warrior/chariot/horseman/swordman. But sometimes they have far more choice to expand to it is you that have to build settlers to expand and reach their border. They are developing fast for having more cities than you early and you found they had had swordman to increase their city strength and built the wall up, making your ancient/classical rush impossible. And it will become a quite difficult catch-up game.

And when talking about to win a game, I think there are always two "styles" faster or safer.

Some people don't think too much on giving up a game and just aim for a faster win if possible. So they will more likely to choose a risky road to play to maximize the efficiency. But some people tend to stick to their game and don't care the turn they can win, and would like to avoid any risk even if it only happened in <10% of a normal game. These two styles sometimes will lead to very different strategies in my opinion.

 

[JamesCivFan]

1) People will tell you to get Slingers early, or an early Worker/Mon, but my queue, ever since Civ V, has always been the same. I pick the double Scout opening in 99/100 games because I think it is just plain superior to every other opening. If you are playing on small maps then single scout is fine, if on large then I almost always go triple scout, one bought or from ruin. Of course BO depends, but right now I like either:

Early settling (if capital is really good strong on food/hammers/doesn't have good tiles to improve early like horses etc):
Scout / Scout / Slinger / Settler / Mon / Worker (you delay Craftsmanship and rush for Early Empire if you can do it, otherwise Worker instead of Slinger is completely fine)

Early culture opening (if your capital isn't as strong in hammers/food and/or has lots of good early tiles to improve/if barbs are near/if you want to rush):
Scout / Scout / Worker / Mon / Slinger (Worker and Mon are interchangeable, the crux is that you get to Craftsmanship really fast and then spam units)

The first will give you slightly superior development because settling early is kind, the second one is perhaps more consistent, realiable and safe.

2) See my thread

3) I think violent SV is by far the most popular strat for fast wins right now, but violent religion or culture can also be good. I doubt they're that great on Deity though.
Domination has and always will be the fastest way to win if you're really good at it. I have always preferred SV myself.

@yung.carl.jung, which post in your thread, exactly? Link me please.

 

[Victoria]

Also it's usually better to have a city of 8mines instead of 4 cities of 2mines, settler is not cheap.

So talking of fast science victories... extra cities have the purpose of extra districts, not extra mines.

4 cities of 2 mines and a campus is far superior to a single city with 8 mines and a campus.

What else do you need in the city? Well a monument as civics are important and you do need a few commercial and industrial districts but not one in every city. I am weirdly starting to park my cities anywhere sooner rather than later because all I care about is a campus. I even am starting to avoid fresh water.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

@yung.carl.jung, which post in your thread, exactly? Link me please.

The first post has everything I compiled in spoilers, but if you look a little farther another player wrote down his guide, too. Of course it's all a little old, but many things have remained unchanged.

So talking of fast science victories... extra cities have the purpose of extra districts, not extra mines.

4 cities of 2 mines and a campus is far superior to a single city with 8 mines and a campus.

What else do you need in the city? Well a monument as civics are important and you do need a few commercial and industrial districts but not one in every city. I am weirdly starting to park my cities anywhere sooner rather than later because all I care about is a campus. I even am starting to avoid fresh water.

You need to think about it like this:

Pop provides Science and Culture. Growth and Hammers are literally useless in your peripheral cities, since they don't add to your victory. They won't be buildings space districts/parts. So what do you do? You want them to have the biggest utility available.

Monuments, even in 1 pop cities, will make you gain policies faster. Gold you can spend across your whole empire. Trade Routes can be used on the cities you want to use them on.

This leads to a ridiculous situation, since cult/sci from pop is really, really low:

It might not be worth it to build a granary in a border city at t100, even if it is housing blocked, but it might be worth it to settle a city on t150, just to build a monument/commerce district. This feels somewhat counterintuitive, but it's just the current state of the game with no city # penalties.

SV is all about 1) Early and midgame Science 2) Centralized Hammers 3) Gold and GPP.

So in my border cities I never build Campuses, because it simply does not pay off anymore. However, Commerce Districts always pay off, even if its 5 turns before your victory. You still get the buying power, potentially get that last GS one turn earlier, still can send one more TR to the cap and get those last few Hammers to reduce building time of your spaceship parts etcetera.

Most ressources work globally: Culture, Gold, Science, Faith. Some work Locally: Food, Housing, Amenities (somewhat), Production. The former is useful in peripheral cities, the latter next to useless.

Have you tried selling cities? Especially ones that you conquered in bad locations? You can get absolutely disproportional sums of money, do some nasty tricks and so forth. Some consider it an exploit, but (so far) the only real exploit the game had was Horse Economy, imo.

 

[Victoria]

I like the selling cities bit..... A tiny city with a campus at 100 can just project it for the rest of the game but I agree at T150 probably its no longer of much value

 

[JamesCivFan]

@Victoria, check the other thread as well. We're planning on doing a playthrough all together and decimate the AIs to hell.

 

[Victoria]

@JamesCivFan if its tonight... I have to test Brazils Carnival for an old post

 

[yung.carl.jung]

There are a few pretty disgusting semi-exploits that will improve your win time by a great margin. For example, once you have conquered a lot of cities you can do this:

Sell a city for a ton of gold once your army is near. Not, GPT, just plain gold. Then instantly DOW them, recapture the city, sell it to someone else and take all the AIs GPT in the peace deal 10 turns later, after you have decimated their army. Peace deals work (mostly, I think) by army score, so if all your units are upgraded properly you should be able to take a Civs entire GPT and maybe a city or a relic.

In the end game it is not about capturing cities anymore, but rather about making the most out of your army: Getting great peace deals, constantly selling things for raw gold (like Luxes, you get them back after DOWing), taking an AIs relics and selling them to another AI with more money..

 

[JamesCivFan]

I mean, those semi-exploits were always in Civ games. I am not against them, but they are just cheesy imo. I would do that if I could in like a couple games but I feel like it'd get old fast (at least for me). Kudos to the people who enjoy using them though. Nothing against them at all.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

If I'm being completely honest I forget about doing these kinds of things 90% of the time, that's just what happens when you play on autopilot

 

[antimony]

The mention of wonders above is interesting. Most wonders have some use but are not super useful but the pyramids and great zimbabwe are both very useful. Great zim is a super gold producer you should always keep in mind when looking at cattle tiles and the placement is irrelevant, a badly placed commercial with no adjacency pays off far greater when great Zim kicks in later.

Great Zimbabwe has amazing synergy with science victory if it's in the same city as your spaceport, since you want all routes to start from there anyway in the endgame. In cultural victory, international trade routes are more important, but if your capital is in the range of most AIs, why not?

I have started placing cities anywhere, I really do not care about fresh water and sometimes avoid it as I do not want my cities larger than 7 normally... a city of 2 can house a campus or a theater and have 2 plains hills for the workers to run projects against the district for the rest of the game... do you need more pop in that city?... why? Amenities requirements mean you then end up have to build many costly entertainment districts... to what end?... because you grew your cities too large. You some commercial districts but just how many? MOAR? why? great Zim will get you a lot of gold, sure you need some and you need them for eureka s but one in every city is just greedy and slows you down. Industrial is great? well you need 3 factories for eurekas so 3 industrial... do the rest really pay off? unlikely.

When trying this type of strategy I found out I was really overestimating buildings and underestimating CS bonuses. 3 envoys to a science CS = a library in every city, and 6 envoys to a commercial CS = a market + bank in every city. CS envoys and policy cards benefit the most from many cities, and both are unlocked as you progress in culture, which really supports having monuments everywhere and possibly 2 districts per city for meritocracy. In the midgame, I now tend to finish a 2nd district per city before building anything in the first, except for certain eurekas and wonder requirements (Guilds, Great Zim).

I'm not sure when Commercial Hubs stop paying off. Gold is always useful to upgrade units, recruit Great People or buy late-game buildings, not to mention the trade route output and great merchant benefits that scale with # of CH.

What is most efficient to build early? Settlers and troops to get cities. Its a hard choice whether to go military tradition route or early empire route, those cheap settlers have good value and if you have no-one nearby you you should go early empire, but of you want to strike early with military then you need to go the other way.

There seems to be consensus on one early settler for the Early Empire inspiration. After that, theory would suggest that it's better to produce your ancient/classical army before the settler expansion push. Conquest gets more expensive over time, whereas settlers become relatively less expensive over time; if you delay a settler, it costs the same later but your production / gold output increases. This would suggest starting with the top part of the Civic tree (Agoge + Conscription) first, as long as there are cities near enough to take with Warriors/Swords + Archers, and possibly a ram.

 

[martyb36]

I've played a fair amount of Civ on Deity and only ever found the instant slinger spam to work for me, so this pricked my interest as a potentially different start. I pretty much only go for culture or science victory FYI

I can win Deity 80-90% of the time and usually between turn 250-300 so was interested in lowering this time.

Started a game with Russia and got a start that matches @yung.carl.jung 1st option in the quote below (using one scout due to small map).

1) People will tell you to get Slingers early, or an early Worker/Mon, but my queue, ever since Civ V, has always been the same. I pick the double Scout opening in 99/100 games because I think it is just plain superior to every other opening. If you are playing on small maps then single scout is fine, if on large then I almost always go triple scout, one bought or from ruin. Of course BO depends, but right now I like either:

Early settling (if capital is really good strong on food/hammers/doesn't have good tiles to improve early like horses etc):
Scout / Scout / Slinger / Settler / Mon / Worker (you delay Craftsmanship and rush for Early Empire if you can do it, otherwise Worker instead of Slinger is completely fine)

Early culture opening (if your capital isn't as strong in hammers/food and/or has lots of good early tiles to improve/if barbs are near/if you want to rush):
Scout / Scout / Worker / Mon / Slinger (Worker and Mon are interchangeable, the crux is that you get to Craftsmanship really fast and then spam units)

The first will give you slightly superior development because settling early is kind, the second one is perhaps more consistent, realiable and safe.

2) See my thread

3) I think violent SV is by far the most popular strat for fast wins right now, but violent religion or culture can also be good. I doubt they're that great on Deity though.

Domination has and always will be the fastest way to win if you're really good at it. I have always preferred SV myself.

Managed to hit all the inspirations and eurekas (trying to work towards Knights).
However nearest Civ city was approx 20 hex away (easy flat land to get too though).
Had a CS approx 13 tiles away towards this Civ.

From building the scout, mon, settler and builder I found was my archer/warrior army wasn't ready until about turn 45.
And I was pretty concerned with my culture (had mon in both cities) as I was still 50 turns off getting feudalism.

So to quote @Victoria below my knight rush would have been useless. So canned it and thought I'd ask for some pointers here.

I am finding @whacker GOTM posts of great interest and have been playing around because what he does clearly makes a difference.

Scouts are an interesting opener he uses. They are more flexible than people may appreciate. Beyond the standard reasons of goodie huts and finding CS's the early intelligence for planning is a benefit of efficiency, every extra tile visible is an extra chance of finding that all so important iron which most of a decent early aggressive game hinges upon. And scouts Do move faster. If its a single clear tile and a wood tile the scout will do that in 1 move while a slinger will do it in 2 turns. All of this movement roughly evens out to 1.5 times as fast as a slinger... or 3 movement points instead of 2, and that's without promotion. Much more importantly people have discovered the AI targets scouts hard, scouts will misdirect an attacking force (as will a great general) and archers will target a fresh scout over a badly damaged archer. An enemy swordsmen will happily chase an archer around a city while the archer within will shoot it to bits.

The mention of wonders above is interesting. Most wonders have some use but are not super useful but the pyramids and great zimbabwe are both very useful. Great zim is a super gold producer you should always keep in mind when looking at cattle tiles and the placement is irrelevant, a badly placed commercial with no adjacency pays off far greater when great Zim kicks in later. The plus one charge pyramids does not seem like a lot but the cost of builders increases and if we are talking about being efficient and only using charges where they are needed you can keep builder costs down a lot. Chopping is very powerful, especially if held off until you have a lot of techs and civics in place as they are based on the number of these. Not using many builders until later means the power of each increases. So what do we need builders for? Eurekas, every one you can get, they are quite important. As many mines as your city is going to work and as many luxuries as you are going to use... do not have 5 salt mines if you are only ever going to trade 1 salt resource. Do you build farms?... well not really, the feudalism civic is important and if you cannot get 6 farms by conquest you certainly will need to consider building these to get to knights (their eureka is the feudalism civic).

How large should your cities be?... well no larger than you need for your victory. I have started placing cities anywhere, I really do not care about fresh water and sometimes avoid it as I do not want my cities larger than 7 normally... a city of 2 can house a campus or a theater and have 2 plains hills for the workers to run projects against the district for the rest of the game... do you need more pop in that city?... why? Amenities requirements mean you then end up have to build many costly entertainment districts... to what end?... because you grew your cities too large. You some commercial districts but just how many? MOAR? why? great Zim will get you a lot of gold, sure you need some and you need them for eureka s but one in every city is just greedy and slows you down. Industrial is great? well you need 3 factories for eurekas so 3 industrial... do the rest really pay off? unlikely.

What is most efficient to build early? Settlers and troops to get cities. An early settler will give you a good kick start and an early builder for the early eurekas. If you can get away without building slingers until Agoge... why not? That's one of the benefits in a scout... I am surrounded by city states or mountains so I will not be attacked by barbs or civs. In this case a settler may be best first but of course you do need to think about how the hell do you clear a camp and kill 3 barbs for eurekas. Every Eureka is important. A eureka not gained is speed lost.

The best Army?... well no doubt knights with a great general and a ram can take lots of cities very very quickly while an army of archers is just so slow and cumbersome. You can start with bows and hope for iron and that's the best approach IMO. As soon as you know you have iron (bronze working is important to get early) then its how do I get to knights quickly?... and thats by getting to Feudalism quickly and thats a culture push. Monuments... you need them. lots of monuments or any other way you can get culture. getting a T60 Feudalism is great... if you do not push it you will likely get it T100 and your knights will be useless. Of course you can ignore Feudalism and just push knights but thats a big eureka. its a huge monus to get in a goody hut (goody huts are times to give better rewards after T30 so if you can hold off opening them you may get lucky)
If you get horses then horsemen are a good option also and also affected by a great general so make a good early knight army. The +2 GG point card comes with Military tradition as does flanking, support and cheap horsemen/chariots.
Swordsmen with a ram are also very powerful and fast but at 12 less than a knight and slower they run out of steam earlier in the game and cannot take cities as fast. Speed of conquest is rather important.
Gold is a bit issue with an early army and your conscription card is also one to consider early. It allows for a larger army if need be and preparation building of chariots for knights (do not do too early)

Its a hard choice whether to go military tradition route or early empire route, those cheap settlers have good value and if you have no-one nearby you you should go early empire, but of you want to strike early with military then you need to go the other way.
Eary pushing tachs and civics are these, Political Philosophy for the government, Feudalism/knights, bronze working, Machinery if you have no iron as the very least and you also cannot forget apprenticeship for industrial districts but more importantly +1 on mines. On the way you get writing and currency and placing districts early is important. Every tech researched add roughly +8 production to the cost of a district... or if you have a larger push on civics.. they are around +10 each.

I am in no way and expert player in these areas and just finally getting to grips with it all and see how it all fits in... its quite hard to juggle it all... to stop a non eureka'd tech at 50% rather that 65%. We just want to rush through the turns. Gold seems to be the early limiter so an early gold CS or settling on a luxury you can sell on can make a bigg difference. Make peace with a civ for good cash if there is an alternative for 10 turns.

So much more I could type. I love this game, its a lot more complex to get 'right' that civ V. I am more of a relaxed player by nature which is why I struggle in this area but I also love understanding so being able to get at least withing 10 -20 turns of a whacker victory is nice to have.

What I'm getting at is how on earth do you manage to get Feudalism by approx turn 60?! Without capturing a large amount of AI cities with a hastily built army or going Gorgo.
Sure it works a treat but need some pointers!

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Even when doing a Horse/Knight rush I still build ~6 Slingers. I find that before my enemy gets Horsemen Archers will always be able to get Wall-less cities or even walled cities if they are in a bad location. Maybe you scrapped too early?

But it is true that the 1st start will set you behind a lot in early conquering, maybe your initial idea of Slinger into Archer rush would have been the better option there.

Did you forward settle your opp with your first expo? Did you get the Monument in your first expo before or after Slingers? I much prefer after.