Monthly Deity Challenge #4 - Austria

[vadalaz]

Welcome to the fourth game of the unofficial Hall of Fame Monthly Deity Challenge series! The games in this series are played on Deity difficulty under the standard HOF rules, with a preset victory condition, map size, map type and game speed, and the leader choice is occasionally up to the player. All discussion is highly encouraged here, be it questions, strategy and leader choice tips, write-ups of your games or suggestions for future games of this series.

Settings:

• Expansion: Brave New World
• Victory Condition: Science (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Deity
• Map Size: Standard
• Map Type: Great Plains
• Speed: Standard
• Leader: Austria (Maria Theresa)
• Opponents: Any
• Version: SV8
• Date: 1st July to 1st August 2015

Using the settings suggested by Manpanzee.

The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker. When the 1st August HOF update arrives, I'll compile a list of finishers and announce the winners.

Good luck!

 

[vadalaz]

I'm curious if it's a good play to generate an early Great Merchant with the Market slot or perhaps get one from Liberty. 30 influence and 400+ gold would really help to utilize UA, and later on you'll have a building that gives +25% to great people generation, so getting the Merchant shouldn't hurt the total number of GSs too much. Actually, that CS you diplo-married could even get you an extra GS in the end.

 

[IronfighterXXX]

I haven't finished my France culture game yet (actually I only played a few dozens of turns few weeks ago) due to summer and my others besides c5 hobbies, but I really eager to try this one.

Great plains map means reduced most painful HOF games aspect - rerolling and I've never played Austria and it's quite interesting civ.

 

[Manpanzee]

I have a nice game going. Four city Tradition + just married a CS this turn. Education will come on t97, which is really really good. As long as I don't screw this up, I should definitely come away with a personal Deity best here.

The Austrian UA is pretty sweet on Deity. The CS I bought has almost every building I could make (and some that I can't), plus it came with a TON of units. I got 4 Pikemen, 3 CompBows, a Chariot Archer, a Horseman, and a Warrior. That's a lot of stuff for 720 gold and a foregone CS ally.

With such a huge army, I can actually think about war. Morocco's capital has some nice wonders (Petra, Chichen, Hanging Gardens, Alhambra) and vulnerable terrain. I know I want to take that, but I'm not sure if I have the ranged units to get it done -- the city DOES have 27 combat strength, which is probably out of CompBow range. So it might take some fighting + further investment to get it done. But even if I can't take Marrakech, I can at least whittle down Morocco's troops and get some gold out of a peace deal, so I might as well go for it.

I was able to found a religion despite a late pantheon (Religious Idols), and took Garden happiness as my follower belief. I can build Gardens in all cities, so I'll have the happiness I need to go big. I have 5 unique luxes plus Old Faithful, as well as some Mercantile CS happiness. It's a pretty nice map for happiness in general, which is exactly what you want.

 

[zenmaster]

I have a nice game going. Four city Tradition + just married a CS this turn. Education will come on t97, which is really really good. As long as I don't screw this up, I should definitely come away with a personal Deity best here..

Sweet start! Seems like Austria's UA really gets nicer as you go up in difficulty level. Good luck on the war with Morocco - I agree with you that it will be a win-win however you play it. Getting that religion was great and should help that mid-game a lot; look forward to seeing how you finish up!

Sent from my SM-G9200 using Tapatalk

 

[Manpanzee]

Well, I succeeded in setting a personal Deity record, but the sub-200 game continues to elude me. This time, the main obstacle was faith generation -- marrying the only religious CS on the map does have its downsides. Outside of faith, I was ahead on most metrics compared to my best games in last month's King gauntlet, and it really looked like sub-200 could be in play. However, all of my best games in the King gauntlet involved three faith-bought Great Scientists, and this time I could only afford one. This basically meant another 10 turns of waiting until I generated an extra GS, costing me the fabled sub-200 achievement yet again.

Anyway, the midgame was pretty interesting. I fought Morocco a bit, took some gold in a peace deal, then came back with Crossbows and finished him off. That really ruined my relations with the other AI, who were kind of unfriendly to begin with. I ended up fighting a bunch of wars (some of my choosing, some not) for peace deals, Great Prophet steals, and so on. This meant no Research Agreements in the second half of the game. Morocco's capital was extremely valuable, and eace deal gold is very lucrative on Deity, so I definitely think it was worth the sacrifice. But, sure, some RAs would have been nice.

I married two more CSes in the 190s, once it became clear that science would be the big constraint and gold wouldn't be an issue. This added 350-400 to my bpt. It's possible that adding these cities a bit earlier would have sped me up, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it would've made -- I think I would be waiting on that last GS spawn either way. As always, there were various things I could've done differently that might've given a better result, but none of them were total obvious blunders. I think that if I replayed from my Education turn I could maybe get a t199 win, but who knows.

I feel like I've done most of what there is to do in Civ V, and I'm getting close to the point of retiring and waiting for Civ VI. But that sub-200 Deity SV continues to tantalize me... Not sure if I can quit while that's still out there.

 

[Mesix]

Nicely played, Manpanzee!

After finishing the Austria gauntlet, I am tempted to give this one a try. There are so many other settings that I want to try and leaders to finish for VVV. I'm sure that my best effort will be later than turn 209.

 

[vadalaz]

Very nice game Manpanzee, a shame it was the only entry though. The activity in this forum has fallen it seems, though I guess that's to be expected with the summer vacations and servers going down. I've personally had very little time to play lately.

Going to halt the series for now - hopefully the activity picks up again at some point.