My fastest domination victory ever. Turn 206 Immortal Mongolia

[Antix]

This thread is not an actual playthrough/photojournal, instead im posting some screens of my recent domination victory and the strategy i have used.

I achieved my fastest domination victory ever on the Beta Patch 4-17-2.
This patch contains an "unintended feature", which gives mounted ranged units 2x Experience for attacking ( 6EXP instead of 3EXP).

Game Settings:
Civilisation: Mongolia
Map: Pangea Standard 8 Players 16 City-States
Difficulty: Immortal (7)
Game Speed: Standard
- Strategic Balance
- No Ancient Ruins
- No Events
- No Tech Trading/ No Tech Brokering

Religion:
Pantheon: God of the Expanse (Turn 36)
Founder: Council of Elders + Orders
Enhancer: Zealotry + Creativity

Thoughts about the game:
My neighbours were Assyria and Rome. Assyria went Progress and Rome went Tradition, which was very suboptimal from the AI. Rome had a small army and Assyria settled very poorly, so i was able to claim a lot of land and expand very fast. ( see map replay down below )
I forward settled Assyria and attacked Rome as soon as my first 3 Skirmishers were ready. Despite Rome defending with Legions, my Skirmishers were able to snipe one Legion after another.

After a very strong early game, my army had so much more experience than the AI that it was very easy to snowball the rest of the game.

God of the Expanse was probably a pretty risky choice, i founded pretty late and without Angor Wat it is not the most optimal pantheon. In the end it was worth it, the yields when your border expands are crazy good, my cities had the best infrastructure and after Turn 120 i was sitting at 3000+ Gold while still having a very strong economy.

I went Barrage with all my Mounted Ranged units, I wanted to get Logistics ASAP, which allowed me to get 12EXP per turn from attacking.

Wonders:
I rushed Terracotta Army, Angor Wat (very good synergy with Authority tribute + Ger + Monument + God of the Expanse), Alhambra, Colossus ( not necessary, but the additional trade route helps rebuild captured cities ), Notre Dame and Chichen Itza.

Victory:

Spoiler :

Level 11 Cavalry:

Spoiler :

Best Unit:

Spoiler :

Map Replay:

Spoiler :

 

[kawyua]

That is the dream start for mongolia. Really strong once set up. I never could get enough atk power and units to be able to roll through civs like that wow. I only get 2 xp per atk with mounted ranged units though on 4-17-2? If you're really getting 6 xp per atk then that is actually 3x more then you are supposed to i think, that is undoubtedly very lethal. are you only using vox populi?

https://github.com/LoneGazebo/Community-Patch-DLL/issues/6546

I'm not sure whats triggering that 6xp you see.

edit: just attack an enemy unit in border for 6 cp on mounted units which is super duper strong

 

[Antix]

That is the dream start for mongolia. Really strong once set up. I never could get enough atk power and units to be able to roll through civs like that wow. I only get 2 xp per atk with mounted ranged units though on 4-17-2? If you're really getting 6 xp per atk then that is actually 3x more then you are supposed to i think, that is undoubtedly very lethal. are you only using vox populi?

https://github.com/LoneGazebo/Community-Patch-DLL/issues/6546

I'm not sure whats triggering that 6xp you see

It seems like you get 6XP if you attack cities with ranged attacks and not when you attack units, my bad.
With Logistics you are able to get 12EXP per Turn and potentially even a bit more, if you tank 1 shot of city bombardment (i did not do that, too risky)

 

[kawyua]

I'd like to just mention that even if the bug with getting 6 exp per attack on units in enemy borders made your strategy with mongolia very nearly absurd to win at turn 206, I think this is also a testament to how strong border growth strategies are with authority ever since they changed the yield to production and gold rather than food and gold. the game was a little different before, but its definitely harder to win now than before with a lot of strategies nerfed. However, this is one of the few strategies which when setup blows the game wide open with the amount of yields you get. Warmongering strategies with order to pair with this is sort of the icing on the cake really.

the main idea being that stacking additive border culture reduction is so strong. there are 5 sources of this reduction, goddess of the expanse, russia ua, mongolia ger, monument, and ankor wat. Each of them does an additive 25% reduction, and caps out at 80% reduction. So, getting 3 out of these 5 is not bad to be sitting at 75%, still getting that last additional 5% is still very strong for border growth strats. so, although this strat can be done well with other civs with monument, expanse and ankior wat, it is why going russia or mongolia is still very good for last border reduction for an effective 20% reduction in border culture cost. you really can't take just 2 of the 5 like monument and ankor wat, expecting this strat with , getting to 75 is really important

I'm not sure if you did picked it up, but going for tradition's 20% culture expanse exponential cost reduction is very strong, I wish i knew the actual formula to display on desmos, but when i plotted taking it versus not taking it on ingame, the difference is like a factor of 2 by like the 6th border growth and 3 by like the 11th? off the top of my head. the difference gets larger and larger with border growths. I think its a very worthwhile pickup compared to taking some of the medieval policies in the game. authority border growth goes off real strong with all this setup.

This goes into my point that authority is a strong policy tree to open if you are doing any sort of warring. I find that the tree is good to pick up after finishing progress, because its slow to get warring going early on, and scales well with late game warmongering. even when another civ picks up goddess of the expanse first, and with the inquisitor nerf in the recent patch its still worthwhile to transition to their religion despite the cost. That is, if you do pick up buildings like order and cathedrals before transitioning to them.

The ultimate dream would be to go full authority and then use 4 down the middle in fealty then 2 on tradition taking sovereignty, but I've never really pulled that off.

I don't mean to demerit your game because its quite possible to get win like you did just a little later without the exp boost with a solid strategy like you pulled off.