My First Impressions of Mali (deity)

[SteveJustSteve]

I'm certainly not an expert player. Just started getting a few wins R&F against deity lately (mostly culture wins).

My first play with GS was Mali and it's going ok. Early game was of course a struggle. Trajan and Scythia were my two closest neighbors. Ouch. I traded a luxury with Scythia right away and sent a trade route to Trajan. Lucky for me Trajan had a big desert between him and I. He chose to start taking out all the city states first. That bought me time. Scythia didn't like me much early, but she seemed to have other problems on her border than me.

Hit a golden age early and spammed out a few settlers with faith. I actually took Reyna as my first governor (eventually promoting enough so I could buy districts), Magnus second and promoted so I could faith by settlers in my golden age and not lose pop. Put commercial hubs everywhere and holy sites. Literally bought every building in every city with gold or faith. I think I only was ever producing walls, builders and the occasional district if Reyna was busy elsewhere.

I did grab the first or possibly second religion running holy prayers. I took defender of the faith and jesuit education. Trajan declared on me. It was rough, but I didn't lose a city. I did faith buy a general and had to switch to Oligarchy. Those 3 bonuses saved me. His catapults, pikeman and Xbows vs archers and swords was tough. Luckily there was a defensive choke point. Trajan asked for peace and offered me 90 gold per turn.

Upgraded the religion for the Stupa building for the amenity (I was locked on 1 continent). Hit another golden age and took monumentality again. Got myself up to 12 cities. All with commercial hubs. Most with desert holy sites. A couple campuses. No theater squares. Got to the mid game. All the civs but Trajan love me. I'm trading with everyone. I've got alliances with everyone. Things are going decently well. My gold per turn is over 600. My faith per turn is over 250.

Now my problem. I basically have everything purchased that I can purchase. Yes, I can keep buying more units, but I'm running into resource problems. I don't have any oil. I can't get niter fast enough. All I can do is buy units that aren't going to actually do much except boost my strength score up.

I think the issue is that I went toooooo heavy on gold and faith. There was so much... I basically have run out of stuff to do with it. At this point Trajan probably had 15+ cities maybe 20. He was first in culture and first in science most likely because of his huge population. I had these grand ideas of liberating the city states and pushing back trying to take a bunch of cities from him, but it was my cuirassiers vs his AT crew now. And my bombards weren't making much of a dent in his walls. He was starting to build spaceports already...

I pushed my science ahead to get infantry and then realized you need oil to upgrade the musketmen.

So yes, the gold / faith combo was so much that the negative production didn't feel bad. Food was actually a problem to grow cities large enough to get 3rd and 4th districts. I was heavily invested in international trade routes and heavily invested in the desert.

I felt like I was doing everything right the way Mali should be played, but I looked up somewhere around turn 215 and I literally had no idea how I would win the game. I seemed too far behind in science to catch up. I had 8 tourism per turn rolling. Maybe I could have tried spamming apostles and spread my religion??? It was a standard size map so that was going to take a lot. Domination didn't seem realistic either, but maybe that's because nearly every civ loved me. How do I go wage war on my buddies? Do I hope for the World Congress to declare me a winner? I'm not even sure how that works.

I just felt sort of directionless and thinking I should restart taking a more balanced approach. Or I should have started waging holy war much much earlier.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

@SteveJustSteve

If you get a chance post up some pics.
Turn 1, 50, 100, 200 and last turn are the norm.
Perhaps use the Spoiler Tags for the screenshots.
12 cities seems like enough to win.
I know how you feel though.
Sometimes you just scrap a game and learn from it.

Recently I have only been playing up to turn 100 to see how I am doing.
I can usually judge where I will finish by that point.
This gets me more games in and I find the first 100 to be the most fun.

 

[SteveJustSteve]

What pics would be most informative? I feel like the base game UI is sorely lacking in information.

 

[SteveJustSteve]

This is at turn 215 ish. If it's not cool to post this here I will delete it. Just let me know.

It's like I have all this gold and faith, but I can't buy technology. Maybe I can try and buy stuff like oil off of my friends. Or I need to make a real focused effort now on buying campuses everywhere and try to catch up.

 

[MarigoldRan]

To keep up on tech, rely on Golden age in Medieval. VERY IMPORTANT. With your Sugubu, you'll be generating huge amounts of both commerce and science with the science golden age.

That can slingshot you into many different types of victories.

 

[montalaar]

aluminium(often in deserts)>airforce>war

 

[Steamboat Willem]

It's like I have all this gold and faith, but I can't buy technology

You can buy Great Scientists though.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I agree, if you can get to Bombers you will take over the map very quick.
You certainly have enough gold to buy them.
Guess you just need more oil.
2 to 4 bombers will be plenty to be honest.
As already stated you can buy Great People so that is a plus.
I think you can win from this point.
At least it is more fun from here because your a bit behind in tech and you get that feeling of a race.

I could be wrong about this but...
the AI doesn't seem capable of using an air force.

I am not sure how long it will take the AI to win an SV with GS.
It seems like it would take them over 300 turns now.

In my limited Opinion I think Domination is your best bet moving forward.

 

[kb27787]

That has got to be marathon or epic speed right? t210+ is quite late for a normal game. For such speeds if you don't do domination or religious I'm afraid I have no patience to spend 40+ hours to complete a whole game. You have 6000+ faith. Either get grandmaster's chapel and go domination, or just buy 10+ apostles with some gurus for healing and end the game (my recommendation)

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Oh and don't forget that pillaging can catch you up in science as well.
They have made it difficult to lose.

 

[Leathaface]

I did grab the first or possibly second religion running holy prayers. I took defender of the faith and jesuit education. Trajan declared on me. It was rough, but I didn't lose a city. I did faith buy a general and had to switch to Oligarchy. Those 3 bonuses saved me. His catapults, pikeman and Xbows vs archers and swords was tough. Luckily there was a defensive choke point. Trajan asked for peace and offered me 90 gold per turn.

Was the AI able to use it's troops well?

 

[Sostratus]

View attachment 517948

This is at turn 215 ish. If it's not cool to post this here I will delete it. Just let me know.

It's like I have all this gold and faith, but I can't buy technology. Maybe I can try and buy stuff like oil off of my friends. Or I need to make a real focused effort now on buying campuses everywhere and try to catch up.

Okay, small nitpick:
As far as I have seen (haven't played mali yet) the Suguba gets a bonus from each holy site, similar to how the hansa works. With that in mind you can do waaaay better on suguba placement.
For the below, just swap Hansa+CH for Suguba+HS.
Here's a link the Germany civ of the week thread where I reposted my Hansa placement picture:
Civ of the Week: Germany
And further down in the thread I give some screenies from a game, there is another post before that where I mark up someone else's screenshot for optimization:
Civ of the Week: Germany

Basically, the only downside of hansa abuse is that it leads to putting the maximum number of Hansas -and therefore city centers- into the smallest space possible, which is very much a wide strategy (one may want to concentrate large areas into one city for reasons of various bonuses.) However, this becomes an upside with Mali, since the entire point is to cram as much as you can into the desert to leverage the civ ability + usually desert folklore; and then pump the gold into your treasury. Once you get used to this strat it doesn't take much planning.

Just remember: you can always create a diamond shape out of 2 holy sites and 2 sugubas, meaning the sugubas will each get 5 gold base, 7 if on a river. You can get much more than that but you should almost never be under that.

 

[SteveJustSteve]

Was the AI able to use it's troops well?

The was near the beginning of the game happened up near Walata and at the time Trajan owned both Mohejo-Daro and Antanananananarivo. It's hard to see from the screenshot, but there is a small mountain range (like 3 or 4 tiles) to the north east of Walata and there is that lake to the west. Trajan was feeding troops in from the north which is where most of the fighting was happening. I think it was only 2 tiles wide. He kept trying to bring troops across the lake which was a bad idea. At one point brought some chariot archers around the southeast portion of the mountains. Did he use his troops well? Hard to say if the AI was significantly smarter. He did bring catapults and focused on taking down my walls more than my troops. I struggled with keeping the city, but it was probably more because he had so many troops rather than being smart about it. If he focused more on killing my troops instead of taking down the walls I think he would have taken Walata.