New Game-play Idea: Barbarian Germany Domination! ...and story behind its discovery

[danaphanous]

New Game-play Idea: Barbarian Germany Domination!

I have searched the forums and Google extensively using keywords relating to this style of game-play and I cannot find anything—So I’m going to say tentatively that I am the first to ever do this. Some of you older players may have seen this, but as far as I know this is something I invented, and boy was it an awesome discovery!

Okay, here goes, my discovered game-play style: Barbarian Germany Domination!

I have just won a domination victory on a standard-sized 4-AI map, doing all of the following:

• Having never researched a single science
• Never building my capitol
• Opening Honor and getting the opener plus warrior code, military tradition, and discipline (the only things of use to a barbarian)
• Founding a pantheon
• Getting 5 great generals
• My army never costing me a cent in maintenance except for a few turns as I burned cities

How is this possible? Well I’ll tell you…
It has to do with a unique feature that was first introduced in civ 5, mainly the fact that none of the displays for culture, faith, science, or gold costs appear or work properly until you settle. If you’ve noticed, in the first 3 turns or so you see none of these displays until you settle. I’d thought nothing of it, but recently realized that it’s probably because they don’t want your settler/warrior start costing you gold and disbanding as you move around to select a cool city spot.

This realization led to an awesome exploit with Germany though, and credit for the idea that initially led me to discover this play-style has to go to another player.
http://http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=521676&highlight=unique+playstyles
and user: HAIG

he let me realize that you could play Germany after deleting your settler. He appeared to mean it as a fun little perk and not something that would win you the game reasonably, but I have built on this idea and made it oh-so-much better!

One of the most annoying features of Germany is the fact that he has this awesome barbarian conversion ability and yet you can only do it about 5 times or so before your army is too large to support in gold early game. Later in the game the AI disperse all the barbs so it isn’t much use. So my initial ideas of building a massive super-army with barb units was sorely disappointed.

Or was it… ?

Simply follow these simple steps and this reality can be yours: disband your settler, be free!

I experimented quite a bit with gamespeeds, sizes, maps, and what was possible. I found that much is possible including world domination, but it is hard, especially on fast game speeds.

Here are the rules and goals for this gameplay style that I invented to make it fun, these settings are optimized to make it possible to win as a barbarian:

Initial settings:

• Marathon or Epic Speed
• Pangaea Map
• Raging barbs (doesn’t help you initially, but does provide 2 quick levels of training, can’t make it too easy on you!)
• Select the <complete kills> option otherwise the game will say you lose without a city upon the taking and burning of your first victim.
• Standard is best as Huge is very hard to find/control all AI, mainly due to the large delays in healing in the wilderness between camps and exploring. I also turned the civ numbers down to make a little more barb space as I was just trying to demonstrate that you could win this way without it being something cheap like Duel-settler which would be a meaningless victory.
• I have beaten up to a King game this way. It was doable enough I think I could definitely take Emporer and probably Immortal too. Deity would be difficult but possible on maybe marathon.

Special Rules:

• A. Upon contact, you must declare war on every civ you meet&#8212;no exceptions. You must do it within 1 turn of contact. If you pick and choose the time and take civs one at a time you get an unfair advantage with this playstyle as AI don't ever target you since you own no cities. You are allowed to wait until your active turn to do this where you have motions left to retreat, attack, or fortify.
• B. You must never make peace with the civilized heathens. No matter how much they beg or offer you juicy cities to burn. Note: I&#8217;ve never seen them do this anyway UNLESS you own a city currently (are razing one) as they seem to perceive you as weak without a capitol no matter how huge your barbarian hordes become. I went the whole game without a suit for peace even though I burned every city on the map but capitols--it was surprisingly quiet and AI-chatter free which was a nice change, but as soon as I started collecting capitols the begging began.
• C. You must raze every city you find, and you cannot keep them. The AI will be city-spamming on the large map with reduced civs so you must keep up your regular map-cleansing sweeps and burn them all. Note that you will have to pay gold for a couple turns as it burns so don&#8217;t let them grow large! My game I never captured anything with more than 4 population so this was pretty easy. Capitals you obviously can't burn so just raze everything and move on.
• D. You must delete every unit you capture. It doesn&#8217;t much matter as you can&#8217;t use them much, but as a barbarian without encampments this is what they do. About the only use civilian units are is making tons of roads to screw with the AI's economy but it&#8217;s way too easy to bait and kill the archers garrisoned. I found it a little exploitive to keep them, and decided against it. Plus if you nerf their economy with road spam they can never support any units which takes the fun out of the battles.

To play:

1. Realize that settling is for the weak and disband that starting settler as a traitor to Germany&#8217;s barbarian roots.
2. Move your warrior around and find a barb tribe. Convert that unit (careful, don&#8217;t die and lose!) and look for more.
3. Realize at this point that your unit(s) are costing you no gold to maintain because you didn&#8217;t bother to settle and so you are still under gold-free maintenance pre-settling rules!
4. Begin to build the massive barbarian army you always dreamed of, free of maintenance cost, and harass the heck out of every civilized fellow you find. Burn cities! Disband those worthless settlers/GPs/and workers! Raze every improvement! Basically be the giant pain in the ass that real barbarians are but this time you&#8217;re having the fun!
5. It is loads of fun and very freeing as you don&#8217;t have to worry about gold, happiness, or any of that tedious crap.
6. Gradually build your armies and split them off until you have every capitol surrounded and subdued. Then strike at all the capitals at the same time. If you can take them all the game will end (confirmed, you do not need your own capitol to exist). By no means take the capitols before you have every one found and ready to conquer, though, as you cannot burn capitols and the large army you have built will start costing you a LOT of gpt upon the taking of a permanent city. You may have 50 turns or so of gold to support your troops so you have some time to finish everyone.

Unusually civilized things that are possible and that I have accomplished:

1. You can collect culture from ruins and open honor for a permanent culture income. Most of the tenets are worthless to you, but a few of the honor tenets, and especially the opener are amazing as a barbarian civ.
2. You can found a Pantheon (not that it does you any good)
3. You can get great generals
4. You can Ally CS&#8217;s and receive units from them!
5. You can receive barbarian units for techs that you have never researched (confirmed)

Things you will never be able to do with this playstyle (as far as I know):

• Ever research a tech
• Produce anything with cities
• Upgrade any units
• Get off-continent (hence pangeaea being a requirement)
• Receive any special (non-barb) units

Be sure to keep those AI down or they will outstrip you and start removing your barbarian friends from the map; then you will lose. Your biggest problem will be their tech, but as barbarians get some of the new units too it is possible to keep collecting new units for your army, however, the longer you wait the worse and more outdated the bulk of your army will get (because you can&#8217;t upgrade without tech, I wanted too but there is no way to make those super-warriors upgrade! ) so strike early and cripple your opponents&#8217; expansion and science as much as possible.

My story and my game are told below, along with the path of discovery that I traveled, from just having fun to realizing that I could conceivably win playing as a barbarian, many pictures included in spoilers if you want to see how this plays out in a real game:

Spoiler :

I started on marathon to see if domination was possible (gives you an advantage since you acquire units at the same rate regardless of game speed)

My initial starting position, boy was it beautiful! But I must be strong and exterminate the dissenting population. Bye, bye settler!

Spoiler :

my first ruin, what luck!

Spoiler :

First contact DoW: lol! Attila thought he got lucky with that thing&#8230;too bad, battering rams aren&#8217;t much use against the cityless hordes of unwashed germany!

Spoiler :

&#8230;cornered and destroyed
Oh, another warlike civ? Perfect! Handle this warrior! Note, you get 1 score point per military so I kinda suck there&#8230;

Spoiler :

Oh baby, I am just so lucky this game! Look what I found! This thing greatly increased my mobility as the terrain was extra rough on this map.
I took to taking regular pilgrimages to the holy mountain as the movement bonus made attacking hill-fortified cities like Gao and Karakorum so much easier. Shaved about 50 turns of exploration off at least as well.

Spoiler :

So you got archers did you? So do my little friends&#8230;

Spoiler :

&#8230;and handaxes

Spoiler :

lol, you got to be kidding me, a pantheon? I searched the list for something of use but no luck. Every one was geared toward cities. I picked faith-healers which is the only one of remote use. Maybe while I&#8217;m razing cities I&#8217;ve taken I can get a few turns of bonus-healing to quick-recover my army? (unconfirmed) I thought this would work but apparently you need the pantheon in it for the city to be considered friendly. At least I presume because it never seemed to work.

Spoiler :

Would&#8217;ve been an awesome boost though, as the main slowdown in this game was healing without cities around to speed it up. In the beginning I was wasting 9 turns to heal after every encampment&#8230;it was ridiculously slow.

I took to putting on all my melee the healing promotion second and moving them in 2&#8217;s or 3&#8217;s to get the +15 hp healing rate and it sped up the recruitment process by about 50%! You need to get exp from real AI to get the 3rd promotion for +20 hp but it&#8217;s worth it to have about 1/5 of your army be these. Really speeds things up! I chose my warriors as this promotion as I knew they would be worthless taking cities later and it gave them a permanent use&#8212;it got so that I regretted every one I lost later. I kept them out of reach near the city attackers for the extra healing and set up healing spheres:

Spoiler :

The army is growing&#8212;my first city victim! Muuuwahaha!

Spoiler :

This is when I realized something amazing, see all the display metrics that have been blank the whole game have appeared! I have 10 faith after the pantheon, am now losing gold (of course), and WHAT!? I have enough culture to open a policy! This came from a lucky 2-culture strike on ruins and is the only way this will ever happen. Yay! I just randomly noticed this, I almost didn&#8217;t and would&#8217;ve just moved on with the game as when you surpass the 75 culture it doesn&#8217;t alert you without a city active. (confirmed on 3 games)
Opening honor baby!

Spoiler :

Doing this really turned the game around, I went from monkeying around to being a real powerhouse over the next 100 turns. Not only did I earn culture for every barb killed from then on, allowing me to keep opening policies during the few turns I was burning cities, (cuz they count as yours while they burn), but the most useful thing is it alerted me to every new barb encampment and my recruitment rate literally increased by about 5x-10x! check out that long list of 20 encampments it told me about with opening!
City number 2 down the tubes, this is getting fun!

Spoiler :

After killing everything he owned, disbanding his worker, and razing every improvement and extra city I moved on from the hapless Ghengis Khan, a victim of his own style of brutality. Next I find Attila, the guy had several units and 3 cities already! Time to shut this runaway down! I had to lose 2-3 elite troops to his horse archers!

Spoiler :

Note the turns. Recruiting, building momentum, and razing Ghengis&#8217;s accomplishments to the ground took a lot of time, but I was by no means playing optimally, I have no idea how quickly you could achieve this type of domination, but on a map like mine it takes a while as I&#8217;ll show you.

Camping Attila to make sure he doesn&#8217;t come back in power:

Spoiler :

I took to splitting my army with each subduing, and leaving a couple troops to tend to things: disband the occasional foolish worker, kill the occasional unit produced, and of course, cap all the settlers. They would also periodically go recruit from nearby encampments that spawned to rebuild the army that had moved on and prepare for taking their pet city in the future. (takes a good-sized force with these ancient units)

It took forever to find everyone as I had a huge, Pangaea, snaky landmass. Songhai and Indonesia had ages to prepare for me, as true to my rule I DoWed their scouts ages in advance of my forces. Here&#8217;s Songhai! A beautiful starting empire to destroy! This is my elite expeditionary force that I took to sending to find each new civ. Each group had barbarian pawns they picked up along the way but the elite have 5-6 upgrades at this point and they all have cover promotions.

Spoiler :

The fall of Songhai:

Spoiler :

Oh look! Full honor! This is about as far as you can get policies that actually help the barbarian playstyle. Most others require cities.

Spoiler :

If you can finish honor then you get gold on kills which helps accumulate a mass of it for supporting your units upon the taking of the capitals (means more time) but I found I had plenty from encampments. Check out mah stash!

Spoiler :

By the end of the game I had 3500 or about 70 turns of support for my burgeoning army to take all capitals. And that&#8217;s disregarding the steady income from more encampments. In reality I had enough to last me 80-90 turns. Germanys other UA 25% reduction in land unit cost really synergizes with this playstyle.
3 out of 4 civs subdued and camped, where is the fourth? Freaking Indonesia was way away and through a mass of jungle.

Spoiler :

Note the loads of generals accumulating. I got one from a policy, then realized I had enough backed-up points for 2-3 more currently. They all popped into existence when resistance ended in one of my being-razed Songhai cities. If you can&#8217;t get this to happen I found you can just halt razing one turn and they all pop in-game. Pretty useful for city-taking.

 

[danaphanous]

Part 2: time to cap some capitols!

Section 2: The domination

Spoiler :

Where in the world is Gajah Madah?

Spoiler :

Found you! I wonder how tough this nut will be after 242 turns to prepare and 100 turns after DoW! Should be fun…

Spoiler :

The conquest, and he was the first to have nice units like composite and spearmen to meet me. Lost quite a few elite veterans.
I found a horse though! Became my most useful unit…moving and razing like crazy…just like the true barbs…ah sweet vengeance!

Spoiler :

Once I subdued the main army, I began systematically taking the capitols as I had planned. Couldn’t take them before as the gold costs would’ve started disbanding my troops. (you can’t burn caps)

Spoiler :

Chaaaarge! Kill Attila! This guy was the hardest to camp due to his hit-and-run horse archers. They were tough to keep down.

Spoiler :

taking the battle to Genghis:

Spoiler :

All went according to plan, but look! I didn’t notice it at first but the sneaky guy got walls, and the Khan + archer. My troops lost this battle due to ancient tier-one troops being awful against walls. My archers were doing only 7 damage. I retreated in disgrace. Oh well, if not failure this game would be too easy. I recouped and went back to barb-recruitment near him. Also took the elite troops down from Attila’s city, and a few turns later he was facing this ominous sight. I was careful this time and moved, and fortified a double-cover spearmen in first as bait, by which I parked a tier-2 healing warrior. He still killed it but it spared me 5 turns! Took me about 8-9 turns to bombard the city down to capturing…this was with 5-6 bombardment units…was really missing siege but that’s a sacrifice the barbarians have to make for the better cause.

Spoiler :

I was taking Gao around the same time, as I hadn’t had enough troops in the forward to risk leaving any behind as I expected Indonesia to be real tough after have 250 turns to develop. Gao was also on a hill and similar pop, but was far easier (no walls)

Spoiler :

And…victory!

Spoiler :

Yes, victory. But will the world remember my triumphs with pride or loathing? I killed all civilization to win civilization. I find this ironic.

Cleanup, since barbs don’t leave anything living, even after victory:

Spoiler :

My vast army stats, at max I had about 40 troops, but down to 32 after losing some upon taking 4 capitols:

Spoiler :

 

[danaphanous]

Part 3: Aftermath and Fun Facts I discovered:

For some fun trivia about this playstyle:

Spoiler :

1. every non-capitol city you capture becomes your capitol, but you can still burn them as you select <burn> before the check for &#8220;is this your first city&#8221; comes into play. 2 turns later upon reducing it to rubble the game then announces you&#8217;ve lost your capitol. It comes complete with a palace upon conquest! This incidentally makes it harder for foes to retake any burning cities due to the extra defense of the palace. I saw Attila accomplish it once with a convenient battering ram.
   
   Spoiler :

   
2. You don&#8217;t need to have your own capitol to win as apparently the game only checks what exists. I half-thought I couldn&#8217;t win due to this glitch, but was going to try to capture a non-cap city to see if it would count. Didn&#8217;t need too, apparently.
3. If resistance ends in a city so that you have science points finally, no progress on science is made as you missed the initial check to start researching at the beginning of the game. I found you can jump-start it by going to the tree and manually clicking on one and this unfreezes science progress. Not that this matters though&#8230;tech is not part of this strategy, nor keeping cities.
4. While the tech tree is frozen, annexed cities (experimented with Indonesian capitol) will build nothing either. As soon as you unfreeze the science progress it starts building things.
5. If you capture a foreign capitol the palace does not automatically appear as it does in all others, but if you jump-start the science tree like I described above, weirdly enough the first thing that appears in the queue is a palace which takes 1 turn to build:
   
   Spoiler :

   
   
   
6. You can start the tenet trees if you get a lucky strike of 2 culture ruins. This is the only way. And it will not alert you to the fact&#8230;you have to manually spend your points as cities are burning otherwise the menu is not available. If there is a key-shortcut to open the tenets menu that might work but I didn&#8217;t know any so I haven&#8217;t tested.
   
   Spoiler :

   
7. You can get a pantheon if you get a lucky faith strike from ruins and apparently this can happen whether you own cities or not, indicating the faith check happens every turn regardless of whether you have a city or not
8. Prophets and all GPs on the other hand need a city even if you have points. Popped this after captured Indonesia capitol:
   
   Spoiler :

   
   
   
9. Taking more than 3 capitols even with having discovered 4 world wonders I was plunged into bad unhappiness. This is part of what made the last city so difficult as I had a -27% combat penalty. For this reason I foresee any game over 4 AI being hard to dominate like this unless you can coordinate the taking to happen all around the same turn across the map (doable but tedious and dangerous) If you lose one battle like I did, you'll be underwater with massive unhappiness penalties and never take that last city. At first I thought leaving luxuries hooked up would allow me to capture indefinately, but apparently you do not get happiness benefits from them unless you own the tech required to connect them? (half-confirmed, may need additional investigation)
10. You can get generals from cities as they burn, all that is required is you halt the burning. You can immediately begin razing again for some reason even though it is technically your capitol so this is bugged:
    
    Spoiler :

    
    

    

    
    

    

    
    
    
    
11. You can ally and receive units from CS&#8217;s without owning cities, however, the gifted units will be in the CS territory since it can&#8217;t find yours
    
    Spoiler :

    

funny pics:

Spoiler :

check out my elite archer with march, logistics, AND range

And the barb territory up north, where my original city site was, after 200 turns of freedom. This is just one view, I powered through about 10 times what you see before killing that encampment. It was a carpet of them.

Did you catch Indonesia trying to win a cultural victory there after I wiped everyone else out? Good thing I had opened honor! Would've lost to his 2 tourism per turn immediately haha!


Well, have fun trying this out yourself! I found it amazingly refreshing and was a new spin on my favorite game! I&#8217;d love to see if I just got lucky, or if this is regularly doable for the average player. Striking Kilamanjaro, 2 culture ruins, a pantheon, and having just 4 civs with reduced speed did make it a little easier on me.

Anyway, this may tie into my earlier post about irony, but I find this play-style the funniest of all. You basically destroy all civilization (the point of the game) to win civilization? The point of the whole game was to settle, develop, and tech, but you can win this doing none of that!

And may you have as much fun being a barbarian and burning civilization to the ground as I did. Barbarian Germany is the perfect barbarian nation, as real barbs can't burn cities nor coordinate. I had the perfect closing image&#8212;Askia admitting his defeat with the lines: &#8220;The barbarian hordes have overrun civilization&#8212;we are finished&#8221; but unfortunately I forgot to screen shot it. Best of luck!

• I have included the save at turn 00 if you like my map and want to try it yourself. See if you can beat me, starting with conquest in mind from the beginning! Note that if I hadn't lost the Genghis battle that I coordinated simultaneously then I would've finished several turns sooner.
• Please let me know if you discover anything else odd, or anything you can do that I didn't! This is brand-new civ territory!

 

[Tinker]

This isn't actually completely new, people have been doing this since vanilla. That said, very good write-up, and I didn't realize some of the weird stuff that would start happening (like that building of a Palace). Where do Generals spawn?

 

[Myth and Legend]

I love this. Also, I'd take God King instead of Faith Healers. You will rack up culture and faith for as long as you own a city with a palace.

I doubt Deity will be doable. The Ai gets comp. bowmen around turn 30-35 (and so do the CSs) I have seen barb camps spawn swordsmen, horsemen and spearmen however, they do it regularly. Barb camps get tech from the highest tech on the map (like city states) so it's possible to save a few to get swords. Sadly, no way to get comp. bows however.

It will be great to get CS gifts but I think you need the appropriate tech for UUs. Otherwise I imagine it will be really fun to get Keshiks, Camel Archers and the likes.

Have you tried plopping a citadel down on a Lux? It connects lux but it has to be within the limits of a city. It can help with late game happiness, provided you are willing to research the basic techs.

 

[SULOMON]

If a person somehow got enough culture for the Heathen Conversion Reformation belief the barbarian army would be much larger and maps with more civs could be conquered.

 

[Callonia]

Yup but on huge maps I play regularly I never have problems with recruiting barbarians. I average maybe at least 20 barbarians from encampments at minimum. Funniest part is taking isolated parts of worlds for yourself with a port city then your soldiers sally out from there and bash in encampments and recruit them xD

They can become your city defense as your city concentrates on keeping up in science and development.

Anyways, congrats on your barbaric victory!

See what I did there? xD

 

[danaphanous]

This isn't actually completely new, people have been doing this since vanilla. That said, very good write-up, and I didn't realize some of the weird stuff that would start happening (like that building of a Palace). Where do Generals spawn?

ok, I couldn't find articles about it but I thought that might be the case. It was too much to hope I'd be first I guess after 3 years out

That said, I might be the first to do so much with the strategy, such as actually opening honor and starting the tenet trees! If you read the full story, you'll realize just how massively useful this was, telling me where every new encampment was so I could go convert it. Greatly accelerated my recruitment rate. It was funny as I was never expecting to be able to build culture without cities--forgot about ruins.

I only was able to spend culture as I was burning cities as I couldn't open the culture menu, but I recently found that one of the F keys brings it up so that might work in the between times.

I think if I could coordinate simultaneously I might be able to beat far more AI provided they aren't so spread out next time. I also found that barb encampment spawn rates were super high this game because I managed to destroy all scouts early so they couldn't roll back much of the fog of war.

 

[danaphanous]

I love this. Also, I'd take God King instead of Faith Healers. You will rack up culture and faith for as long as you own a city with a palace.

Yeah, that might be better. At the time I didn't realize I'd ever have a Palace but the fact that they appeared in every city I captured could've made that useful. As I burned everything anyway, there were none that had a big impact.

Anyway, I never researched any science as I never owned cities until the game was ending (the late game capitol assault). So yeah, it's true if you actually started researching tech you could hook up luxuries but that would've broken the barbarian feel for me. You guys are welcome to try variant of this strategy though. As you get enough gold to support your armies for 90 turns or so after the taking of the first capitol it might be doable to start researching luxury techs right at the end as you roll up a larger amount of AI. You could conceivably do this before your huge army started disbanding.

 

[nokmirt]

I don't have time to read the whole OP, but what I did read was cool. Next time play FEED THE BEAST!

 

[danaphanous]

Hmmm, yeah mods might make it even more fun. The unlimited barbarian exp mod would make this ridiculous. I'd probably have had lots of units like my elite archer, with logistics, cover, march, AND range.

 

[Ovidious]

I'll get a chance to read through all of this tomorrow, so I am sorry in advance if the following were already talked about.

Pantheon - Faith healers, heal 30hp in friendly city. I've got to test this one to see if this applies to city states. Because without a city I can still donate to citystates.

Could not raze enemy capital. I will see if setting it to one city challenge will fix that. Otherwise it will not work(?) as I will always get puppeted cities.

Raging barbs? I only get barbs from camps, not loose units, will the same number of camps be there on regular barb setting?

 

[danaphanous]

I'll get a chance to read through all of this tomorrow, so I am sorry in advance if the following were already talked about.

Pantheon - Faith healers, heal 30hp in friendly city. I've got to test this one to see if this applies to city states. Because without a city I can still donate to citystates.

Could not raze enemy capital. I will see if setting it to one city challenge will fix that. Otherwise it will not work(?) as I will always get puppeted cities.

Raging barbs? I only get barbs from camps, not loose units, will the same number of camps be there on regular barb setting?

Thanks Obvidious, it sounds like you're actually playing a game like this, so yeah, I'd love to see what you find! As for the capitals, yeah, you can't burn them and as soon as you puppet them the gold loss begins and your army starts to catch up to you. For this reason I said to burn all cities BUT capitals. For the capitals I just pillage everything to nerf them and left a few troops to keep them under control and recruit in the general area--they will never recover power if you keep a few units around and keep killing all their workers/troops. By the time I'd done this to the last civ I had an army around all caps ready to strike and then I just took them all simultaneously for the domination victory. Kinda a weird way but the only way I found to actually win without the hassle of owning cities till the end. You'll read about that in the story if you have the time...along with lots of little trivia I found out. Raging barbs actually hurts you in the beginning and can result in you losing that first warrior, however, if you can survive and pop 2 culture ruins as I described it will later help you immensely in filling out the honor tree. I had it on just out of habit...I always play raging barbs.

 

[TurboJ]

Hmm; maybe you could also exploit these findings but just delay building your capital - that could be fun. Like, do a quick conquering run around, and when you have taken 2-3 AI cities, found your own capital if you can pay the gold upkeep of your army.

That could help early expansion in a way, maybe? Playing on Continents you could possibly clear the continent and be free to settle all the good spots yourself. Would this work?

OH, and raging barbs: You will get better choice for converted units. Once you get your first handaxe or archer, you can kill the units inside the encampment without taking the camp. Wait a bit (a very short bit on raging barbs) and see
if the next unit that spawns there is an archer or a horseman etc. Only take the camp when it has a unit you like You can also work it like this: A camp has a brute, but you want the archer right next to him, who's already spawned. Range-kill the brute, and the archer will always move in to reclaim the camp (if it has a free path to do so). Now you can have your archer.

 

[Thunda]

can you ally cultural and faith city states as an alternative to only getting culture (don't know how you are getting faith) from ruins?

 

[LoneRebel]

Yeah, Faith Healers is one Pantheon that would work here. At first I didn't think any pantheons would work because you'd have no way to convert cities to them, but then I realized that the way it works is that pantheon beliefs are automatically applied to all your cities at the time the pantheon is founded.

In the same vein, actually any of the pantheons can be used. For the terrain- and resource-based ones, consider the terrain around the capitals of the other civs, not the terrain around your nonexistent capital, of course.

 

[warmonger]

I've been having a bit of a play with this strategy over the past week or so. If you like continuous war without the hassle of deciding what to do with those pesky workers or if you can't chose between a granary or a library, this is the way to play the game.

I've tried it on difficulty levels 2, 3, 4, and 5 and, so far there is little difference between the levels - all are easy if you know how to wage war.

Somethings I've noticed:

it's easy to ally city states - just keep clearing camps for them.

No need to take all three capitals at the same time - with just 3 AI's on the map, only taking the third will put you into significant unhappiness or cash drain.

In one game, I found the fountain of youth about 4 hexes from my starting position - this made the game so easy it was cheesy.

with raging barbs, the AI tends to turtle: in only one game had any AI built more than their capital. This actually slows your conquest down as there are no weak cities to get warriors, archers and the occassional spearman past level 2 experience. (of course, there were plenty of settlers in barb camps waiting to be liberated)

6 warriors and 2 archers are enough to take a capital.

There's a big advantage in taking a city early if you have accumulated enough culture from ruins to open honour. This makes it even easier to kill barbs. Take a capital early if you have to.

If I have time next week, I'll try it on diety (level 8). There'll be a lot of killin' to do.

Thanks to the OP for writing this up.

 

[danaphanous]

Oh! This thread, yeah that was a fun weekend when I figured this out. Thanks for reminding me. I've since learned a couple more things too:

1. I learned recently The F-keys bring up menus...I have not tried it owning no cities, but I imagine pressing F5 would open up policies and allow you to put points into honor without needing to own a city even though the GUI for the menu is gone. Have not tried it though so tell me if it works. F1-F12 brings up all the other menus too.

2. And I discovered the same thing with cities. You can take 2 and be okay. The 3rd really hits you with unhappiness and reduces combat abilities. I had hell capturing a 4th already owning 3. Didn't help it had walls too, which is why I recommended a simultaneous assault for larger numbers of civs. You could probably do it with way less troops taking them sequentially though...which it seems you've discovered is possible with 3. I wasted years sitting by cities...so that's good to know! I bet you ended games pretty quick then.

3. If you check One-City-Challenge you can auto-burn all cities upon conquest including capitals. This seems perfect for this playstyle, however, I'm not sure if it'll make you keep the first one of them as OCC expects you to have 1 capital and never build/capture anything else. I suspect it'll burn them though if it doesn't boot you upon deleting the settler. I've been meaning to check but haven't had the time. Also, even if this works, at the end you might not be able to win as you would control 0 original capitals. That might glitch something, or require you to hunt down all the spare units before you can win...I'm not sure, but I think you need 1 capital to end OCC.

Tell me what you find out, good luck with Deity! I'm gonna try that level soon with this too.

Wow! Fountain of Youth...that is OP, I was happy enough with Kilimanjaro but that one is even sweeter!

Oh, and one reason the AI expands so little is just the slow game-speeds if you're playing like me. If you are playing Marathon, they expand really, really slowly on that level, but you should have more fun on immortal and Deity where they start with extra settlers regardless. More to burn baby! Out of curiosity, have you tried standard speeds?

 

[reddishrecue]

I have tried domination and have completed domination with different civilizations before and Germany too. In my experience, getting the hanse was the best part. I was making so much gpt and getting the panzers. As for the few screenshots that I saw, I have to say that is a good primitive army.

 

[warmonger]

1. I learned recently The F-keys bring up menus...I have not tried it owning no cities, but I imagine pressing F5 would open up policies and allow you to put points into honor without needing to own a city even though the GUI for the menu is gone. Have not tried it though so tell me if it works. F1-F12 brings up all the other menus too.

I loaded up an old autosave of the last game from when I had popped a few culture ruins but hadn't taken a city just to test this out.

f5 brings up the policy screen. It said I had 120 culture to spend but I couldn't select any policy tree. f6 brings up the tech screen. There I was able to select a tech to research but it had no turn numbers (as I had no bpt) so that was useless.

All of the menus are available through the UI but there's not much you can do in any of them. the advisor screen was the best - everyone said let's establish a city so we can do something but the best comment was - "I need somewhere to put my stuff; my arms are tired."

I'm off to try diety.