Quest for Glory - Deity Challenge #1

[billby]

Unfashionable I know, but went with Tradition because (two salts aside) this didn't look like a fast start map and anyway Janissaries are a long way down the road from turn 1. So is the Ottoman's navy potential. My heart said try Honour, but I don't think I had seen more than a couple of barbarians by the time I needed to pick the first social policy.

Had Aztecs declare war on me twice. The first time was when I stole two workers. Then again around turn 50. Slogged it out, reached Tenochtitlan with composites at around T100, the captured it with crossbows on T107. Have a healthy looking three city homeland with city pops 11, 9 and 6.

Game crashed at that point.

 

[billby]

This game crashed a lot... an awful lot.

Overall I'd say it happened about 20 to 30 times in total. I've seen crashes before, but they are relatively rare. I wonder if there was something in the map causing the problem?

Eithe way, it's a pity because it was an enjoyable map with some knotty challenges. In the end I felt I just had to complete it.

One specific problem was if I razed cities after capture, that seems to trigger crashes. Which meant I was carrying a higher burden than I'd like. Also the game was unstable if, after taking a city, it was recaptured, there was a huge wave of crashes when my army landed on the other continent.

Another oddity was I completed the Patronage tree quite early on, but never saw a single gifted great person despite having 15 allied city states for most of the game.

After a lot of persistence, I managed to complete this game, taking Vienna on T284.

Sure that's slow by the standards of other people on this forum, but I needed to finish for my own satisfaction and the only way I could complete the game was to slow things down. I knew it was going to slow down further when we hit ~200 or so and aircraft began appearing in enemy cities.

After my first attempt, I reloaded from t90, played much more aggressively and cut through most of the home continent like a knife through butter:

T100 - Tenochtitlan
T121 - Constantinople

Then another set of crashes plagued me around T150. Reloaded from 140 and moved on"

T156 - Rio

So far so good. The next set of crashes meant I could only deal with the Maya by laying siege to strong cities with crossbows. which start to lose their potency at around turn 150, especially given Palenque had the Red Fort and Himeji Castle making it a tough nut to crack that way. Still...

Palenque - 183

The game and my master plan were still more or less on track at this point, perhaps a few turns behind the pace, but doing whatever was necessary to stop the game from crashing meant I lost a lot of momentum and couldn't take Ulundi until 240.

I could have moved faster during the next phase, but hit another spell of crashes, so moved cautiously taking Assur on T274 before wrapping up on T284.

 

[Ecocrexis]

So i saw this thread and decided to give it a go.
I didnt have much of a strategy except for rushing horsemen and trying to blitz down the aztecs.
I am not great at rushing at got horses around turn 50 however by that time the aztecs rushed me.

My early game was definitely awful and I did not prioritize anything properly.

Anyone want to give advice on what i should be focusing on?
I went liberty and animal husbandry first then grabbed things as i saw i needed them.
Would i have been better off going straight for horseback riding?

Eco

 

[Nizef]

So i saw this thread and decided to give it a go.
I didnt have much of a strategy except for rushing horsemen and trying to blitz down the aztecs.
I am not great at rushing at got horses around turn 50 however by that time the aztecs rushed me.

My early game was definitely awful and I did not prioritize anything properly.

Anyone want to give advice on what i should be focusing on?
I went liberty and animal husbandry first then grabbed things as i saw i needed them.
Would i have been better off going straight for horseback riding?

Eco

Could you post a screenshot or two? I usually like to see some metrics, like science per turn, gold per turn etc. Otherwise any help might be counter productive.

 

[Ecocrexis]

Could you post a screenshot or two? I usually like to see some metrics, like science per turn, gold per turn etc. Otherwise any help might be counter productive.

Apologies. but i did save it other than autosaves of which none remain.
I tried an immortal difficulty game and was still behind the AI so I think my problem is a alck of understanding of timings and important milestones to push for.
I think more research on my part is needed.

 

[raider980]

So i saw this thread and decided to give it a go.
I didnt have much of a strategy except for rushing horsemen and trying to blitz down the aztecs.
I am not great at rushing at got horses around turn 50 however by that time the aztecs rushed me.

My early game was definitely awful and I did not prioritize anything properly.

Anyone want to give advice on what i should be focusing on?
I went liberty and animal husbandry first then grabbed things as i saw i needed them.
Would i have been better off going straight for horseback riding?

Eco

I also struggle with Deity; its an entirely different animal from Immortal. Some things I've found coming from my perspective:

• Tradition is always better than Liberty. Better players can make Liberty work but for us mere mortals, Tradition just makes the game easier, even if you want to have more than 4 cities.
• Early rushes are hard, the earliest I can manage is with CBs but usually not even that because the AI starts so far ahead of you.
• Unfortunately, horse units aren't that good, you usually may only build one or two to run in and take a city after your CB/XB bombard it. Even so I always need a melee unit next to the city to absorb hits.
• Science is the most important thing. Pop gets you science so a lot of people run food trade routes instead of gold but I can never manage that because I'm always poor. Also, people say to make Education a priority.
• If you start near a warmonger like the Aztecs, they will attack you so you need to build up defense and have enough units. You can try to bribe them to attack someone else if it looks like they're coming for you; usually its worth paying even a high price.
• Edit. For money, on Deity you can usually trade 1 horse or iron for 2 gpt from an AI. You need to do a seperate trade for each horse; so you would do three 1 for 2 trades instead of one 3 for 6 trade (don't ask me why but the AI will accept the first but not the second even though its the same thing).

The current Quest for Glory challenge #13 is on the easier side (not easy by any means but for Deity, its got a good start) and people are currently playing it so you might get tips from what others are doing.

 

[Nizef]

@raider980 makes many valid points. I wouls like to stress the last one: some games are far easier than others. In the QfG series I would say that at least #2, #8, #11 and #13 are fairly easy, while #1 is avarage or even on the harder side.

Furthermore, when you start out on Deity, I would like to mention the EDGE series https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-enjoyable-deity-game-experience-edge-index.677766/. Many of the games there are easier than regular games and could therefore be a good starting point for anyone who wants to take on the challenge of becoming familiar with Deity.

 

[Ecocrexis]

Oh thank you both for some great advice.
I'll check out the edge series and I will take Raider's advice to heart. I did try liberty start as thats what people said they did in the thread (-_-)

 

[Nizef]

Oh thank you both for some great advice.
I'll check out the edge series and I will take Raider's advice to heart. I did try liberty start as thats what people said they did in the thread (-_-)

Liberty will make your development faster and thus make you catch up earlier than with Tradition. However, all maps are not suitable for that and many times happiness is the biggest problem.