"Radical" strategies

[Bibor]

Sweden + permawar religious prophet spammer AI nearby = profit?

 

[Deau]

I dunno, I don't find this to be a big problem, if you keep fast units and later planes handy to shoot them down. Seems like the least of the 4 issues (-33% combat, -50% production, no growth other than conquering).

It's a major problem. It forces you to save lots of units accross your entire wide territory as otherwise the barbs just pillage everything and screw you up on workers.

It also means that all your cities are growth starved from the turn you dip sub 0. Unless you play as Askia, you won't have nearly enough prod to pump those library/universities/public schools.

I used to do it a lot in vanilla to get the most out of my LS/muskets or even rifles rush before peacing out and whenever I would stop at in the -30 to -40 range, the recovery rate on happiness was so awful that the decision turned to be detrimental.

 

[kirbdog]

It's a major problem. It forces you to save lots of units accross your entire wide territory as otherwise the barbs just pillage everything and screw you up on workers.

In the games where I have had severe unhappiness, rebels have never been more than a nuisance.

 

[VilePilot]

Sweden + permawar religious prophet spammer AI nearby = profit?

Spawn next to Sinai as Sweden on Pangea. Beeline for patronage, spam prophets.

 

[kirbdog]

Spawn next to Sinai as Sweden on Pangea. Beeline for patronage, spam prophets.

Sinai doesn't really give enough faith for this. Desert folklore, on the other hand...

(edited to add: still, probably not the absolute best way to play Sweden)

 

[VilePilot]

Sinai doesn't really give enough faith for this. Desert folklore, on the other hand...

(edited to add: still, probably not the absolute best way to play Sweden)

religion is so unbelievably broken at deity

 

[Gunnaka]

I tried the Hail Mary on Emperor difficulty, was nearly 40 turns behind everybody else. I wouldn't consider it a winning strategy unless you get lucky with that extra continent (mine sucked, and I had terrible luck with barbs too) or played at lower difficulty. I'm sure someone who plays regularly on Immortal or Deity could win that way on Emperor.
Here's one: Play as Spain, don't settle your first city until you find a Natural Wonder. A sort of Hail Mary in that regard; perhaps not so radical. But it can lead to interesting results. I tried it - I was getting fed up with not finding any Natural Wonders - on Immortal difficulty. I just said 'screw it' to the computer, sent my warrior north and my settler southeast. The settler miraculously found Mt. Sinai and didn't get eaten by barbs; unfortunately, Madrid ended up being about six tiles away from Rome.
Unfortunately for Rome, that is. I'm still surprised at how quickly he was able to get to Ballistae, but they came too late to save him.
The game's not over yet, and I'm nowhere close to winning. Barcelona is nice - three fish and the Rock of Gibraltar - but most of the enemies have lots of good cities too. Not doing too terribly for someone who didn't settle his capital until relatively late into the game.

Just out of interest, were you the one who posted the picture on Reddit of the Macchu Picchu on the Rock of Gibraltar? Seems to fit well.

 

[tomtom5858]

Just out of interest, were you the one who posted the picture on Reddit of the Macchu Picchu on the Rock of Gibraltar? Seems to fit well.

It was on Uluru, not Gibraltar

 

[Arachnofiend]

Sinai doesn't really give enough faith for this. Desert folklore, on the other hand...

(edited to add: still, probably not the absolute best way to play Sweden)

Going mad warmonger and gifting excess Generals/captured Prophets totally is a viable way to play, though.

 

[Merenptah]

Check this one:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=496817

Austria with 40 City-States (mostly off-shore <- Continents Plus), meet them all early with a Great Admiral from Naval Tradition -> befriend them all via Aesthetics -> marry them all when you have the Gold for it while spreading your happy Religion (Ceremonial Burial) across the Globe with Religions Unity (religion spreads to friendly CS at double rate).

 

[Ikas]

You can try an infinite city spam strategy as Carthage, combined with messenger of the gods to get some ridiculous science output early game. IIRC my game started well, but lost when France became a run away. I might try it again sometime to see if I can get it to work.

 

[SathingtonWaltz]

One fun thing to try is the following: Pick Germany, delete initial settler, explore the map with your warrior and try to build up an army of barbs. Bonus points if you capture a city!

 

[Vo01985]

Share/discuss your so called radical strategies

I only know "Hail Mary" (saw it here on civfanatics).. as Polynesia on a Terra map send your settler to the new world. I've yet to try it though. Is it an effective strategy at all?

I tried the Hail Mary strategy on Deity (pre-expansion). I settled fairly late, obviously, but the continent was all for me and I was able to ICS without anyone declaring on me and it was actually a really fun game, a lot of expanding, building, and taking care of barbarians every now and then. I had all the civs discovered before I settled my first city so I was trading like a mad man. I was fairly far behind, but in the end I ended up winning with a science victory. So this is definitely a viable strategy!

 

[DarthSheldonPhD]

Mongolian science/culture/TIME victory through nullification without termination. Here's how: send out swarms of Keshiks without any melee accompaniment. Destroy all military units, capture/disband all workers/settlers, and most importantly pillage all improvements. Don't bother attacking cities, you won't be able to finish them anyway, but that's the point. While your trek towards a science or cultural victory will be considerably slower than usual, you've rendered all your opponents incompetent.

 

[Catan_Settler]

Turn game speed to EPIC, choose Huns, play tiny or small pangaea and double the number of AIs but don't increase city states. That makes for 7 AIs/8 CS on tiny or 11 AIs/12 CS on small.

Build order: scout, [start worker], switch to shrine, [finish worker], barracks, [then its go time, see below]

Tech order: pottery, mining, bronze working, archery, the wheel [then it's go time, see below and work on writing/calendar/philosophy/masonry in your spare time]

Policy order: Tradition Opener, Honor Opener, Pop the General, Get double XP, +15% strength for melee, then whatever you feel like.

Sell all your luxuries and save the cash. If you finish building your barracks before you finish researching the wheel (can happen with a low food high production start) build a battering ram first. If not, buy a battering ram and start building horse archers. From here, you basically want to spam horse archers and battering rams at a ratio about 3:1 (more horse archers). Both the huns units start with a promotion already (HA has Drill I, BR have Cover I) so building a barracks lets you take Drill II and Cover II on all of them. As you can afford it, buy horse archers. Your main priority is Horse Archers, however you do need a ram early on cause it moves slow that's why you bought it if you didn't sneak a build in before horse archers were available. Once you have that one battering ram, don't build another until you've got 6 horse archers out.

While you're building the first few units, send your horse archers to clear barb camps around the capital. Once those are done, start sending them towards the nearest AI but keep looking for and clearing out barb camps. Park your battering ram on the AI's border within 1 move of their city, but keep farming with the horse archers until you have 3 or 4 of them, which should have Drill III by now. Once you got 3/4 archers and a ram it's time to start burning down AI cities. Raze everything except the capitals, which you are going to puppet. Later on, you'll have time to build the national college in your capital (once you have 3 rams and 9 horse archers out, this should be sufficient for the rest of the game) and after you've got the national college up, you can annex an AI capital closer to the main fighting if you like. It's handy, but not essential. In fact, you literally can do the entire game with 3 rams and 9 archers, but sometimes you'll get careless and lose a unit.. it happens, just buy a new one.

You basically want to roll around the pangaea in as efficient an order as possible. If you start in a corner, obviously go towards the middle. If you're near the edge but not right on the edge (ie: the AI is on the coast and you're just inside of em) go take that AI out first, and then sweep around the rest of the continent from there. Don't stop moving, other than for healing your heavily damaged troops. Horse Archers should be promoted up to Drill III, then Logistics (two attacks), then Range, then March. You will be surprised how quickly they get to Range, and once they do your campaign will really accelerate. Typically by the time you've knocked out 3 or 4 AIs you'll have a half dozen horse archers with two attacks and a range of 3, and battering rams will be getting close to Medic II. This force can drop a couple cities per turn, if the cities are close together.

If you are quick and don't give up the momentum, you should be able to clear the whole pangaea before its too late. Too late usually means facing a swarm of crossbows, but if you're near the end you can handle a couple of em. That being said you will *definitely* fail if you are facing longbows or cho-ko-nus, which the AI will spam if they can get to the tech. So, if you see England or China on the map, don't save them for last as they are about the only two civs who can stop you. Make sure to kill them early even if it means a bit of a detour.

Oh yes, forgot to mention religion. I do like trying to grab one, (hence the early shrine build) so I can grab Ceremonial Burial and Asceticism (free happiness from shrine). Unless you get a good faith generating pantheon though you probably won't have time to get one founded by the time you've cleared the map, so if you're in an area with no desert, stone, precious metals, incense or wine just grab Faith Healers or perhaps God of the Open Sky for a culture boost instead. Sometimes with all the barb killing and capitals you take, you wind up pushing some decent culture and will be able to finish the honor tree before you kill off all the AIs. Which is nice, cause it gives you gold for each unit you kill... which will do nicely to pay for your tanking economy, or buying the occasional replacement horse archer.

So that's about it. I don't know if it's really all that "radical" but it is for sure a bit of a gamble. It's an all-in rush or die type of strategy. If you do get stopped well you have one spread out empire with crap infrastructure and a gajillion miles of road needed to connect it all. This is also why we doubled the AI opponents... more fighting, more XP, and just a neverending stream of cities to burn down.

I'm having fun with it.

 

[DarthSheldonPhD]

I don't know if it's really all that "radical"

um... it's pretty much exactly what the huns were designed to do, in other words, the exact opposite of radical, with a good selection of map settings to emphasize this. It's like Boudicca on an Arborea, not really radical, just common sense.

But...

I'm having fun with it.

...is all that matters

 

[Gucumatz]

Going mad warmonger and gifting excess Generals/captured Prophets totally is a viable way to play, though.

I won a Deity Culture game the other day with Sweden (my first cultural Deity win ever I believe) partly because of captured great prophets/gens. I even got 3 unused great prophets from captures which I used for holy sites.

 

[Gucumatz]

Here is a radical strat I may try out one of these days: Play as Austria on OCC Immortal/Deity. Any city state you annex will auto kill the city state, but you will be left with the units. Your goal is to eliminate every city state in game this way

 

[Spikey1201]

I don't know if I' call it radical - perhaps a little perverse - but I've always wanted toget a diplo Vic with Sweden from selling GG's or GP's to CS's.

I'd get the SP in honour that increases GG production and run a constant war throughout the game and stockpile GG's. And I'd try to get an early religion, pick pilgrimage and pagodas and spread it hard. I'd buy pagoda's and GP's and stockpile the GP's in the same way GS's are normally stockpiled. ( I think you can sell GP's to CS's but I'm not certain about that - haven't had the opportunity to try).

I'd play a standard full tradition, left side of rationalism game. HOwever, instead of using stockpiled GS's to bulb to the SS techs, I'd ignore Apollo and bulb the left side of the tech tree to get to the UN. And use all my GG's, GP's and any other spare Great Persons to buy all the CS's on the map.

It normally takes just one Great Person to ally a CS - so depending on the size of the map you'd need between 12 and 20 Great people.

The one game where I tried it, I ended up not stockpiling GG's but spending them when they were born. I wasn't playing well - it was a pangea and I was delaing with multiple DOW's and I was needing every CS ally that I could get as the game progressed. I wasn't able to get an early religion either- or pilgrimage, and didn't get enough faith per turn to try spamming GP's -so I don't know if that's a viable strategy.

But Maybe my next game I'll try it.

I guess I see it as perverse, because if you're warring is going well, then you're probably heading to a dom Vic anyway. And if you've stockpiled Great People, why spend them on CS's for a diplo victory? The only unperverse way this strategy would work is if you can sell great prophets to CS- but I still need to check that.

Just did this as Sweden on a standard map on emperor. It was surprisingly easy, the key is to finish patronage so that the CS are giving you great people which you then gift back. Though I finished it differently: Got bored waiting for UN (I play marathon) and having that many CS allies for that many hundreds of years was making me into a runaway. It was Pangea, so I started building advanced units and then gifting them all, then declaring war one civ at a time and watching my CS conquer the world. Some are more aggressive than others, they won't take out every single city, but on a Pangea they will take out a lot.

 

[digrosz]

One fun thing to try is the following: Pick Germany, delete initial settler, explore the map with your warrior and try to build up an army of barbs. Bonus points if you capture a city!

are you even able to delete your starting settler? And if you can, this strategy seems really hard. What if you killed a barb in a camp, but you lost on the 50% chance? The barbs friends would show up and finish your warrior off...