Well, that was a lot to say and I haven't even done anything yet! Let's begin in earnest. On Deity, I get 675 points to start out; you get more if you start on the lower difficulties, by the way. I'm sharply limited on what I can do with those points, so they have to be spent wisely. Cities cost 100 points each - probably cheaper than they should be, in all honesty. I have enough points to buy four of them, which will go on the dots indicated in the last post. You should spend the bulk of your points in this scenario on cities, because the oldest rule in the book in Civ is that more cities = more power! (On Monarch or below, you should definitely build 5 cities if at all possible. You have the points to do it, and you won't get as good of a return on anything else.) Building the max possible number of cities is even more important in this scenario because settlers are DOUBLED in cost! That's right, they cost 200 shields instead of 100. Since you can't pump out settlers with any kind of rapidity, better to fill your territory to the brim with cities right away.
There goes 400 points, leaving me with 275 remaining. The next thing that I need are some units. Not for defense (if the AIs come after us right out of the gate, we're dead meat regardless), but to provide military police in our cities. Here on Deity, our cities won't be able to grow past size 1 without a unit on MP duty, and since this is a Medieval start, we'll be able to revolt into Hereditary Rule right off the bat - which would make not starting with a couple of military units pretty silly. Any warm body will do for this task, which allows us to skimp on defense and grab the cheaper warriors over the better archers. (If playing on lower difficulty, you could easily take archers here - I'm just really short on points!) Each warrior costs 15 points, for 60 total.
We still have 215 points left. The next thing we want are some workers. These are also surprisingly cheap at only 60p; considering that a catapult costs 50p, that's some very weird math taking place. Workers are unbelievably important in terms of accelerating the growth curve - just look at how much slower the Monarch AI is out of the gate in BTS compared to non-expansion Civ4. That's mostly due to the fact that it no longer starts with a free worker (although the AI is smarter, so it eventually "catches up" to the previous performance, but the early growth curve is WAY slower). If you don't know what to spend your points on, buy more workers. You really can't have too many of them. I'm buying two of them for this game, although I'd like to have three in all honesty. But the remaining points are needed for some other things. Our starting workers will improve the capital first, then move out to our secondary ringing cities after that.
95 points to go. Now I'm going to add one of the other things most useful for improving early growth curve: a granary in the capital. This will let the capital grow much faster, and (even more importantly) recover from whipping at a better rate. You'll see on my turn that I intend to whip the capital almost immediately, which is why getting the granary into place before the game begins will help so much. None of the other city improvements give you anywhere near as good of a return as a granary (a mere 60p, relatively cheap).
With the final 35 points, I have just enough to add another population point to the capital (33p) to take it to size 2. Again, this will allow us to whip the city faster, but mostly I'm doing this because I have points to kill and not enough to buy another worker. Buying population points is an OK expenditure, but cities grow pretty fast at lower sizes, so there are better things to do with them.
In any case, here's what NOT to spend points on in this scenario:
- Tile improvements. They cost
FORTY points!!! 
You can get a worker for only 60 points. Would you rather start with three mines, or two workers? Yeah, that's what I thought. I like Paul Murphy (the designer of this scenario), and I worked with him on writing the Civ4 instruction booklet, but he screwed up bigtime on this one! Anyone spending their money on tile improvements is smoking some fine weed.
- Technologies. Way too expensive. Even the cheapest cost about 600 points. Would you rather have ONE additional technology, or four cities and three workers? That's what I thought!
- Culture. Not as bad as the other two, but still rather pointless. You'll want to spread Christianity to all of your cities ASAP for favor points, which will expand the borders automatically, so there's no real need to waste points here. If you have points left over, maybe, but there are better ways to spend it.
That should just about cover it. (I'm assuming no one is stupid enough to spend 150 points on a supply train at the start!) Now the main reason why is this scenario is winnable is because the AI is a total idiot about handling the Advanced Start. Take a look at a typical AI start:
The AI never builds more than two cities at the outset (utter stupidity), wastes all kinds of points on tile improvements yet builds NO WORKERS (!!!), and pumps up the population of its cities to unsustainable happiness levels, where they immediately begin starving. Yikes.
Painful to watch when you open up the Worldbuilder. (I'm not doing that as I play, mind you, this is from some tests I was running earlier!) It's this disastrous start, plus the AI's lack of understanding how the papal favor system works, that will allow us to win on Deity.
So (finally) the game gets underway. Say hello to the Kingdom of Austrasia!
Note that every city starts out by working on a granary, except the capital of Metz (which already has one). I immediately pull a triple revolt on the first turn (2 turns of anarchy), taking us into Hereditary Rule, Slavery, and Organized Religion. The last of these allows me to swap Metz over to what I actually want to build: a Christian missionary. Our first task will be to get the religion spread to all four of our cities. This will catapult us into the lead in papal favor, start the gravy train of papal pikemen appearing in our capital, and expand the borders of our three non-capital cities to boot. Win-win situation all the way around!
I also signed Open Borders with the pope, since we may as well start improving relations with him right away. I picked Civil Service as our research project; it's a tech the AIs tend to ignore, we should get major trade value from it, we want Bureaucracy civic bigtime, and we don't NEED any of the cheaper techs at the moment anyway. The only really valuable early tech other than Civil Service is Feudalism, and the AIs *ALWAYS* go for that one, so we should be able to trade for it.
Incidentally, this game begins on Turn 46 (592AD). Why it does this, I have no idea. I guess something with the way the dating system is constructed (?) I'll play 14 to get us to an even number of Turn 60, then we'll be on the usual 10 turns per player after that. Not trying to hog things, just avoid confusion - honest!
594AD (T47) The first thing to do is get our resources at the capital connected. One nice thing about revolting to anarchy on the first turn is that we can get a jump start on hooking up the wheat tile before even getting out of the revolt. First connect the food resources, then the happy ones; first at the capital, then the other cities.
598AD (T49) Let me show you what I mean about the unhappiness penalty in this scenario:
The "AAAARRRRRGHHHH!" unhappiness is from not having enough papal favor points. As we go up in papal favor, this disappears completely. Notice that without Hereditary Rule military police, we wouldn't even be able to grow to size 2 without causing unhappy citizens! (You have more leeway on levels below Emperor, of course.) The next job for our workers is to connect the silver at Metz, which will grant another happiness level to our cities. That will let them at least reach size 3, pretty decent for the moment. Spreading Christianity (our state religion) to each city will take that to size 4, even better. (Yet another reason why spreading the religion around early is priority numero uno!)
600AD (T50) Between turns we meet a unit from Lombardy (Alboin). Even better, we can swing a deal!
The playable civs start with different techs in this scenario. (Also a bad idea, because the player can do exactly what we're going to do: tech broker and reap the rewards.) Pretty much any deals you can swing on Deity, you should do so. The longer you can keep up in the tech race, the better! We don't really need Drama, but better to get it now for free than have to research it later. Cha-ching!
604AD (T52) Metz's borders expand. This is actually a big deal, as it pulls the corn tile into range. One worker is en route to connect the resource, the other is still mining our silver.
606AD (T53) We meet Justinian, a powerful non-playable civ that resides on the eastern side of the map. As with the pope and Alboin, I sign Open Borders right away to start improving relations. No tech trades available, unfortunately, but they may be eventually. Keep an eye on him, because Justinian usually becomes a very dangerous customer in this scenario.
Metz is now able to whip a Christian missionary, so I do so.
608AD (T54) Metz builds a missionary, and starts another. The unit is heading to Cologne, where I'll immediately swap production to a missionary there as well and whip it. That along with Metz's second missionary will allow us to convert all 4 cities within the next dozen turns - skyrocketing us past the other civs in papal favor. Just trust me on this - that's a big deal.
610AD (T55) The Holy Faith spreads for the first time!
Note that our papal favor has gone up to 38. When we top 40 points, we should reach a higher status with the pope and possibly be granted a papal pikeman. We can then use that unit to defend the capital, and send our military police warrior out on a scouting mission. Finding more civs and opening up more tech trades is also an important early goal.
618AD (T59) Cologne is ready to provide its missionary contribution to the kingdom, hurried along by some "encouragement" via the whip.
620AD (T60) And that's it, nothing of interest happened on the final turn. Just make sure next turn that our eastern worker finishes the road before moving the missionary, which will let us convert Mainz on the next turn.
We'll win or lose the game on our own merits here.
We should eventually place a city on brown dot in the southwest and use it as military pump #2, a la purple dot, but I won't have enough points to add a fifth city at the start. Three white dot locations in the north are possibilities for later expansion. All would make fabulous fishing villages, plus pull in the three seafood resources.
) - much fairer and balanced, and still reasonably winnable for both warmongers and peacemongers...
Let's keep the focus on cautious expansion for now, mixing in some "real units" with more settler/worker combos. Protective archers are probably the best bet on the defensive side of things (until we can trade for Feudalism for longbows... which could be a while!) and hopefully the pope will start sending some pikemen our way soon.
