Something other than 4 city tall with tradition

[BasedGod]

I am getting so gaddam bored of this opener. I know its optimal and I can win literally any game I play with it as long as there isnt a combination of a sub-optimal starting location and lots of early war/barbs, but at this point I just feel like I'm going through the motions in all my games no matter what civ I play.

Anyone got any "fun" openers? Something that requires some degree of actual strategy outside of beelining education?

Lately I've been trying to open Honor before going down Liberty as Germany and warmongering with the barbs. Hasn't worked yet as I've found that I end up with too many melee units in my army composition. Still more enjoyable than another 340 turn science victory without a single DoW.

 

[Matthew.]

Try liberty and straight rush to NC with one city. Finish NC at about turn 60, then expand as wide as happiness allows.

Education is still an important tech, but depending on Civ and map you can try going straight to something like a long sword rush. High pop. in capital with NC and the academy from Liberty finisher means you won't be that far behind in beakers.

Melee is a weaker choice, but if you are aggressive and get some promo's stacked on them, they are actually decent and a helluva lot more fun than crossbow spam.

Strong capital is still important so you will want to allow an extra luxury or two for the capital since you won't have Monarchy for the happiness.

 

[redwings1340]

If you go down to emperor you can change your playstyle a bit and still make it work. Liberty to commerce as an economic focused civ can be pretty good. If you're Portugal you can probably transfer this to using your economy to fund mid renaissance wars to take over your continent while you trade with everyone on the other continent. That was the first style I figured out in BNW. Tradition to rationalism is the superior option, but others can work if you make use of it.

 

[nightspydk]

Don't really see the point with tradition. I've slowly moved from it to a point where I just get liberty and build my wonders with engineers. The thing is later on it's useless. That free great person from the liberty tree will get you that most important wonder pretty early on.

I must admit I don't much play to enjoy all the spectacle anymore just for the win and that is my choosen path. Later I go rationalism perfectly times with access to the porcelain tower hopefully.

Well there is my prefered path to victory after many various attempts.

 

[Matthew.]

You don't need to go down to emperor. I just got out of a game with a terrible start location. Could only expand twice initially, three core cities only at like 12 pop. at turn 250. Managed to take two cities from Poland in the mid-game and settle a few more later on. Very weak game overall and still managed tech parity at Renaissance and tech lead by Industrial. Went Liberty and only managed to get one city-state alliance.

BNW AI rarely runaway like they used to in G&K. 400 science by turn 200 is more than enough to secure a lead.

 

[Winston]

Part of the problem is that BNW nerfed wide strategies and early conquest heavily by restricting the amount of happiness that's available early in the game. Tradition has access to 2 happiness social policies and you can't effectively expand beyond 3 cities anyway so you're almost railroaded into picking tradition. In addition tradition deals with gold, food, and culture too!
In GnK I used to go wide via liberty, honor, and a religion which provided enough happiness to make it work - honor's nerf has killed off that strategy now as there aren't enough happy faces to make it work well.

 

[Zaimejs]

I love reading about you guys slumming it on emperor I am just in the middle of an Emperor game that I pretty much cannot win. I get in wars with my neighbors, then end up ten techs behind... right now Austria just keeps buying up city states, and she has cannons on my border and twenty ships guarding her capital. I just don't get it.

But I do have fun with openers. I pretend there is no optimal, and I just pick what's best at the moment (probably why I'm in my predicament). I did finish tradition, but after taking Honor for a few... I wanted to take out the Barbs and Elizabeth, so I got me some warriors.

Sometimes I go with A couple from tradition and then finish out liberty. I just mix and match for fun.

Probably not optimal.

 

[Dylan96B]

If you're bored then up the difficulty, and build a play style that best fits. If you're playing Emporer, then there's no reason not to move up to Immortal. It's not much of a jump and is a stepping stone to Deity.

If you're all ready playing Deity, then disregard.

 

[redwings1340]

I love reading about you guys slumming it on emperor I am just in the middle of an Emperor game that I pretty much cannot win. I get in wars with my neighbors, then end up ten techs behind... right now Austria just keeps buying up city states, and she has cannons on my border and twenty ships guarding her capital. I just don't get it.

But I do have fun with openers. I pretend there is no optimal, and I just pick what's best at the moment (probably why I'm in my predicament). I did finish tradition, but after taking Honor for a few... I wanted to take out the Barbs and Elizabeth, so I got me some warriors.

Sometimes I go with A couple from tradition and then finish out liberty. I just mix and match for fun.

Probably not optimal.

I don't win every emperor game I play. I can win most of them, but in my game as brazil I found myself in that situation. I went piety first and took a lot of tourism boosting and religious buildings, and just found myself really far back technologically. The jungle start combined with my long term religious strategy meant I just fell back behind on everything, and then got conquered by the Shoshone in the 1700s.

Tech is super important. You really need to make a huge effort to get a national college up and to tech really quickly. If you can't do that, you can just get behind and be in a terrible situation.

Still, on deity unless you're really amazing and willing to take the time to micro far more than I am, you can really only do very specific social policy routes and strategies to win. On emperor you have a bit more freedom to play around and be creative. Sometimes playing around will still fail, but if you chain up suboptimal policies/buildings/tech paths together to create some decent strategies, it can work well enough. I played optimally once, but when I start playing again I plan on doing more playing around. Doing that is more fun than optimal play .

 

[zenmaster]

If you're bored then up the difficulty, and build a play style that best fits. If you're playing Emporer, then there's no reason not to move up to Immortal. It's not much of a jump and is a stepping stone to Deity.

If you're all ready playing Deity, then disregard.

I think you missed the OP's point.

He's found, like I also have discovered, that when playing Immortal or Deity, it is really hard to play a viable game without going tradition/rationalism. Upping difficulty level does NOT help in varying your play style-- to the contrary, it indeed does railroad you into certain choices to have any chance of catching up in the tech race while not being conquered. I myself have gone back down to emperor to experiment with different "sub-optimal" civs and SPs.

 

[Dylan96B]

I think you missed the OP's point.

He's found, like I also have discovered, that when playing Immortal or Deity, it is really hard to play a viable game without going tradition/rationalism. Upping difficulty level does NOT help in varying your play style-- to the contrary, it indeed does railroad you into certain choices to have any chance of catching up in the tech race while not being conquered. I myself have gone back down to emperor to experiment with different "sub-optimal" civs and SPs.

I see. But I can't understand people having difficulty problems with Immortal. Deity of course, Tradition/Rationalism is really the only choice (add consulates and GG). But Immortal you could open all the tree's and send your Trade Routes to city states, and still win by turn 350.

 

[BasedGod]

I see. But I can't understand people having difficulty problems with Immortal. Deity of course, Tradition/Rationalism is really the only choice (add consulates and GG). But Immortal you could open all the tree's and send your Trade Routes to city states, and still win by turn 350.

Not sure how exactly you work that out. I play on Deity only occasionally but I win pretty consistently when I do, (as long as I go 4 city yawnfest) its just about not getting fcked over at the start. Typically I play on Immortal but if I ever do something troll on Immortal (like the Bismark thing I mentioned in OP) I get screwed over. I haven't even gotten the Germany Honor start to work on Emperor tho, even if that was partially the map's fault for being covered in mountains and hills making moving my army pretty much impossible.

On a different note, what do you guys think of going liberty into commerce on the new patch and spamming the new Landsknechts with the Mercenary Army policy to go on a mid game conquering spree? I could see it being pretty cool for Poland as you get Winged Hussars from the Landsknechts eventually and you would potentially be able to finish both Commerce and Rationalism with your free policies.

 

[Winston]

@BasedGod

The problem is happiness though - it's hardly worth conquering cities early on because you're Civ can't absorb the happiness hit. I have problems keeping 4 cities happy in the medieval age so I usually don't bother capturing many cities until the ideologies become available - this relegates all the early units to defence forces or to raiders IMO.
I like many things about BNW but I think the shift to tall was too much - they need to put some happy faces back in the early social policies to make wide/early conquest viable again.Tradition has had no nerfs to happiness in BNW so the devs seem to have deliberately skewed early choices to tradition.

edit:
There's a mod called 9 ages of social polices that makes wide & early conquest viable again - I'm probably going to use that even though it will disable Steam achievements

 

[BasedGod]

You wouldn't be conquering until you got Civil Service, Machinery and Physics though, probably not until you finish at least a couple universities too, you'll have your Colosseums by necessity at this point (as you went liberty) maybe even your circus maximus, might be allied with a city state or two granting you luxuries and you can always get luxuries from conquest as well. Conquering one or two cites will be manageable in the medieval and then when you get your Lancers you can go for a couple more as you will have Zoos at that point probably. Also Commerce has that one thing where you get 2 bonus happiness from luxuries, which will help alot.

 

[Winston]

Maxing out commerce could work as you'd need the 2 happy per lux to absorb the unhappiness and lost trades with rival AI's. It's worth a try at least just to mix things up.
I'd suggest changing the map settings to increase the number of luxuries in that case.

 

[Chemical Toilet]

I've had as similar problem as OP. I used to only open with liberty when I first bought this game because of the appeal of that free worker and settler. After getting bored with it and seeing so much praise for Tradition on this site, I switched to Tradition. Now I'm bored to tears and when I try to play liberty again it just isn't as viable. Liberty is like walking a tight rope of sorts, you're always having to watch your gold.

My most recent game I opened honor first and then went Tradition as Greece and that made things a bit more interesting. The extra culture from barbs was cool.

 

[redwings1340]

On a different note, what do you guys think of going liberty into commerce on the new patch and spamming the new Landsknechts with the Mercenary Army policy to go on a mid game conquering spree? I could see it being pretty cool for Poland as you get Winged Hussars from the Landsknechts eventually and you would potentially be able to finish both Commerce and Rationalism with your free policies.

If you're Poland you can probably do anything you want to. I think it would work pretty well. That's in a way a variation off my Portugal strategy idea, and Poland can probably pull it off even better because they're ridiculous.

With order or autocracy the late game conquering shouldn't be too hard to manage. If you go in to protectionism and spend some money on city states, your happiness should remain stable too.

 

[Jon the Bastard]

On a different note, what do you guys think of going liberty into commerce on the new patch and spamming the new Landsknechts with the Mercenary Army policy to go on a mid game conquering spree? I could see it being pretty cool for Poland as you get Winged Hussars from the Landsknechts eventually and you would potentially be able to finish both Commerce and Rationalism with your free policies.

I think that sounds really interesting and fun. Still have to get the happiness for a conquering spree from somewhere though. Commerce could solve that, I suppose... but only if you have diverse luxury goods.

I recently played a Liberty, Commerce opener as England on a continents map and it worked pretty well. It took a lot of planning and careful timing, of course; but, it was a fun game for sure. I finished those trees early enough in the game to be able to pick and choose my way through Rationalism and Exploration.

 

[Blitz Spearman]

Immortal player who plays exclusively with Liberty here.

OP should try full Liberty aggressive expansion, it is really fun, really strong and demands actual military strategy and planning after medieval. It goes like this:

- First thing ever is Monument, for as soon as possible free settler;
- Scout with starting warrior and 1 scout max (you need the hammers for other stuff)
- Find a neighbour and see if there are prime city spots close to his capital; the closer the better;
- Settle there asap. DoW the neighbour. Capture workers. Pillage. Retreat and keep killing his units until you get CBs. Capture any settlers he try to sneak out.

Now you have a completely crippled neighbour and a very large free space to expand - yours and "his" space. And unhappiness is mitigated at first because with more space you can get more luxury variety. By taking your neighbour's capital, you have a nother two luxuries city pretty early too. Your gpt also goes up by making markets everywhere, so you can buy happiness CSs. NOW comes the hard paert, though: you are obviously a menace to your other neighbours and they WILL attack you befor Industrial Era. And you have such large borders to defend. So, good luck, heh. Good thing you have that big, healthy, hammer rich empire to help you field an army for that. It is a really cool challenge if you are bored from playing peaceful games. Needless to say, if you win the Renaissance Wars, you won the game.

 

[Matthew.]

^
Yeah that is a lot of fun. Can backfire on higher difficulties though. If the terrain is poor and it is one of those unit spammy Civs, you can find yourself in a non-stop war needing to spend every resource just to hold off the inevitable loss of your forward settled city.

And if you are successful, you need to go into defensive mode ASAP, because triple DoW's along with enemy CS alliances can be a nasty surprise.

A helluva lot of fun, but definitely a risky strategy at times.