Super Quarries! – An Alternative Opening Strategy

A hill start supported by good food including stone and marble that are closely packed together? That's a really nice start, I agree. You might be able to try @Redaxe's tactic of buying the stone works with this setup too.

Yeah even better is you can work a 3 food cattle immediately and then at size 2 start working that stone immediately. It actually is amazing how much that extra food and production accelerates your early game.
Also regarding that map
Spoiler :
there are 2 religious CityStates nearby so you can easily secure a StoneCircles Pantheon
 
Yeah even better is you can work a 3 food cattle immediately and then at size 2 start working that stone immediately. It actually is amazing how much that extra food and production accelerates your early game.
Also regarding that map
Spoiler :
there are 2 religious CityStates nearby so you can easily secure a StoneCircles Pantheon

Really? Wow. In terms of covering all the bases, it seems that particular map has it all then!

Spoiler :
Getting help from x2 religious city states eliminates the risk in securing Stone Circles and also gives you the option of bypassing Pottery and heading straight for the wonder. Great find.
 
Really? Wow. In terms of covering all the bases, it seems that particular map has it all then!

Spoiler :
Getting help from x2 religious city states eliminates the risk in securing Stone Circles and also gives you the option of bypassing Pottery and heading straight for the wonder. Great find.

Yep so the only real challenge is getting the Mausoleum but if you steal an early CityState worker and chop all the nearby forest you should have a >75% chance of getting it. Funny thing to with China and each library effectively providing 3 early gold is how much money you find yourself swimming in. It really is a perfect map for just about any strategy.
 
Not wanting to be Mr. Grumpy but surely the opportunity cost of building the MoH is too much to make this worth it.
 
Not wanting to be Mr. Grumpy but surely the opportunity cost of building the MoH is too much to make this worth it.

If you're talking about Diety remember that most players will be stealing workers from CityStates or other Civs so that essentially saves the player around 12-14 turns of production so that can free you up to build a Wonder.

Adopting Liberty also makes early Wonder building less punishing as you get extra production from Republic and a free settler soon after so you theoretically can continue expanding while you build your Mausoleum.

If you do have a strong stone start than the Mausoleum certainly makes a Liberty game a lot easier with all that extra gold. The only bad thing is the merchant point but if you are playing Venice or a domination game than Great Merchants are useful.

i haven't tried this but it would be interesting to see the result of using a Merchant on a Cultural Citystate to help get commerce policies more quickly for a domination player. I suspect it would still be pretty lacklustre compared to an Engineer or Scientist but I like to be creative with my strategy.
 
It may be worth mentioning that I have received some puzzlingly negative reactions about this guide (mainly through Steam) as there are players who seem to find a lot of this information self-explanatory, mundane and apparently quite aggravating for some reason.

My aim was never to try and revolutionize an expert player's game (I would expect them to read guides mainly for enjoyment purposes more than anything else) and I did state first-hand in my overview that experts will likely already know a lot of this.

The advanced notes section was an attempt to be more inclusive and give the experienced players something to chew on, as there are definitely some finer points in there that a beginner is not going to be too concerned with whilst still learning the game.

I intended this guide to be more a set pointers towards achieving a specific opening with a very good ratio of success regardless of difficulty; something even more experienced players may not have considered, mainly because of the featured tech order being so unorthodox.

The common wisdom for high end games is often "don't build early wonders", but I like this strategy because of how it rallies against that notion whilst still creating a reasonably competitive start for the player. Situational sure, certainly not game-breaking, but instead different and that's what I like about it.

There really isn't any such thing as common sense either- especially when it comes to a massive game like Civ V. What experts know about Civ is not necessarily what another less experienced player is going to know and really, any strategy guide is always going to be for those players; the newer players who might actually appreciate an outline of how the game can be a little different with specific instructions clearly laid out in front of them.

My question at the moment would have to be: was it unreasonable for me to expect a newer player might find some use out this guide? Or is it indeed too "obvious" to be of any merit to any kind of player?

Just curious.
 
Situational sure, certainly not game-breaking, but instead different and that's what I like about it.

It probably would be "game-breaking" for most players playing on Deity though. You'd be better off using those hammers to get your settlers out/archers/caravans etc.

At the risk of sounding like some of the more obnoxious posters out there (which I am not, I'm a nice guy really) what is the point in posting strategy that is suboptimal?

The answer is "fun", I guess. Which is of course fair enough!
 
Well even if you don't build early Wonders a stone start is still a heavy production start and can feel like a salt start.
And yes I expect most players would probably figure out the value of stone but I'm always interested to read other people's thoughts
 
At the risk of sounding like some of the more obnoxious posters out there (which I am not, I'm a nice guy really) what is the point in posting strategy that is suboptimal?

The answer is "fun", I guess. Which is of course fair enough!

Two reasons mainly; one is that the strategy is not solely made to accommodate the constraints of playing on Deity (something I hope the overview points out), but to also support the other difficulties that people may enjoy playing on.

This is even selling the walkthrough a little short too as it's not incompatible with Deity at all; it just tends to be more risky depending on your game's circumstances. Such is the way with most of the games I've played at that difficulty.

The second reason though is just as you said: because it's (hopefully) fun and something a bit different. If you didn't enjoy the guide because you're a heavy Deity player and prefer approaching the opening in a particular way then that's my failure to adequately communicate that particular facet of the walkthrough and I apologize for that.
 
There seems to be a rise of the "optimize everything" mindset where a big percentage of stuff can get brushed off as suboptimal. We seem to be forgetting that we play to win and not to get insanely good finish time
 
We seem to be forgetting that we play to win and not to get insanely good finish time

Almost every player who spend a little bit more time with civ will be at situation that he can't loose anymore;
what usually will present him with dilemma: either quit playing due to boredom (game is won before start)
or still play and try to get better finish times than others or beat personal records.
 
Oh absolutely, but that generally only goes for Deity players, there have been lots of discussions that tried to estimate the average difficulty among all players and the general consensus was that it's estimated somewhere Emperor and King. That means there's plenty of guys who didn't (yet) even attempt tackling higher difficulty levels.

Still, a game almost 5 years old is remarkably live
 
I have no idea how folks are doing this.

I've had great starts and the the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus is gone by turn 80 on epic (Emperor level).

Don't even get me going on Great Library gone by turn 56.
 
I have no idea how folks are doing this.

I've had great starts and the the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus is gone by turn 80 on epic (Emperor level).

Don't even get me going on Great Library gone by turn 56.

What is turn 80 from epic to standard - about 55?

That is doable on Diety if you have decent production, steal a worker and tech Pottery, mining, masonry, animal husbandy.

The problem with Diety though is that even if you do everything right there is still a chance a Civ could decide to build this Wonder really early and beat you to it. It's not as insane like the Great Library or Stonehenge but it can happen. But depending on how serious a player you are, I just reload back and try it again :crazyeye:
 
Almost every player who spend a little bit more time with civ will be at situation that he can't loose anymore;
what usually will present him with dilemma: either quit playing due to boredom (game is won before start)
or still play and try to get better finish times than others or beat personal records.

Or experiment a bit with fun, but sub-optimal strategies and try to win that way.
 
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