Tip: Improving a civ's core's land and cities before switching to it

[Genghis Khaiser]

Maybe I'm reinventing the wheel, maybe I'm giving some good advice for newcomers, but here's what you should do at any opportunity before playing a late-spawning civ. This makes new-born civs much stronger.

-Start the game not as the civilization you want to play as, but as one that spawns nearby and many turns before (For example, start as Vikings and build and improve as much as you can in Holy Rome's core).
-If you build a city on most capitals, they will disappear unless you have previously built a Wonder there.
-Once they spawn, gift them all your gold, as well many units and cities.

Here are some examples I can come up with:

Spoiler :

• Moors: Start as Byzantium, Rome, or Carthage, built Iol Caesarea and Tunis. In the 3000 BC scenario, build a city in Qurtubah's spawn and at least one Wonder there.
• Netherlands: Start as Holy Rome, found Utrecht, make it the best city as possible, and build the San Marco Basilica there.
• Prussia: First, spawn as Vikings and try to settle Hamburg, Berlin, and Königsberg, then switch to Holy Rome, found Protestantism and conquer Rome and Jerusalem. Build as many Wonders, buildings, and improvements as you can in Germany.
• Mexico: Start as Spain in the 1700 AD scenario, found Oaxaca, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Antonio, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Luis, Montana and San Miguel. Build as many Markets and Churches as possible. Settle all Great People in Mexico City, and have a big army and navy settled there.
• Canada: Start as Britain in the 1700 AD scenario, improve as much as you can from Canada, leave Montreal alone, and don't settle east. When Canada spawns, gift them all your gold, units and cities in North America.

There are many more, just to give some examples.

However, as I reported in the Bug Reports and Technical issues thread, there are some bugs if you do this:

-Turns end automatically and stack attack is disabled, so you have to go to the Options menu to manually enable them.
-Your espionage is managed by the AI.
-You can't put gold in diplomacy, only AIs can say what gold you give or receive at deals. You have to reload the game to disable this bug.

 

[Tigranes]

Don't you feel this can be regarded as an exploit or even cheating by some people? For example if we start competition after 1.5 release for best score UHV this approach gives unfair advantage, not to mention it is completely unrealistic historically...

 

[ales_]

UHV competition threads normally don't allow switching civs.

 

[cmakk1012]

Don't you feel this can be regarded as an exploit or even cheating by some people? For example if we start competition after 1.5 release for best score UHV this approach gives unfair advantage, not to mention it is completely unrealistic historically...

I mean, there can be some skill involved, but it should be in its own category if you were competing IMO.

Other times it’s useful for highly variable starts, for ex. Turkey.

 

[Tigranes]

Obviously every one of us can have fun with this mod in the way that suits him the best. I wonder how many people just playing to win with one civ but after they won they feel like they want to see what will happen to the world that they have spent so much time reshaping and so they continue "one more turn" or few more turns and switch to the next available civ trying to win as this second one this time and later encounter the fruits of their labor from the "past life". I just finished my Roman game and feel like continuing as Byzantium, even though I did not think I will do it while playing Romans and so just settled Constantinople around 320 AD (like in real life as my 4th city in Greece and Anatolia), so it did not have much improvements. By the way it did not get erased without a wonder --perhaps special rules are in place for this very special city.