Tips for immortal peaceful builder?

[Taelis]

Hi all. I've never posted here before, but here goes.

I'm still trying to beat immortal, raging barbs, aggressive AI, peacefully. My definition of that is no declarations of war, and no baiting the AI into declaring, but I will take barbarian cities and sometimes take cities from an AI that declares against me.

I have managed to obtain parity in land area, and tech parity through education. I've come as close as being competitive in the space race, but never quite won. I can't quite finish a cultural victory before the AI builds a ship, either.

Since I haven't seen a lot of tips for peaceful play on immortal/diety difficulties, I thought I'd share what I've learned and hopefully learn more from the masters:

• I usually place my first city on a plains hill near a seafood resource.
  
• I place my early cities far apart, and let the culture from religion fill in the gaps. I found A LOT of religions. I usually shoot for Buddhism, Confucianism (from the Oracle), Christianity (from a great prophet), and Philosophy (from a great scientist). Sometimes Islam too. Code of Laws and Theology are great techs even without a religion attached, but Philosophy and Islam only seem useful for a cultural victory. (I'm usually not fast enough to build the Spiral Minaret).
  
• I place my early cities on the coast, and shoot for sailing early. Not only does this give me a few extra gold in trade, but a coastal city with a shrine spreads my chosen religion quite quickly.
  
• I've tried playing with Gandhi, Isabella, and Huayna Capac, buts Spain's my favorite - Isabella starts with mysticism and fishing, and with a seafood resource can develop very quickly very early. Being spiritual is helpful, but expansive is HUGE. The +2 health allows me to place cities away from fresh water, on floodplains, wherever, and clear cut for REX.
  
• After medititation, I usually beeline to bronze working. If I find copper in a decent location, I settle directly on it and skip archery. But if it's in a poor location, I research archery instead of claiming the copper - my second city will be the Confucian holy city.
  
• I build a warrior, a work boat (as Spain I demand seafood) and a worker then chop rush a second worker, a settler, and some defenses.

This is working pretty well for me, but I haven't quite dominated this game, and until I do, I won't ever give up. Please help!

 

[Dadamh]

Geez, some people play in such a regimented manner. I just screw around and research techs on whim and impulse. Maybe that's why I'm stuck on Warlord and you're on immortal

It sounds like an excellent strategy. Doesn't founding three or four religions irritate you, however? You can't really pick a valid state religion in that case, and all your neighbors will adopt random relgious detrius from your cities. Thus you'll never be able to appease all their crazy "Convert or die" demands.

On the upside, you are playing as that psychopath Isabella, so I suppose she's out of the picture.

Anyhoo, I know I'm no help, just saying it sounds interesting.

 

[walkerjks]

It sounds like an excellent strategy. Doesn't founding three or four religions irritate you, however? You can't really pick a valid state religion in that case, and all your neighbors will adopt random relgious detrius from your cities. Thus you'll never be able to appease all their crazy "Convert or die" demands.

If you systematically spread one religion only outside your borders, you can easily overcome any of your other relgions spreading to random cities. In one One City Challenge game I played, I managed to get my religion as the state religion is 5 of the 6 enemy civs. Only the civ that founded Buddhism held out. I only manually spread the 1 religion, I spread it to literally every city on the map, and built that 1 shrine.

The lesson in a multiple religion founding game - spread all your religions internally. Only spread 1 religion externally.

 

[Dadamh]

I suppose that would generate a massive amount of gold if you had the shrine.

 

[Taelis]

It sounds like an excellent strategy. Doesn't founding three or four religions irritate you, however? You can't really pick a valid state religion in that case, and all your neighbors will adopt random relgious detrius from your cities. Thus you'll never be able to appease all their crazy "Convert or die" demands.

Actually, as a spirtual civ I welcome those demands - it's an easy, permanent +1 to relations. And I can switch back in 5 turns with no diplomatic penalty.

Anyhoo, I know I'm no help, just saying it sounds interesting.

Heh, thanks. It's the result of a lot of hours wasted on this damn game!

Anywho, has anyone won a peaceful game on immortal or diety? How'd you do it?

 

[walkerjks]

Anywho, has anyone won a peaceful game on immortal or diety? How'd you do it?

I've won a single cultural victory on immortal, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone as it's a very frustrating experience.

The basic strategy is in this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=138647

Minor improvements to that are interspersed throughout the thread.

The reason it's frustrating (and why I play on Emperor still) is that I consistently get a cultural win in the 1875-1925 AD window and the difficulty level has little to do with my victory window. However, difficulty has a lot to do with the AI space victory window. On Emperor, I usually beat the AI. On Immortal, I usually get beat, since early space victories are pretty common (and the AI is a tad more agressive, so slightly more wars).

I'm working on ways to move my cultural win date up to an 1800 - 1900 AD window. If I can pull that off, Immortal cultural wins should become more feasible on a consistent basis.

The other area I need to explore (and just haven't had enough game-time yet to develop this line of thought) is how consistent one can make diplomatic wins. Perhaps playing the diplomacy game, aiming (in a general sense) for early UN might produce wins more consistently than my cultural strategy. I don't have enough info at this point to know if diplomatic wins are more or less a matter of "luck" than cultural wins.

 

[Gufnork]

I made a good run for it, playing Victoria and started alone on an island. I barely lost the space race, but that's only becuase I started on such a good island. I've made a bunch of tries but lost horribly each other time.

 

[alexti2]

I've won a single cultural victory on immortal, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone as it's a very frustrating experience.

The basic strategy is in this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=138647

Minor improvements to that are interspersed throughout the thread.

The reason it's frustrating (and why I play on Emperor still) is that I consistently get a cultural win in the 1875-1925 AD window and the difficulty level has little to do with my victory window. However, difficulty has a lot to do with the AI space victory window. On Emperor, I usually beat the AI. On Immortal, I usually get beat, since early space victories are pretty common (and the AI is a tad more agressive, so slightly more wars).

I'm working on ways to move my cultural win date up to an 1800 - 1900 AD window. If I can pull that off, Immortal cultural wins should become more feasible on a consistent basis.

Precisely. To some extent your cultural win depends more on what are AI nations and how lucky is their starting location than on your own play. So far I've got beaten 3 times on deity by 5-15 turns. My current game seems to be going better, but it's micromanagement hell. I wonder if I finally manage to win it this time.

 

[anton_z1]

Wow people. I still struggle on immortal. will try domination victory. If you haev any tips, they are velcome.

 

[alexti2]

If you play on smallish Pangaea, you have at least 2 choices: one is to rush early, better done with a nation with good early units, like Romans. I don't think that this strategy is particularly reliable, because if you don't have neither iron nor copper nor horses you may be in trouble. Another approach is to grow few big cities and push borders with culture and then attack your squeezed neighbours in the mid-game. This method works well on crowded Pangaea, but not on the sparsely populated one. So it looks there's no apparent reliable strategy which would guarantee a win on any settings. Maybe doing rush with Aztecs, but I haven't tried it. In theory you can rush with Jaguars that don't need any resources.

My cultural attempts are mostly because I'm trying to find winning strategy on deity archipelago which seems to be challenging...

 

[Bezhukov]

I've found the most helpful thing for delaying the AI space race is to encourage them to go to war with one another. Sometimes you will get dragged in too, so its a good idea to have some defense prepared (I recommend obtaining rifling and nationhood as early as is practical and drafting one up), but if you don't give the AI something better to do, they will team up and crunch you in the tech race, no matter how good you are.

I learned this the hard way in a peaceful Emporer game (not one shot fired the whole game anywhere in the world), when Mansa completed Apollo in 1635! Using the above strategy, I somehow managed an Immortal Inca win sandwiched between Monty and Alex by being a good bud and helpfully suggesting targets of their bloodlust other than myself.

 

[Gufnork]

A cheap way to make the victory easier is to manually select your opponents. Any game where Mansa Musa is in will be over much faster than other games. That guy can research like nobodys business. I haven't played a game with him in it where he hasn't had the tech lead.