Won my second Deity game, here's tips.

[Infiltrator]

Yeah, I guess. I beat my first deity with Japan, I am actually curious if japan has a lead on the general generation. Their samurai GG generation carries over when you upgrade so it stays useful throughout the game.

 

[xcaine]

Japan are great, too bad they don't have a unique building... maybe Dojo - better barracks for +20 or +25 XP I played a very good, yet ultimately failed, early game with Japanese on Immortal. Got beaten by China, that's when I took notice and turned sides. I love good military.

When playing against AI, I fear Japan and English Longbowmen the most. Ruthless medieval units.

 

[Godclone]

After Immortal got too easy and I was able to consistently win, I tried and failed Deity about 10 times. Now I got it.

Cheating more . (abuse reloading, AI exploits, etc ... revealed by the rest of your post)

Played as China. Small Pangea, Quick pace. Restarted a few times to get a decent starting point. I aim for domination victory.

Anything larger then a small pangea and your competitors will spam every hex on the planet with military and dozens of cities. That's not fun.

You mean anything larger, and you lose even if abusing since farther AI out tech and outproduce you so much no amount of reloads will save you from their numbers .

Early game strategy:
Deity is tough. You do need to get a bit lucky with terrain and neighbors. I'm always looking for a river spot with a money, food and production resource nearby. This is a prerequisite. I love marble for a wonder bonus or a few gold/silver hills.

No its not. You do not need restarts, i can do it even if i start in the middle of the desert . Learn to move your initial settler, a few turns are irrelevant if you are not playing on fast speeds .

First order of business: Stonehenge. If someome beats you to it, restart. It is extremely important in early game. Beeline Calendar, build scouts meanwhile to grab huts and explore. It really helps to get lucky with early culture points, population boost or gold. Use your first warrior to defeat nearby barbarians, otherwise they will make your life very miserable very soon. Use your scout to steal workers from nearby city states. No problem going to war and declaring peace shortly after, your reputation will climb back until you're ready to start allying them.

After stonehenge, I immediatelly go for Pyramids. +50% worker speed is absolutely essential to me. It's doable with Aristocracy, but someone might beat you to it.

So your basically saying cheat more .

EXPAND AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. I buy my first settler because I'll be busy building early wonders. By this time, you should've already researched iron working so go found a new city nearby. Ideally, you also want a new luxury resource so your citizens won't sulk because of the expansion.

At this point, you might already be getting attacked by an overwhelming force. Hold your fort with spearmen, an archer and maybe swordsman. Adopt Oligarchy for a +33% home turf advantage. If you tackled enough barbarians, great general is very close. I had one pop up just as Gandhi stormed me with his elephant archers. +45% GG and +33% oligarchy will give you the defense you need at this point.

If you have maritime states nearby, do NOT adopt other social policies than Oligarchy and Aristocracy. Save your stonehenge culture points for mid-game Patronage domination. Otherwise, use them on Honor, especially double experience.

If war is tough, go straight for Steel and upgrade to Longswordsmen.
After that, go straight for Machinery for Cho-Ku-Nos. This is when you finally get an edge and are able to stop defending and instead attack your neighbor. Raze their small cities, keep their capital, repopulate with your own settlers.

Hopefully, you conquered some very nice territories because now you'll have different priorities.

Mid-game

At this point, you're facing 1 or 2 other major competitors with a vast, technologically superior army. You can't take them on with your 5 chokunos. Set up a strong defense perimeter in the city nearest to them and hold fort. If terrain permits, create a chokepoint with a citadel or two, declare war on them and just keep defending. They will likely keep coming at you forever and your armies will get more experience and more GGs.
Always build your citadels on hills and always hold the higher ground so they can't bombard you from two squares away.

Your sole mission now is to get to artillery and infantry/mech infantry before them.

For this, you'll need a specialized science city. Could be your capital, but not always. I plan my science city wherever there's the most food, so that means farmed river+grassland tiles and ideally, a mountain nearby for Observatory. Research the techs needed for tech buildings, but don't bother with anything else.

Other cities should not bother with farms, instead TPs everywhere for money. Employ citizens in your paper makers in every single city for great scientists. Early, on, I personally like to build academies around my tech city, but you can also save them to insta-discover later. Expand your cities, keep happiness up, just get as many beakers and GSs as you possibly can.

Don't build buildings you don't need. You should only have one military city with barracks & armory, others can generate science after market/bank/papermaker/university/colosseum have been built.

If your competitor is warring any city states, ally them and gift them strong non-promoted units regularly.

I try to go for other wonders such as Himeji and Hagia Sofia, but I'm not always able to get them.

Late-game

Your competitor will be technologically superior for most of the game, but they didn't beeline Electronics like you did.

If you make it to mech inf. before your opponents: upgrade, attack and conquer. Tanks are crap, don't bother with combustion.

If not, you might need GDRs. I haven't made it that far yet.

That's it.

That is the most flawed Deity strategy i read so far, more so since it relies heavily on cheating and (yes loading a game for new outcome is cheating ) .

Your strategy is one step from playing in worldbuilder and adding units, tech .. whatever in order to win . This wasn't a strategy guide, it was a cheating competition between you and the AI's . (since the AI cheating was endorsed by the difficulty level... you were the only one actually cheating .)

Here is an actually strategy for winning Deity that requires no cheating at all, reloading or exploiting AI trade , or abusing city state workers .

Standard/huge map size , Epic/marathon speed , Continents/Pangaea since its more balanced than anything with lots of water, Ai sucks even more with water involved . Smaller maps mean less opponents thus an easier game , i would play even bigger if not for the unbearable time between turns later in game .

Do not expand until you own your whole continent or won the game in the case of Pangaea . Use your capital solely for troop training , 1 warrior while researching archery, then archers and warriors as needed while going for iron working and mathematics (seconded) .

Declare war right of the bat and conquer all your continent . By fortifying your troops in hills/forests(ed) wait until the Ai suicides all his army and then take all his cities . Raze all you can puppet capitals . By the time you reach iron working you should already have conquered 2 AI's, and have swordsmen for the 3rd , catapults for 4th .

You will have your continent if playing continents by now and expand/grow your cities for tech lead Beelining caravels and army techs to conquer the other continent . If playing pangea continue until you won the game .

Warmongering is a snowball effect. If you plan on waging war at any point of the game (which is inevitable on deity ) you should start as soon as you can, focus all your resources on it and never stop until you won . (p.s. you can also go for diplomatic victory by bribing/liberating all city states in your way .)

Now that is a strategy that works , i don't consider playing any other difficulty than deity since the AI is terrible anyway . And the #1 thing that makes it a strategy is that it is not reliant nor does requires cheating , that is why its called a strategy and not a cheating guide .

 

[pi-r8]

get off your high horse Godclone. Obviously reloading isn't ideal but it's not cheating. If a strategy works only 20% of the time, well, a 20% win rate on deity is still decent. Your strategy is much closer to what I would call cheating, since it relies on abusing marathon speed plus ridiculous AI stupidity which will hopefully be patched out soon.

 

[Godclone]

Obviously reloading isn't ideal but it's not cheating.

Anything you can not do vs another human player is cheating . And i do not abuse marathon speeds, i won standard games too, ... i use it to make some use of the units i train and not be 2-3 techs ahead by the time their finished . And to be able to play from a very poor start location .

A strategy that works 20% of the time might as well be luck , by having the AI pursue different paths .

Also a strategy is one that can be used in multilayer. Restarting/reloading... based strategy is null , and thus cheating if used vs AI . AI is incredibly dumb, and you feel the need to cheat vs that too ? .

You win by being better than your opponents (i have nothing against improving the AI, in fact i'm waiting eagerly for it), using game mechanics ... combat, that works in multiplayer too . Restarting/reloading is not a game mechanic .

Edit : I'm sorry if i stepped on any toes, i was a little ticked of by someone endorsing cheating as strategy .

 

[pi-r8]

Anything you can not do vs another human player is cheating

By fortifying your troops in hills/forests(ed) wait until the Ai suicides all his army and then take all his cities

Your own strategy is, by your own definition, cheating.

reloading is only cheating if you pretend that it's a win. If you just accept it as a loss and move on, what's the problem.

 

[xcaine]

I do not play with random seed.
Therefore, I am not reloading to change the course of the game. It doesn't work.

The only thing I look for is a favorable starting position. Give me a river and a couple of good resources and I'm in.

I'd love to see you start in a desert and repelling AI's chariot archer invasion by having your troops fortified in a forest. Please, post screenshots.

 

[troytheface]

lol

don't be pushed around

its cheating and everyone but cheaters would agree

reminds me of chess - over the board play against someone who claims to have a high rating based on the computer play - you can kick thecrap out of them because reality has been replaced with - i am not sure- computer fantasy

which is why the "stories and tales" section of civ4 was more truthful then posted Diety wins

 

[xcaine]

I disagree.

I have better things to do with my time than continue playing after I know the game has been lost. Or won for that matter.

But if you folks like Marathon, that's your prerogative.

 

[Godclone]

I'd love to see you start in a desert and repelling AI's chariot archer invasion by having your troops fortified in a forest. Please, post screenshots.

You do not need random seed, you move your units other way around, you "restart" as stated to complete wonder(s) .

Regarding starting in the desert, its called moving your settler out of the desert before making a city . And i do not wait to be attacked, im the one doing the attacking, with that 1 warrior i can kill the army(some /most/ or all depending on terrain ) first civilization i meet until reinforcements .

The only thing bad starting location does is delay reinforcements by 2-3 turns, which are needed to get out of the desert, that's it .

But if you folks like Marathon, that's your prerogative.

I played standard too, and it works . The only difference is that your units will always be at best 1 tier behind your research . And the strategy works with any civ, i usualy play random civ. But works best with Japan , your front line units become tanking gods.. allways fighting at full strength . (with medic promotions, +3hp /turn in enemy territory )

 

[xcaine]

And i do not wait to be attacked, im the one doing the attacking, with that 1 warrior i can kill the army(some /most/ or all depending on terrain ) first civilization i meet until reinforcements.

 

[Infiltrator]

Deity can be virtually impossible based on luck. One game I spawned on just grasslands and 1 hill, and the opponent was right next to me, settled in my back yard a couple of turns after the game started and declared war on me right off. I could have fended off his initial warriors but due to no defensive positions, and no economy thanks to bad start, I couldn't keep up with the stream of units that he kept buying off right in front of my capital.

 

[HuntingX]

I have a couple of save games of 1200-1500 BC (varying) dominations in Pangaea Deity, Standard (8/16), Greece, Marathon. It's much harder to do it with non-Greek; but the key is horsemen and the equivalents (obviously companions are better).

It's really easy. As other people have stated, develop your initial city. With lots of computers, you can ALWAYS successfully pinch a worker (or two) from a neighboring civ FASTER than you can build a worker of your own, so just build scouts to get intel on more civs and more city states. You'll need the former to steal money from, and the latter to get food/culture from. Greece always gets horses nearby. Make a couple horsemen. Buy more. By 1900 BC (when your push really gets going), the computer only has a couple units (less than 10), and you have 3-4 companions.

No reload, reseed, etc is needed, since you have infinite gold from stealing money from all computers (I'm always allied with all city states), infinite food from maritimes, infinite culture, blah blah blah. One of the best aspects of Greece is the hoplite, since you get the 'weapons' upgrade from ruins quite commonly, so the hoplite really helps a lot.

Basically, the bigger the game (the more computers there are), the easier the game is, since you can extort/trick more computers for gold, and you can ally with more and more city states, boosting your perceived 'threat' by computers, who are more likely to peace you and refuse to declare.

Also, this strategy is by far the best on Marathon, and I've had a lot less success on faster difficulties, so big props to those people that can win deity on Normal; Marathon is pretty much a joke though.

 

[Godclone]

@ xcaine
Whats funny about that . The key is good battle strategy , don't rush like an idiot like most of players do, the key points are , go rough terrain promotions with medic/march while defending a forested hill for defense bonus + fortify bonus .

All you need to do is stay there fortified for a couple of turns while he suicides his army into your warrior, giving you xp for promotions, if needed retreat a couple of hexes for heal and repeat . As soon as another warrior and archer arrives take his cities .

@HuntingX , Exploiting AI trade is unnecessary . (this include accepting any peace declaration, or getting his lump sum of gold for resources /turn then declaring warr . )

 

[xcaine]

That's why I don't like Marathon. I like to overcome the initial struggle and stretch my game all the way to the modern era.

Godclone, did you play deity on quick? Did you not see the AI rush you with 6+ troops and surround your city/unit before you've had a chance to really build anything wortwhile other than an archer and a spearman? Or them having 4-5 cities while you're building your first settler?

 

[Godclone]

That's why I don't like Marathon. I like to overcome the initial struggle and stretch my game all the way to the modern era.

Godclone, did you play deity on quick? Did you not see the AI rush you with 6+ troops and surround your city/unit before you've had a chance to really build anything wortwhile other than an archer and a spearman? Or them having 4-5 cities while you're building your first settler?

I play standard or slower speeds only . I do not build/nor buy settlers untill i am alone on the continent, or in the case of Pangaea never . (with the exception of getting iron if i really REALLY need it ) .

Also AI army size is kinda irrelevant, you can defeat it with 10% of its numbers, like i said AI will attack the closest thing to him , so keep your units on very VERY defensible positions between you and him . If they get to your city with superior numbers is game over since its mostly flat ground which is impossible to defend.

If you really need extra help (as in having war on 2 fronts, you can build a citadel and defend 1 front while conquering the other )

 

[xcaine]

Tell you what, I'll go play a slow game while you try a quick one and then we can compare notes.

 

[Infiltrator]

Well when you outlined your strat you said epic/marathon. Which gives the human opponent an edge. If I were to look at the way you try to make xcaine come off as a cheater, one could just as easily call you a cheater because you choose to have an easier time with the AI by making the game slower.

 

[Godclone]

Tell you what, I'll go play a slow game while you try a quick one and then we can compare notes.

Give me the map settings which i should use . Note that i will disable ruins, cba having riflemen 20 turns in then achieving victory due to that .

Your map settings are Continents, Marathon speed, Standard map . 8 civ 16 city states (default) , you can use the civ of your choice .

 

[Rellin]

Civ needs a 'regenerate map, button after starting a new game.

OMG yes. I miss this feature!