Wonders of the Ancient World deity walkthrough?

[claudiupb]

I remember I did Immortal with the Hittites on a randomized map. They get a production bonus so that helps a lot. The science Wonders are off the table, but you can easily get Oracle, and the Military ones (just declare war on the first CS you meet and farm XP there). You can also get the Colossus if no one has a good city on the coast. If someone is hoarding wonders, you can just take them by conquest, with 3 self built wonders and at least one conquered you should win it (unless someone is building all the other wonders, but you can just take them as they will likely be in one city).

On Emperor you can try Sumer, you will have a decent shot at the Scientific wonders and with the temples you can also get the cultural ones.

 

[Yashato]

I remember I did Immortal with the Hittites on a randomized map. They get a production bonus so that helps a lot. The science Wonders are off the table, but you can easily get Oracle, and the Military ones (just declare war on the first CS you meet and farm XP there). You can also get the Colossus if no one has a good city on the coast. If someone is hoarding wonders, you can just take them by conquest, with 3 self built wonders and at least one conquered you should win it (unless someone is building all the other wonders, but you can just take them as they will likely be in one city).

On Emperor you can try Sumer, you will have a decent shot at the Scientific wonders and with the temples you can also get the cultural ones.

Ohh god this sucks.. I tried with Hittites and I was beaten to the economic ones, and the cultural ones, I'm going to try your strategy now to see if I can get this done. Can you recommend any specific start rolls? Like marble with coast? or does stone starting rolls with coast work?

Also if possible and I hope I'm not asking for too much, but do you have a save that you can spare for your starting positions? I know it's going to take me so many rolls to get a good start, let alone a good coastal one. And If I'm going to take cities I might as well do it with Persia since their Immortals are pretty OP and seem to be the best warriors for this scenario.

 

[claudiupb]

I don't have the saves, I did it a long time ago, and I lost some of the old saves.

You can try conquering but don't rely solely on that because the original builder of the wonders gets to keep points for the wonder, so even though with Persia it is easier to conquer cities, with Hittites you have extra hammers from horses and iron, so you get more production done. Their UU is pretty cool also, you can offset the 25% penalty when attacking cities with the statue of Zeus.

I think 3 wonders built by yourself and getting a city with wonders should be enough to win. On a random map the behavior is not so deterministic, so you can try the historic map, I remember that Persia used to get the majority of wonders done, so on the historical map you know who the target is. But of course this means you have to build the Great Lighthouse in a different city, not in the capital (so you might not get it).

 

[Yashato]

I don't have the saves, I did it a long time ago, and I lost some of the old saves.

You can try conquering but don't rely solely on that because the original builder of the wonders gets to keep points for the wonder, so even though with Persia it is easier to conquer cities, with Hittites you have extra hammers from horses and iron, so you get more production done. Their UU is pretty cool also, you can offset the 25% penalty when attacking cities with the statue of Zeus.

I think 3 wonders built by yourself and getting a city with wonders should be enough to win. On a random map the behavior is not so deterministic, so you can try the historic map, I remember that Persia used to get the majority of wonders done, so on the historical map you know who the target is. But of course this means you have to build the Great Lighthouse in a different city, not in the capital (so you might not get it).

Alright thanks anyways and to be honest I don't see how other people farmed XP from CS since I only have one warrior (On turn 36 currently with 5 turns to go until Oracle to be built with Alexander declaring war on me in the very beginning, to which I repelled him and he retreated earning me a bit more XP) and the CS just built and archer so that makes it extremely difficult to farm and not get killed without running back and forth. I think it's obvious that I would need to build a couple of more military units and go around DoW'ing CS's and camping outside barb camps. Is this a good strategy?

In all honesty the chances of my spawning near a coast with horse production are slim to none (55th re-roll btw) And I agree warfare is a waste of time unless you're on Prince or lower. I'll try the Persia method on Emperor.

If this one doesn't work for me then I will try the second strategy you just suggested. And if that one doesn't work I guess I'll have to resort to my cheesy Egypt city trap method -.-

 

[reddishrecue]

Alright thanks anyways and to be honest I don't see how other people farmed XP from CS since I only have one warrior (On turn 36 currently with 5 turns to go until Oracle to be built with Alexander declaring war on me in the very beginning, to which I repelled him and he retreated earning me a bit more XP) and the CS just built and archer so that makes it extremely difficult to farm and not get killed without running back and forth. I think it's obvious that I would need to build a couple of more military units and go around DoW'ing CS's and camping outside barb camps. Is this a good strategy?

In all honesty the chances of my spawning near a coast with horse production are slim to none (55th re-roll btw) And I agree warfare is a waste of time unless you're on Prince or lower. I'll try the Persia method on Emperor.

If this one doesn't work for me then I will try the second strategy you just suggested. And if that one doesn't work I guess I'll have to resort to my cheesy Egypt city trap method -.-

CS XP farming with units I imagine is by using ranged units I guess since its much easier to farm XP with ranged units because city bombardment. CS XP farming takes patience because CSes don't always make that much units but if you stay at war with them and let them grow, eventually the CS will pop out with a unit or two and try to plunder your lands.

 

[Yashato]

CS XP farming with units I imagine is by using ranged units I guess since its much easier to farm XP with ranged units because city bombardment. CS XP farming takes patience because CSes don't always make that much units but if you stay at war with them and let them grow, eventually the CS will pop out with a unit or two and try to plunder your lands.

I just got every single achievement for Wonders of the Ancient World. Thank you for suggesting the Emperor guide It worked for me. Now I'm moving on to Fall of Rome. (I'm doing historical to modern scenarios in that order. Hopefully Rome won't give me a hard time lol)

 

[claudiupb]

I just got every single achievement for Wonder of the Ancient World. Thank you for suggesting the Emperor guide It worked for me. Now I'm moving on to Fall of Rome. (I'm doing historical to modern scenarios in that order. Hopefully Rome won't give me a hard time lol)

Actually the Pax Romana Aeternum is one of the hardest scenario achievements in the game. For me the hardest have been Praise the Victories (winning with the Boers in the Scramble for Africa scenario) and Pax Romana Aeternum. I replayed the first 10 turns a lot. But by turn 15 it was pretty clear it was going to happen (you don't actually need to win, you need to have the combined score of both roman empires greater than any other score, the Sassanids are most likely the contender). But still, it was a lot of work.

 

[Yashato]

Actually the Pax Romana Aeternum is one of the hardest scenario achievements in the game. For me the hardest have been Praise the Victories (winning with the Boers in the Scramble for Africa scenario) and Pax Romana Aeternum. I replayed the first 10 turns a lot. But by turn 15 it was pretty clear it was going to happen (you don't actually need to win, you need to have the combined score of both roman empires greater than any other score, the Sassanids are most likely the contender). But still, it was a lot of work.

Damn it looks like you're right! Fall of Rome was way harder than Wonders of the Ancient World because to win all you need is a good starting location, but for Fall of Rome, Good Grief it was harder than I thought it was going to be. I achieved everything for FoR though and now I'm doing everything for Paradise Found. It's a bit boring but interesting because once you get Frigates and Riflemen you pretty much dominate everything.

And now I also need help with the 1066: Viking Destiny scenario on Deity, it's confusing, well sort of.

 

[zxcvbob]

I just got the Immortal achievement, thanks to the tip about moving the starting settler east to a hill by the the Red Sea. Also the part about taking the left side of Honor for extra XP to unlock the military wonders quicker.

I had almost won settling in place with Egypt, but someone beat me to the Great Lighthouse by 2 turns and surpassed my score. Whenever I play the Hittites there is no iron anywhere near my start, and whenever I play anybody on a random map, everybody takes turns declaring war against me; I can keep them from capturing my cities, but I can't get anything else accomplished.

My most fun game was at emperor with Sumeria, building wonders and fighting with the Persians. The domination victory at settler-level with Alex wasn't bad either; the hardest part of that game was waiting for the AIs to build wonders so I could steal them (for the Reverse Engineer achievement)

The Legalism policy seems to be broken in this scenario. If I already have a monument and have not yet researched whatever unlocks temples (I think it's Philosophy), I never get a free culture building in that city. When I play a deity game to get the last achievement, I may skip building a monument in my capital, then take Legalism before Aristocracy.

 

[claudiupb]

The Legalism policy seems to be broken in this scenario. If I already have a monument and have not yet researched whatever unlocks temples (I think it's Philosophy), I never get a free culture building in that city. When I play a deity game to get the last achievement, I may skip building a monument in my capital, then take Legalism before Aristocracy.

I think that was a bug in civ5 vanilla, and since this scenario does not have the GNK and BNW expansions, this it is not patched.

 

[Jimbo77]

After using Murrayjdpe's advice (from this forum thread), I came close, but alas no cigar! Always beaten by the pesky Persians. So, I decided to use most of his brilliant advice but changed a few things. Start with Egypt and build one city to the East on the hill with marble. Reroll the map until you get that marble. Here's a link to a page where you can down load a saved file so you don't have to spend hours rerolling.. Civilization 5 Wonders of the Ancient World Strategy & Steam Achievement (kalle-online.net) Build your city on the hill with marble. This will be your only city. Don't waste turns building a settler later. You want to ultimately build units to harvest XP and culture asap. Start with building a monument here, and then the Oracle, and then a worker, and then the Pyramids. After this concentrate on building chariots, until the stone works become available, then build that. From then on only build chariots unless Zeus, Halicarnassus and Great Lighthouse become available.. Social policies wise, go Tradition, Aristocracy, Honor and then Warrior Code, and then Military tradition. Forget Legalism, it doesn't work, and forget landed elite. Make sure you use you worker once built, or captured to get the resources going, and farms to provide food, asap. Use any captured workers to get your city resources going even quicker. Switch the city to Production mode in the City Management page once the Pyramids become available. Keep it like this til the end of the game. Use your warrior to circle the map from the start picking up all the ruin's treasures. Use him wisely, don't get him killed. There will be a couple of ruins that give you a culture boost. Very important for getting the Halicarnassus and Pyramids. You should be able to pick up the Oracle fairly easily, and then the Pyramids. Once you get Honor social policy dedicate a couple of chariots to killing barbarians, until the end of the game. You will receive around 7 culture for each barbarian you kill, plus XP. Don't take the barbarians camp. Leave it to regenerate more barbarians eventually, and come back to hammer them again. Always have a couple of chariots going around hitting the barbarians until the end of the game. If you can spare more, do it. It's the only way to build enough culture to unlock the Halicarnassus in time. Use your other units to attack the nearest city state asap for more XP. Doing this should build up your XP and culture significantly to ultimately unlock the Halicarnassus, Zeus, and the Great Lighthouse. All gold that you make, buy chariots with it.. Don't sell gold. You are only concentrating on building the Oracle, Pyramids, Halicarnassus, Zeus and the Great Lighthouse. If you don't get Halicarnassus don't worry, you're still on for 4 wonders and can still do it with a bit of luck. Doing it this way I managed to finally win on Diety first time after about 20-30 failed goes.. Good luck!

 

[guest273]

Hello there kind strangers from this eons old conversation!

A big BIG THANK YOU from me to you for this amazing suggestion!

Yesterday I was able to finally beat this scenario on Deity as Egypt as well.

I played Egypt on Deity in order to unlock the achievement (based on difficulty level).

Good luck!

One of the nice things about Egypt in this scenario is that you are distant enough from the other AI's that they can't realistically attack you, plus since you are so far from them you have better diplomatic relations with them.
And still Persia declared a war on me in my successful attempt lol. And the Hittites had a small clump of about 4-6 units coming my way just as the scenario ended. I think they had the same idea.

It is challenging. I did a lot of rerolling to get the perfect start.
I didn't do a lot of rerolling. Only about 5 times (which these days is considered very minimal rerolling, as I've heard that the people on reddit sometimes do 40+ rerolls for a near perfect spawn in their games), till I had marble on the spot 3 turns east from where your settler spawns.

In order to address the lack of production, I settled east on the hills near the coast. Also rerolled until there was Marble on that spot (to give me the instant 15% Wonder bonus).
And here I was, trying the randomly generated map and getting mad over the fact that I had a much better spawn with cattle / sheep & on a river hill unlike the pre-determined map.
But those randomly generated maps are way smaller, thus war with other Civs actually becomes a real problem. That it unless you roll into a natural wonder from one of the DLC's that can spawn in this scenario for some reason like Fountain of Youth / El Dorado / Cerro de Potosi. Or just get lucky with the Great barrier reef. But even then you'd need an amazing start.
Plus you tend to spawn away from the sea, so the Great Lighthouse becomes off-limit to you.

Somehow it had completely slipped my mind that Marble would be really imbalanced on this scenario / map LOL. Like what the heck. You can just randomly get a luxury resource that makes you have a 15% advantage over every other Civ... Like who did the balancing for this?

Anyway, this suggestion to move east is what made the game for me. First time I tried it I actually moved South-East, so I settled like turn 6 & even without marble (the spawn had cattle, fish, ivory & 2 silver tiles as well as 2 other luxes in range of the capital). I ended up getting the Oracle even though it was kind of a YOLO test run... too bad Persia built 4 of the damn other wonders and so his score was ahead of me because of Deity advantages.

Anyway few attempts and some optimizations and I got the achievement but oh boy was it rough.

In fact, I was able to build all the wonders but the two technology ones (but I was actually pretty close to getting those).
I absolutely cannot imagine getting the economic ones. Temple of Artemis was getting built when I had 300/1000 or 400/1000 gold needed to even unlock it.

Being able to keep tabs on the other civs with the Oracle was really nice (wish this was a wonder in the standard game).
In my Deity run I only got to use it once. When my Great general spawned.

Any gold that you have should be traded to AI's for GPT, since only cumulative GPT counts for unlocking the Temple of Artemis / Colossus.
The position I settled was so devoid of food tiles I ended up paying 500 gold to the maritime CS for the food bonus as well as quick purchasing infrastructure in my capital such as the temple & the stone works as I didn't have the time to build those.

DoW a city state and keep getting bombarded in order to rack up XP.
This is a decent tip, as otherwise you can only get 30 XP per unit from the Barbarians. Although in my final run it ended up only saving me build time for like 2 archers in total...

If you're falling behind, Honor -> Military Tradition can help speed it up. As long as the AI's aren't massively warring with each other, you can beat them to the military wonders (Statue / Lighthouse).
In my runs the AI's were always warring each other and I never even considered Military Tradition as the military wonders were the most achievable for me even with scouts as my units of choice most of the time...
Tradition policies for me were way more important as I always lacked food / was trading away all my luxuries for 240 gold.

I'm really having a tough time with this despite trying every trick in the book.
As it is, I couldn't do anything.

I'm really having a tough time with this despite trying every trick in the book.
I had the same. I win Immortal Civ 5 games with an about 90% consistency and consider myself an exceptionally good player.

And that's absolutely done without the biggest cheesing in the book:
- No / very minimal repairing tiles in the AI's borders for free pillage gold.
- No endless CS war for farming XP.
- No fort building on only source of luxury to keep scamming gpt from the AI.
Etc. etc.

So when I decided to pull out all the cheeses I know and still nothing... I was quite a bit concerned.

Even by loading/reloading for prime camp gains
The thing with this scenario is that it has predetermined RNG seed. As in - if you reload the previous turn and do your actions in a different order, the same barb will always do the same damage to your unit & same with ancient ruins. Map ruins will always be map ruins. Barb camp ruins will always be barb camp ruins. So you can't cheese all ruins to be useful in that way.

Even selling Open Borders for 50g to each civ
This only occurred to me in the last two attempts. That this is free gold because it was not like my border was locking them out & having extra units near my cities would actually help me deal with barbs. Still I had to trade open borders for open borders with Alexander once for the +1 permanent happiness from discovering Mount Olympus (Rock of Gibraltar).

Even selling excess resources for 240 gold, I wasn't able to build a single wonder. My production is crap as Egypt, and that sets me back in a crippling hole.
Selling 2 luxuries + clearing a camp was the equivalent of a CS ally or a purchasable building and yet I had the same experience.

I bought my 1st settler and sent him 20 spaces away to a set of mountains
In the end, I ended up winning with almost a single city. Took the free liberty settler near the end so I could settle a place with 3 sugar to trade away.

By the time I got a war chariot out and started killing, the Statue of Zeus was complete.
For some reason I also overrated the war chariot. But now in hindsight - it's just an overpriced archer. Getting the wheel just for a more expensive unit? What was I thinking?

Anyway, I'm hoping that you're one of the 0.5% on Steam with this achievement brother. Considering that this forum post is almost as ancient as those wonders lol.

 

[guest273]

You don't have to build all the wonders yourself, it is a reasonable startegy to concentrate on a strong military, ok tech, and just go take them from the other Civs.

Which in this scenario on Deity is impossible because they're either miles away from you, or if it's your neighbors who've built those wonders then they have Pikemen by the time you have a sizable army to attack. Deity unit spam is just too overwhelming.

If we're talking real 300 IQ gameplay though then I had this idea of randoming into a map with a really small water area in the middle & cutting all of the AI's off from it, so I could keep at least 1 of the water wonders hostage, then conquer all of the other wonders & win the game.
Then I realized I would need godlike luck and that that game would probably take somewhere between 500-800 turns and go into the medieval-industrial age LOL.

 

[guest273]

I finally beat this w/ Egypt on Deity, historical. After many tries, this seemed the optimum strategy:

It seems to me the other civs' monument cities are simply too far away to get to with a sufficiently upgraded and balanced force.

Hope this is helpful to someone as frustrated with this as I was.

Do not bother with scouts.
My experience was the exact opposite. Having 2-3 scouts for the ruins (the pop ruins were the real deal, tech & cultural ones were really important here - to get at least 2 decent techs, the gold ones were ok too) & farming barbs in Africa + another one for the peninsula. The AI would scout quite badly along the edge of the map there. My starting warrior would go and meet the line of the CS above the spawn location and then go find the 2 natural wonders in Turkey + meet those 2 CS there, then head to the Greek CS for the 15 gold from each of them. If I could spot Mt.Olympus without open borders then I'd do that and then gift the warrior to a CS I was friendly with or was planning to be.

Most of the scouts meanwhile would get unit upgrade ruins and become archers that farm barb camps with workers or defend my capital.

I'm not sure how people are claiming to be taking the other civs monuments (with Egypt)
In their head. That's how. I tried it. Chariot archers can't beat Pikemen.

This and Deity Khan have been the most challenging for me.
Why was Deity Khan challenging to you? I mean happiness was quite a problem in that one but you're kind of locked into honor, so you take the honor happiness and just have 1 city pumping out one turn scouts for the 1 happiness per city garrison.