Let's talk about Deity

[Alkis]

Hi there,

My name is Alkis and I am from Athens, Greece. I used to post in the Alpha Centauri forum some years ago. I also used the hospitality of this site when I initiated the Fast Transcendance Challenge where some very good players participated. That challenge was an opportunity to learn more about the game and also meet some really great players, like Ice, Korn and Vel of course.

The reason I start this thread is that although I won all three games I played on Emperor I have problems winning on Deity. So, I would like to learn new ideas/strategies on how to play on that level.

I think the difference between the two levels, Emperor and Diety is far greater than it should. On Emperor I can be the leader of technology at some point and from then on is easy because I sell one technology to the second most advanced Civ, then to the others and get a lot of gold. With that gold I research more and the gap between me and the others gets greater and at some point I don't even need the diplomacy/trade thing. In one game I completed the spaceship while no one else had even build the Apollo. But that was on Emperor. On Deity I am always behind, therefore I have to buy technologies, thereby depleting my treasury.

I would also like to know the opinions of other players on how many cities are enough to win a space victory. Since corruption is a major issue it just isn't a good idea to build too many cities (even if you could). On Alpha Centauri, for example, 12 - 15 bases were enough on a standard map.

One thing I have to say is that I want to play in an honorable way, no save/reload etc. Also I don't want to use tricks like selling my map every turn to get some scraps of gold. About the "worker factory" I don't know, I think is on the border line. Some players would surely consider it a cheat. I compare it with the add to base command on Alpha Centauri when your base did not have the necessary building to grow more.

Questions that need an answer:

1. Is there a specific tech you should go after or should you just accumulate money?
2. Is early war desirable? Ok most players would answer yes; if yes when and how? When you meet a neighbour do you still build more settlers or just military units? Barracks before units or not?
3. Is there a way to beat the game peacefully? This interests me the most.
4. What is the optimum number of cities?
5. When do you get out of Despotism?

To summurise, the purpose of this thread is to find the truth about Deity level, what actually works and what not.

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Alkis
1. Is there a specific tech you should go after or should you just accumulate money?
2. Is early war desirable? Ok most players would answer yes; if yes when and how? When you meet a neighbour do you still build more settlers or just military units? Barracks before units or not?
3. Is there a way to beat the game peacefully? This interests me the most.
4. What is the optimum number of cities?
5. When do you get out of Despotism?

1. I like to go for Mysticism->Polytheism->Monarchy, as the AI doesn't seem to research those right off. Getting 2 or 3 of those first can almost catch me up in Tech if I trade well.

2. Early war is the easiest way to catch up to the AI in territory and tech early on. The AI doesn't fight any better on Deity than any other difficulty level, they just have more units and better tech. I like to get about 10 - 15 Horsemen before attacking, all veterans. Trying to attack the AI too early will lead to problems as they start out with such a huge number of units (12 to start + 4 free per city).

3. Yes, it's possible to beat Deity in OCC games even. I've personally won culturally and diplomatically, haven't been able to get a Space Launch yet though. In OCC games you really don't want any warfare for the most part. If its possible with 1 city, it shouldn't be too hard with more. Also on larger maps, Expansionist Civs do quite well at keeping up with the AI without having to fight. A settler or two from a hut, and a few techs really help. It's pretty hard to become the most powerful without warfare though.

4. I like as many cities as I can get. The more territory you have, the more the AI will respect/fear you. This leads to better trades. Also you never know where those resources will appear, and the more area you control, the better your chances.

5. I usually don't get out of Despotism until the game is in hand, however long that takes. Part of that is just I get too involved militarily. With a Religious Civ, switching to Monarchy or Republic early can be a good thing, but only after your army is built. I like to keep 50-100 Horse units active throughout most of the game.

[DrSpike]

Some thoughts:

A spaceship win at deity requires a bit of early conquering; you probably have to get 2 civs down to 4 or 5 cities. It is hard to rush from the start in 1.16f so get a few cities up (some long term, some cities just for rushing) with good food squares, get to horesback riding, then pump the horses and attack. I usually end up in despotism for a while, and often go straight from despot to demo when pop levels are high enough. By the time you go to demo have libraries everywhere it makes sense and turn up your research. Until then go for cash and hope your conquest keeps you near the other AI techwise.

[Aeson]

The AI can be beaten to a Space Launch victory in OCC Deity games, I have just had some bad luck with resources. Solo and ToeTruck have both posted victories of this type in an earlier thread.

[DrSpike]

Fair enough. I haven't kept up with the OCC stuff, prefering to save that challenge till I need it. Is that on standard maps now, or just tiny still? Either way, early conquering makes it a damn site easier.

[Aeson]

I agree that conquest on Deity is much easier than any of the other paths to victory. So far the OCC launches have been on Tiny/Small maps. Standard maps are a possibility, but I would be suprised if Large/Huge maps could be beaten with just one city, as the tech rates would be too slow.

[DrSpike]

I have to say I prefer a spaceship victory to domination/conquest, but even for those it's advantageous to wage at least one, and probably two early wars on deity.

[Alkis]

Thanks for your answers Aeson and DrSpike. You are some of the players I hoped they would post here. I' ve read posts of yours on other threads and I really respect you. I would respond earlier but I wasn't ready.

Some things I realized:

The AI does not percieve defeat the same way as humans. Example, even after I destroyed 5 of their cities the Babylonians did not feel defeated (because they still had more military units than my civ). As soon as I had an "average military compared to them" they would give me a couple technologies plus gold to get a peace.

A city you rush units becomes "unusable" in Democracy/Republic.
About cities rushing units the fact is that the city remembers your actions even a thaousand years later. A city with a temple in a Democracy with 20% luxuries plus aditional luxuries could not even get to size two without unrest. I' m talking about a city I used to rush unit after unit after unit. Cities that I rushed a building or two were more or less ok in Democracy. Hence my idea for temporary cities. What you need is just a barracks and one garrison unit (or two if you build more expensive units). If you build horsemen or equivalent as soon as the city gets to size two you rush the unit. Production (shields) doesn't matter.

A nice trick to catch up in technology is to sell slaves. When at war, you capture many enemy workers. You can use them to improve the land of course, but after that just send them to your capitol and exchange them for techs.

When you win against your first enemy you must play on till their destruction. If you negotiate peace after you gain some land your enemy will still be dangerous in the future. I say that because I made peace with the Babylonians (too early in my opinion) and then, at some point lost a size 12 city (population of my race only) to defection which was 4 tiles away from my forbidden palace. Or is it that the FP isn't really a palace in terms of defection? Can a city with a FP defect too?

Playing a scientific civ is important in my opinion. Especially the tech you get in the modern times can make a difference. Also, having a lot of cash when you enter the modern times is very important. I had to allocate 100% to research to keep my lead.

Temporary cities and where to build them. They don't have to be near the capitol since shields do not matter. Only food matters, therefore they need to be built near a tile with 3 food, or 2 if there are no cows, flood plains etc. On the other hand building them near the capitol will save you time. I still don't know what's the optimum number of towns. I did it with 7 in my last and succesfull try.

What I did was rushing the units in three of them and built the normal and slow way in the others. However my neighbours, the English, did a surprise attack when I was still building my army. I had only 4 horsemen at that time plus some bowmen (This time I was playing the Babylonians). The war wasn't easy (for a newbie like me) but anyway I won at last. This time I played to the end, left the English with two worthless towns and colonized their land.

Now, my innovation; Instead of building even more units as Aeson does, I changed to Republic immediately. I don't say it's easy, but playing a builder game is really my style and I managed at last to be "leader" of technology. Leading by just a turn or two I managed to get a space victory. A marginal victory but a victory nevertheless. I sent the spaceship at 1630 A.D. (or something). The Russians were a close second but they didn't have nuclear power when I completed the spaceship. So, actually they were more than a couple of turns away.

Also, I have to say that it was tedious because I had no time to research recycling and I had to micromanage polution cleaning. Btw why did they assign Shift + C to clean polution? Or Shift + P, or shift + R for railroad. Why not just P or just R. Whenever I think about it I get angry. Why Firaxis was so thoughtles? Who knows, maybe one finger is not enough for them.

I think the theory of evolution was an important wonder and that's where a got the lead. About number of units I had, I kept the army I won the English with, plus some units that my temporary cities continued to build. About 17 horsemen which I upgraded to knights etc, plus the bowmen which I used as garrison units. Later I had my temp cities built pikemen and then musketmen and then... I dissolved them.

I built a lot of Tanks, Destroyers, Battleships and Mech infantries (because I had nothing else to build). Never used them though.

A word about my settings. Standard map with random land mass etc, roaming barbs and maximum civs. In all, normal settings.

Questions:

How many cities, permanent and temporary should you have when you start building your army?

Is it a good idea to build many temp cities? Or even, ONLY temp cities?


Aeson, I really thank you for your tips man, they were most helpfull.

[Aeson]

I'm glad some of what I posted made sense Sounds like you are making good use of the Temp cities. I've been trying to play without pop-rushing in most of my recent games, so it's something you probably know more about than I do. That being said, I would mark all cities that are consistantly used for pop-rushing as Temp. It only takes a couple of extra turns to pop-rush the last settler, and rebuild the city with no happiness problems.

A good idea is to treat your capitol as a temp city, at least until you've explored your surroundings. Just build Settlers, Workers, or military units there until you know if an early move of the Palace would be helpful or not. If I am a Militaristic Civ, I build a Barracks there too. When you disband your capitol, the Palace moves to one of your larger cities, usually the one with the most population. You can use this for an almost free Palace build in a more central location. Just make sure your target city is the only one size 3-4+ at the time you disband your previous capitol. All the other cities should be producing settlers at this time anyways, keeping their population down. If you do it early enough this doesn't make much of a difference culturally, or from an expansion standpoint. In the long run, it can be a huge benefit.

A lot of my military is built to fill the gaps between settler production. I mine everything early on, so growth usually is the limiting factor in how fast I can produce settlers. Most low corruption cities have enough time to produce a Spearman/Archer in the wait, or if I am Militaristic, a Barracks. Horsemen take a bit longer, but building them allows for your cities to gradually grow in population while still producing Settlers at a good rate. I play on larger maps where the expansion period is much longer though. On standard maps I usually expand to 5-10 cities peacefully, and then switch to military expansion. By that time the AI has pretty much hemmed me in anyways.

If you like playing a builder style, and want to try it without having to pop-rush your military, the Egyptians are the most suited for it. A size 5 or 6 city will usually be able to produce a War Chariot in 2-3 turns, which compares pretty well to pop-rushing efficiency. The biggest problems are mountains and jungles though, as War Chariots need roads to pass through those terrain types.

I agree with your points on the Theory of Evolution, captured Workers, and pollution cleanup. ToE is very important in getting/keeping a tech lead in most Deity games. Because of cultural reversion, once your captured workers have finished with terrain improvements, it's not a good idea to add them to your population. Selling/Trading them back to the AI is a good use for them. With the patch, pollution cleanup became a mess, as shift-p won't stack more than 2 workers per polluted tile. When using captured Workers for cleanup, it's hard to keep up without manually moving each worker onto the polluted tile and hitting shift-c. It certainly would be nice if the hotkeys could be user defined. Railroads are also a pain because of shift-r

[Platypus]

Alkis asked: is it that the FP isn't really a palace in terms of defection? Can a city with a FP defect too?

A city with a FP can defect, too. (It happened to me when I used a leader to rush the FP in a city that I had conquered a few turns earlier and that still had only 9 squares in its cultural boundary. I don't remember if I had already brought the population down to 1, but there were only 4 people in the city to start with (Medieval ages). The city defected only a few turns after I built the FP. Extremely aggravating!)

I now believe that the FP acts like a capital in that it reduces corruption and waste for the cities near it, but that it does not factor in cities choosing to join another culture, (but I don't have absolute proof).

[DrSpike]

Platypus: You are correct, the FP in no way stops reversion, as I found out the hard way.

Alkis: Some thoughts on some of your earlier questions about number of permanent and temp cities, and early tech choice.

Early techs I always like to strive for are iron working and the wheel; it's important to know where to place cities to capture the resources these techs reveal. It kinda depends on your civ though, and sometimes (if I don't start with bronze working say) I'll forgo iron working and carry out along the path I already have frees techs on. This raises the likelihood of successful trades later. All techs cost 40 turns for a while anyway, and the 2 level ones are worth more for trading. Like Aeson posted, the AI doesn't seem to research the polytheism-monotheism path, so if you start with CB then go for that.

The number of permanent and temp cities varies wildly depending on the victory condition you want and the map in question. If I was trying for conquest/domination on a largish continent I'd build 2-4 good cities, and then build another load in between as temp cities. In these you just rush a granary and rush units, whereas the good cities give you some science foothold and maybe produce pop you can use to rush in the other cities. If I'm going for one of the other conditions I'll do the same thing, but have more permanent cities before building temp ones to rush from. This also allows you to explore and pick early opponents whose land fits in well with yours. As for the optimal number of cities for a spaceship/diplomatic win on deity, I'd say 20-25, including 4 or 5 little temp cities I keep around for rushing or building workers.

Hope that's useful

[Alkis]

I played another game which made me change my mind about the difficulty of the Deity level. I had a really terrible starting position which I am winning now and therefore I changed my evaluation from very difficult to difficult.

Fighting misfortune:
I started on a small piece of land barely enough to build 4 cities with common squares. Several of the tiles were jungle. To the right it was the ocean, to the left the mainland but the entry was blocked by a Persian spearman. As I discovered later Persepolis and especially London were not far away from there. Furthermore, the English built a city in my land making the position even worse. I am sure many players would have resigned at that point. Resigning was maybe the wisest thing to do, but anyway I played on and built 5 cities, literally one tile away from each other.

From my diary:
1725 B.C. I have 2 towns size 3 and 2, both have grannaries, building barracks and temple respectively. I made the experiment (mistake) to build early grannaries. My military is just 2 worriors.
1700 B.C. The English asked for a tribute, 21 gold. I gave in.
1500 B.C. I have 3 cities one tile away from each other.
1025 B.C. Five cities. I use even my capitol to rush horsemen.
270 B.C. Moved my Palace disbabding my capitol. The war with the English goes well. I destroyed 3 of their cities including London. Captured another one which I hope to keep because it's away from the others. I now have 8 cities.
70 B.C. 11 cities. The war against the English was won leaving them with one town. Unfortunately I had to declare war to the Iroquois because they started colonizing my newly conquered territory. I would like to have an ally but there are no money to make an embassy.

And the game continued with several wars and small intervals of peace. I didn't have the chance to change to Republic and even when Democracy was available I had to stay with Despotism. Being the Babylonians was helpfull though because I could change goverments without long periods of anarchy. In the end the English, the Persians and the Americans were eliminated, the Iroquois and the Aztecs were greatly weakened and now I am number one in everything but culture. The Egyptians are number two but my relations with them are very good, we fought many wars together.

That I didn't lose that game really impressed me. So, what's the catch here? Build some bad cities and build an army asap? Is that all? DrSpike's idea of building 2-4 good cities, and another load in between as temp seems very interesting. Next game I would like to experiment with building as many cities as possible.

I definately made some mistakes in the aforementioned game. I am sure now that early grannaries is not a good idea. The best thing to do is have 5 cities (preferably 8 if possible) very quickly. Also when you attack is good to have a couple settlers ready. Otherwise other civilizations will attempt to colonize the land you conquer.

Embassies are important so that you can buy alliances. When someone attacks you ask other civilizations which have borders with him to join the war at your side. About the Theory of Evolution, when you build it, it's good to have Espionage, Industrialization, Communism, etc so that the only available techs to research are The corporation and atomic theory. Choose the corporation, the game doesn't give you the technology you are researching, so you will get atomic theory and electronics. Then you can start building Hoover Dam before anyone else. In any case make sure that you don't get any cheap technologies from the wonder. If you don't have espionage for instance and someone else does, buy it at all costs.

Many thanks to all of you.

[DrSpike]

Don't get too attached to a fixed number of permanent cities before building temp ones. It depends a lot on the terrain and critically the size of the landmass you are on. I like to have some good cities because if you are on a small island _you_ have to do the research to get yourself Map Making/Astronomy and maybe even magnetism. Flexibility is the watchword. I space 4 tiles apart usually, so temp cities can always be founded in the gaps later when I know my early goals, whether it be science or conquer conquer conquer

[Alkis]

Yes DrSpike, flexibility is the keyword. I' ve been thinking lately, which kind of position do you consider lost. As I said I had to change my mind about what I thought it was a losing start. However if you start on a small island alone or on desert, surrounded by desert... well, that's really hard.

Btw and this goes to all who play Deity, which one is your favorite tribe? Mine is the Babylonian.

Something I have to admit is that Civ3 despite all it's faults it's challenging on the highest level. At last I made a positive comment.

[Aeson]

My favorite tribe would have to be the Zulu. I usually play on larger maps, and Expansionist is quite handy. Also Impies are perfect for early horse rush support, and great for cutting off AI resources quickly. During the early expansion years, Impies make good mobile garrison units, allowing for a smaller defensive force while the extras are out causing havoc with the AI. The Zulu's definitely have their niche, they just happen to fill the one I enjoy playing the most. The black or yellow colors are 2 of my favorites as well.

I was using Temp cities in the last emporer game I started, setting one up wherever I found 2 bonus food sources. I ended up having an army of 200 horsemen and 150 impies by the end of the BC's. 4 great leaders too, just 1 at a time. Then I switched all the temp cities to 6 turn settler factories, quickly populating the areas that my army had opened up for expansion. To set up the 6 turn settler factory I just built a temple, granery (conquered pyramids) and 2 garrisons where already there, and had enough luxuries to get to size 5 before the first unhappiness. I had more than enough luxuries by that time, plus the oracle that I captured, so I'm not sure how many are needed. Then at size 5 pop rush out a settler. Works well for totally corrupt expansion, leaving core cities to their buildings.

[DrSpike]

Favourite civ on all levels depends on your playstyle (as always) . For a spaceship/diplomatic victory I think scientific is nice, and religious is always welcome, so the babs are a good choice. Using the bowmen in the early wars leads to a despotism golden age though. I'm leaning towards trying the Greeks for future early deity launches. For a domination game the Iroquois are justifiably popular; any civ with a good early UU is a good choice.

[vmxa1]

When I use the Babs, I just don't make many bowmen and do not use them to fight until I want the GA. I do not like archer/bow anyway so why make a bunch, unless you are sending them in to grab a city.