Deity level actually quite difficult

[solo]

Originally posted by Mutineer
About Deity games all of you talking about some special condition.
I found it hurd to get out of hole on lonly island start in standart continent Empiror level game. You can not trade with anyone untill optics.

I have big problems belive that you can choise normal speed, deity level continental game, put everything in rundom and have any disent chance of winning on first rundomly generated start.

I agree that a deity win is unlikely from every random start. You probably need a better than average start, plus be in a favorable position relative to the AI.

In OCC, where you can only control a small number of resources, it is even more important to have a very good starting position, but once a good start is found, no other special conditions are needed to have a chance at a win.

Your chances are actually better on a lonely island start, since you are safer from being wiped out, and can concentrate more on acquiring techs quickly.

When I first tried deity it seemed like winning was impossible, that the AI just had too much of a headstart and that they were able to sustain their lead with their huge research and production bonuses, but they expand so quickly that their research will bog down for awhile during the midgame before their economies develop enough for research speed to recover.

So there is an opportunity to catch up, but I think you need to get off to a very good start and also have a little more luck than usual along the way, to get a win. If you take Aeson's advice to research deeply into the tech tree while the AI waste some of their time researching laterally, then there will be opportunities to trade for bypassed techs and to keep up with them, but you can not afford any detours that were so tempting in lower level games, such as going for Economics first to get that free merchant or Music for that free Artist!

[Shaka II]

It sounds to me like playing on pangea would be dangerous at deity, since you are so vulnerable, and in order to stay up in science it seems likely that there will be times when you are weak in power. On emperor, pangea is a fun contest, but maybe too much at deity. Or maybe it just means that an adjustment in play style is required. For example, two cities is likely to be all you get on pangea at deity, maybe three at the most, so if there's no copper, go for iron working in hopes of finding iron and take a few cities from the AI to get the core up to 4 or 5 cities. Then go for Alphabet to catch up in tech.

I would have thought that being isolated on a small continent would be bad for tech trading, but according to Aeson, the AI gets there at about the time that Alphabet is researched. I think Optics will be more around the time CS is reseearched, but it depends how far ahead the AI is in tech. Probably this would be the best scenario then, to have a small continent to yourself or single neighbor, to avoid the quickly expanding, often aggressive AI's on a pangea map.

Another way to look at pangea and continents is to consider how AI's grow in the beginning. if there are 6 AI's and 1 human player on a pangea map, the AI, getting 2 settlers each will tend to populate twice as fast, which may yield 4 to 8 cities for each AI civ, while the human player has only 2 to 4 cities. The map is pretty filled by this point. Sometimes the AI's grow toward you, sometimes away from you, so you might get only 2 cities, or as many as 4 cities, but 3 should be typical.

On a small continent, where the human player has his own island, he gets to completely build out to get his fare share of land. This is an enormous advantage, having only barbs to fight off. So, the human player should get around 6 or 7 cities by the time the first caravels come around. But Galleons don't come around until Astronomy, so there's no major threat.

In this light, a small continents or medium continents game might be the easiest on deity.

But sharing a small or medium continent with one other neighbor should be even better, since he can't grow too much past 6 or 7 cities early on before hitting maintenance problems, allowing the human player to almost catch up in cities. Then, when the time is right, he can be taken out gradually (bursts), without having interference from other AI's on other continents.

The best benefit of all seems like it would be that it's hard for the AI to get you on an island. They either need Astronomy or have to be within coastal range, or be on your continent already. Also, when going for a space victory, you don't have much need to conquer the other AI's on other continents. Does this make sense?

So maybe medium size continents would be ideal, or else be ready to break out the swords early on pangea.

[Metaliturtle]

I only played one deity game, and I won a cultural victory, mainly because I was Saladin, founded a religion, and converted Isabella to it right away. She spread the Buddhism around and cruised tanks all over my vulnerable borders while I worked on culture. I made tiny "buffer" cities between her and me that I would randomly give her when she complained about borders. For the most part though, she was fighting with Alexander, who seemed to be at war with everyone, even me but I just lost one galley to a greek battleship.