Advice on playing an isolationist game?

[boonewaser]

I've just gotten heavily back into Civ with the release of BtS, and after a couple of games played by fairly straightforward strategies, I'm having a go at trying a strictly isolationist approach. Closed borders, no trade routes, no contact with other leaders, ignoring all information about the other Civs (apart from keeping an eye on relative military power). I got the Great Wall up early, which if nothing else makes for a great visual.

Sumerians, pangea (to make things interesting), standard map size, epic, prince. 4 other Civs; so far I've encountered Shaka, Boudica, and Wang Kon, who appear to be in approximately that order in distance from my borders. Having at least two aggressive neighbors should make this quite exciting, though the protective trait of Gilgamesh should help. I made things a bit easier on myself by turning off tech brokering, though trading is still allowed. The creative trait inspires me to go for a cultural victory, and to that end I've already got Stonehenge, the Oracle, and Chichen Itza, which will help with defense as well. I've just finished researching Aesthetics, and have pretty much hit a limit at 6 cities for the size of my area. I got Code of Laws and founded Confucianism with my free Oracle tech, but so far I'm avoiding a state religion until I see what the other civs adopt to avoid the diplomatic hit.

Having no allies in the mid-game on a pangea is going to be tough, although I'm lucky enough to have sea on 3 sides and border just Shaka. My biggest concern is maintaining a military large enough to deter Shaka and Boudica, while still churning out enough culture to make a victory plausible. Anyone have any tips for getting through this game somewhat intact?

[Solver]

An interesting variant.

No Tech Brokering is probably indeed a must - with brokering allowed, you would simply fall behind in tech too much. Does "no contact" also mean "no attacking"? And what about espionage?

I'd also say that a cultural victory is the best one to go for. For winning through culture, you don't need to constantly lead in techs, you just need a lot of Wonders built and at least one religion.

You're really screwed with your neighbours, though. Shaka loves building huge armies. He will have a larger army than you. And unless you can befriend him, he will attack. See if you can adopt his religion. And then there's Boudica, she's totally nuts. She will almost certainly attack. What's worse, if either Shaka or Boudica attack, the other one is quite likely to join the fray.

So... good luck

[boonewaser]

No attacking, but I'll certainly be taking heavy advantage of espionage to try and slow down the aggressives. As far as avoiding getting squashed, it's my hope that they'll go after each other; with any luck they'll go for different religions (or I can influence them with spies), and I'll choose mine based on how things look. Founding Confucianism definitely helped me from a culture standpoint, but it may be too much of a risk to convert to something they won't like, especially since I won't be actively spreading it.

It's too bad the Sumerian UU is so early in the game; a powerful mid-game unit would be much more useful here.

[Blaupanzer]

Six cities probably won't cut it, unless you get ahead in military techs.

[boonewaser]

I made it within 50 turns of a cultural victory before Shaka finally invaded with 100+ cavalry and 50+ riflemen and grenadiers. My defenders held him off for over 20 turns, but it was pretty hopeless. His bloodlust was strong enough that he refused to talk to me even after I was down to two defenders in my stinking, rioting capital. :-P

Glorious battles though. Especially dramatic was how the New World Symphony by Dvorak started playing as the last few great generals fell. It was definitely a fun game, but my next one is going to be all-out aggression on my part - enough of this namby-pamby pacifism.

In technical terms, I'm quite impressed with how the AI handled the invasion. Only one real SoD (that retreated temporarily after I expended my cannons on it), with most of the rest of the units splitting off and taking out my more lightly-defended support cities. I lost 3 cities over 19 turns, then the last 3 all in the same turn. It was very well-organized; even if I had had an army that could have stood up to the invasion it probably would have succeeded simply because I couldn't have shifted troops through my empire due to the attackers spread around every city.

The main thing that surprised me was that over the course of the game Shaka took Boudica down to 3 cities and destroyed Saladin, with neither becoming a vassal. In my previous Warlords games vassals came about after almost every war. Is this something that's been reduced in BtS, or is it down to the personalities of the leaders from this last game?

[snoopy369]

Wow, nice. Some AIs will indeed handle invasions quite nicely (while some will do quite poorly, but I think that's a good thing, having a variety out there).

I think vassalization is broken, or at least it feels like it. I've seen multiple reports of AIs refusing to take any vassals... not sure if they just made it less likely, or if it doesn't work, but something's definitely changed.