Deity for beginners.

[Lord Merciless]

I'm an environmentally friendly person.

On the serious side, it really depends on the composition of the English military. If it's cheaper to use more Nukes and fewer MAs, then go ahead. There is also a question about how Chinese would behave. Are they still in MPP with the English?

[Kuciwalker]

How is Deity for beginners?

[Txurce]

Winning ugly.

So as not to make this summary longer than it needs to be, I'll reply to all of the endgame advice in the context of the actual game.

Taking the AI's lead... and the continent as well.

I started building transports for a projected invasion of England from east and west (Jaybe, I investigated the cities I intended to invade as well). Still worried about getting nuked, I spread my armies around, even though like Catt, I usually keep them in one city. The English had 3 ICBMs and 4 Tacs; the Chinese had 4 ICBMs and 9 Tacs. That was too many to take out in one turn, so - given that I only had 3 at the time - I ruled out nuking my way to victory in England. (The marine-led nuclear invasion would have been nice, Arrian, but I also hadn't thought of building marines.) I feared having my main cities ravaged, and getting into trouble with the Chinese, who maintained a production lead throughout the game. LM's one-turn campaign is brilliant, but I didn't have the units to pull it off. My offensive forces at this point consisted of 12 armies and 32 other MAs, which meant my 13 bombers and 4 artillery would be left guarding the home front along with my 4 MI (!).

As I suspected, things didn't stay quiet long enough for me to marshal my invasion fleet. After failing to provoke me with maritime incursions, the Chinese invaded from their continental cities, taking two of my lightly defended ones in 1816. I took them right back, and used my armies to take all five of theirs in the next turn.

The English came in with the Chinese, and the war shifted to the seas, as my opponents tried to pillage my coast and land several transports of forces. My 13 stealth bombers, augmented by 8 more captured from the Chinese, were spread along three of my coastlines (Jaybe), along with most of my 20 destroyers. The enemy had battleships and cruisers, but they were destroyed as they came near my coastline. After sinking the last 3 Chinese tranports in 1822, they sued for peace the next turn.

Invading England... and the nuclear consequences.

I kept peppering the English sea raiders while assembling an invasion from one side... I didn't have enough destroyers on the other. After switching to monarchy in 1838, I landed 6 armies in the higlands outside Coventry, and 6 more outside Canterbury, along with a couple of dozen MA. The English all but ignored them, and the two cities fell in 1840, bringing the Chinese back into the war.

Elizabeth didn't like this, and promptly nuked five of my cities, as well as Canterbury. (Interestingly, there didn't seem to be rhyme or reason to the AI nuking - they skipped both my capital and Iron Works cities. This held true throughout the game.) I had five nukes by now, and used them selectively. After nuking the two cities I could reach in one turn, I took them, then nuked the city with uranium in its radius, to make sure no more nukes were built to be used against me. I then offered the English a peace treaty in 1842. They accepted, and I set about consolidating my position. (In hindsight, this set of events makes me wonder if I would have been better off following Arrian's nuke'em advice.)

Nuke fever... and making the Chinese sue for peace.

Elizabeth, apparently suffering from radioactive dementia, declared war on the Chinese in the same turn. This led the Chinese, for reasons too inscrutable for me to figure out, to nuke five more of my cities. My country was a wreck, but thankfully a monarchy. In the next turn, I nuked Peking, hoping to create some unhappiness, and abandoned three of my English cities for fear of a culture flip, replacing them immediately. The Chinese had apparently exhausted their nuclear reserve, so I started cleaning up the mess. But I wanted peace with China to knock off the English in a more relaxed manner. So I sailed a transport with three destroyers over to their northeast island, nuked it, and took it in 1852. Predictably, the Chinese paid for peace again.

England falls... but the AI doesn't.

In the next turn, I broke my peace treaty with England and took two of their cities. Resistance was weak, and two turns later, England was no more, with China taking the last English city. This left me wondering when I was ever going to get enough tiles for a domination victory. Eyeballing the map clearly doesn't work... or do you guys see it differently?

The Chinese no longer had any oil, so I wasn't too worried about too many units standing up to me when I landed on the Chinese mainland. In 1870 I landed all of my armies but one in the mountains outside one of their cities, and took the city on the former English lands. The next turn, my armies rolled into three of the closely-packed Chinese cities. I abandoned two and rebuilt them, but there was no need... a domination victory was finally declared in 1874.

Final observations.

I was happy with how I played the early game for a rookie, but now think that an early GL should be spent on the Great Library ahead of the FP. The financial savings and opportunity to keep fighting with up-to-date units thanks to research is too great to ignore. GLs make the difference between hanging in there and being a contender throughout, which makes militaristic an irresistible trait. Given how many times I changed government, I don't see myself playing anything other than the Aztecs or Japan for a while at this level.

Early pillaging for tech and parity works, but I suspect that a surprise rush would result in similar gains. In a nutshell, we have become excellent warmongers thanks to this forum, and most of the lessons learned on emperor and monarch apply here. The biggest difference is that you almost never fight a technologically-inferior AI.

Diplomacy and geopolitics were the key to the mid-game, where I was at my weakest, and needed to pile on without getting knocked out of the game. Isolated cities tend to not have updated units, and are prime targets for a midgame scavenger. This worked out perfectly for me, but I should have been in a stronger situation, like LM.

My relative weakness and lack of happiness wonders for much of the game led to my needing to make my wars quick. This may be old news to some of you, but wars can be limited to five turns if you can do some damage right away, and then take a city on the fifth turn. (Sometimes just killing a lot of units does it, but not against an angry opponent. And none of this applies against an enraged opponent, like Egypt.)

The modern war made some things very clear:

First, the lesson I learned in my "Babylon and on" game - that multiple armies cannot be stopped by any AI - held true; my invasions were uninspired, but they steamrollered the opposition in every single case. It's worth building as many armies as possible, and rushing them if war is imminent. I was also able to win in my usual style, which is with a lot less units than most people use. On the other hand, my habit of building almost no defensive units almost resulted in disaster in my wars against Egypt, where I crippled my economy with wholesale drafting of cannon-fodder conscripts in order to stop their MA-heavy counterattacks. Next game, I'll be building lots of spearchuckers to upgrade later.

Second, it was shockingly easy to destroy all invasion forces, as well as send the hugely superior AI navies packing, with the combined use of bombers and outdated destroyers. This is a very cheap defense, and the bombers double against land-based offensives, while two or three destroyers are all you need to escort loaded transports, no matter what the enemy has.

Third, nuclear war is, as many have said, a slippery slope. Once it starts, don't expect the responses to make sense. Egypt nuked me because I might have razed more of their wonders than anyone in the history of Civ3, and I broke three straight treaties with them, including a ROP. But this resulted in England nuking them, and them continuing to nuke me. Likewise, there was the truly illogical nuking of 1840-2. Also worth noting is that the AI seemingly shot its nuclear wad in one turn, and did it shotgun style, choosing the target cities indiscriminately. Finally, SDI did the AI almost no good. I fired seven nukes, and six hit their targets.

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Skywalker, I called this thread "deity for beginners" because that is what I am at this level, and because my overall approach can be fairly easily duplicated. No one's going to be asking "how did he do that?"... which is meant to be encouraging, and my point as well.

[Arrian]

Victory is thine. It seems that winning on Diety requires a very high tolerance for pain.

What I find truely amazing: you RAZED a city with active happiness wonders. I understand why you did it, I really do, but I do not think I could ever bring myself to do that. Which is part of the reason I don't play Diety...

-Arrian

[Theseus]

Has anyone tried a truly massive poprush? Expecially if Rel, convert to communism, draft twice, then poprush something that uses up all but 1-2 of your citizens? What are the unhappiness consequences?

Awesome win, Txurce.

[Arrian]

Umm... Theseus, do you remember the "AI communist self-destruct syndrome?" That's what happens when you draft and poprush like mad under communism... your empire collapses.

First off, free military support requires big cities. Drafting and Poprushing would drop your population such that you might have to actually pay for your troops. Communism is terrible at making money, and you now have less citizens to work the land, and probably some serious happiness problems... in short, it's a recipe for disaster. So, to answer your question... nope, I've never done it.

-Arrian

[Theseus]

Nonono, sorry, I didn;t make my question clear.

Like you, I just CAN'T bring myself to razing cities chock full of GWs with ongoing benefit.

So, I'm suggesting that JUST for Thebes and Memphis, in this case, I might have tried razing all the cities around them instead, and capturing and dramatically reducing their pop as quickly as possible. I wouldn't care about their productivity, just the GW benefits (although this would probably result in retaining a number of improvements as well).

(Do I remember commie meltdowns... sheesh!!)

[Txurce]

Arrian and Theseus, I enjoyed the strategic ruthlessness of razing Thebes and Memphis, partly because of its outrageousness. In retrospect, I came to a similar conclusion as Theseus: that I may have been able to keep them both - definitely one - by razing the generic big cities, keeping the smaller ones, and saving the two wonder cities for last, when it's too late for a flip.

Thebes is questionable, since my second war with Egypt - the one in which I destroyed Thebes - was a very close call. My defenses were on the verge of collapsing, despite ruinous drafting, and I needed a knockout blow. Would they have surrendered if I'd taken a big city like Alexandria? Probably. But I worried (probably needlessly) that given Egypt's depth and my thinness, I had to really hurt them.

Memphis is a different story. By taking it first I pretty much broke Egypt's back... but by then I was pretty sure they were nearing exhaustion, and saving Memphis for last would have given me the varied and highly specific benefits of Hoover's, Smith's and Cancer. As unorthodox as my choice was, I probably played it too safe.

[punkbass2000]

Alright, seriously, is there anyone who plays deity without war? I feel like most of the strategy I'm hearing is military-focused and I'm interested in discussing peaceful deity strategy. To get the ball rolling, I believe that ToE may be the single most important wonder for peaceful deity wins. I find that in all my peaceful deity wins (read: all my deity wins) building the ToE is the turning point for my game. Without war (well, without offensive war) I am obviously very far behind tech-wise in the beginning, I'm usually half an era behind by the time the AI has Nationalism, which is when I can typically start trading aggressively, prebuild the ToE, complete it, grab two techs no one has (usually Atomic Theory and Electronics) sell Atomic Theory to everyone and the rest of the game is just technique and me deciding how to win. Anyone else with similar observations?

[Theseus]

Still haven't played enough deity... the only recent game was 1337's, which was highly atypical.

[Txurce]

Punkbass, how do you expand enough to generate sufficient beakers without offensive war in deity? (Or emperor, for that matter; I've only done it once, and that was in the archipelago GOTm, when there was a low number of civs.)

[Lord Merciless]

Guys, I have a similar Deity game on going as the Japanese. I just entered the Modern Age in that game and faced a difficult choice. I will post more details about this game later today.

[Lord Merciless]

It's year 1670. The world is mostly at peace, except that Romans(red) has sneaka attacked me a turns ago. Since I signed MPP with most other nations, everybody declared war against them. I'm pretty left alone to built up my civilization.

The problem is that my victory is by no means certain. The Persians got an early lead in Space race, already completed 2 components, and probably leads me in Tech race as well. If I want to win this game, I must attack them.

However, the Persians are in MPP with at least 3 other civs. An attack on them would not only force me to fight a multi-front war, but also cut off from most of my luxury imports. I'm kind hesitant in executing the campagn.

The option is going completely peaceful. Since my civ has much larger production and research capability than anyone else, I can just try hard in the space race and hope to get ahead in the end.

Suggestions?


This is the general situation of the game:

[Txurce]

I recall Soren having said that the AI would be more efficient in pursuing the space option in 1.29. That notwithstanding, if Persia has completed just two components out of ten, and is only slightly ahead of you (if at all) in tech... and you are dominant in beaker and shields output... then I'd say you have an excellent chance of beating them to the launch. (You also seem to have a lot of gold on hand... could you buy tech parity?) You may want to hedge your bet by positioning an invasion fleet near their capital, or alternately spying to see where they're building their last component or two, and nuking them. If it's down to the wire, you could switch production from one city to another if you're nuked in return, using the palace gambit or something similar.

The alternative means crippling your civ with war and a loss of luxuries, presumably in the hope that Persia will wind up in worse shepe, so that you will come out ahead in the long run. Given your grasp of the game's particulars, which bet seems better?

[punkbass2000]

Originally posted by Txurce
Punkbass, how do you expand enough to generate sufficient beakers without offensive war in deity? (Or emperor, for that matter; I've only done it once, and that was in the archipelago GOTm, when there was a low number of civs.)

I'm not sure how to answer your question in a meaningful way. I don't think I do anything other that what is generally considered to be the most efficient means of expanding, ie. pump out settlers, city specialization, etc. If it would help I'll be able to post a series of saves from one Deity win I think, after I move for university on Tuesday. Once there the computer I play civ on will be connected to the internet.