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**jshelr** · December 11, 2002, 16:29

BTW, the original post was very thorough and thoughtful. Nice job.

**Charis** · December 11, 2002, 16:42

Passive Deity strat

Good questions...

So how do you avoid being a complete backwater when you use a quiet opening? I just fiddled around with a Korean Deity game, in which I started on the same land mass as the Persians. By the time I had 5 cities (closely packed, just 3 tiles apart), they had 14, and I had nowhere left to expand. My choices were either fight or stagnate.

Well, that's about right, except the "stagnate" option is really "honker down." As you note, most games in deity end up going one of two different paths - very early aggression or very late aggression. Although it seems like you're behind or stagnating, the player's far better civ management and tactical abilities get stronger with time. With a passive start, if you survive until the industrial era, it's usually winnable. The first few times trying this path are, to most folks, quite painful and scary. And it can lead to a real slogfest is you wait *too* long to plan your later attacks.

Just as early aggression being done best very early and very aggressive, when I go the passive route, it's virtually NO military. Cardboard cutouts defend the cities, maximum effort to expand and get enough cities to be able to build an FP, typically no more before the AI has taken all the land. Any tribute demands? Pay 'em! Then it's a pure builder game for quite some time, coming to life if there is a cav vs rifle opportunity, else a pre-MechInf opportunity for tanks, otherwise a Modern Armor based war.

How do you not get totally behind in tech? Often you do, ending up a half to 2/3 of an age behind, in early Middle Ages while they're working on Copernicus. Rapid exploring to maximize civs as early as possible is key. You may not outbuild them, but if you meet two civs before they meet each other, bam, tech parity! Going max research on a tech that the AI tends to ignore, and brokering, is another (Math or Polytheism tend to work well). Doing no research, building a strong economy, and looking for 2-for-1 tech trading deals, will help you not get too far behind. By the end of the Middle Ages, you have a FP, Wall Street, and are actually selling your 'only' instance of some resources like iron or saltpeter (forgoing making units that need these for 20 turns). It's amazing what the Persians will pay for iron if they lack it and have just gotten into a war. Several techs or huge gold, and you can repeat in 20 turns. This building and trading game *is* the fun of the passive approach, and the underdog feeling of surviving this extreme military weakness. If you're nice to them, and pathetic, you get to know how to make them ignore you :P

Getting Theory of Evolution built, using a prebuild, and using it to snag Hoovers, is the real "turn around" point. If you miss both of these, it's going to be a loooong game or a loss. Get both of these, and you have not just tech parity but a lead, and victory almost assured.

As an experiment, I tried amassing a catapult / swordsman force. I figured the minimum to take a city was 10 catapults + 5 swordsmen. This took until 270 BC to build, and when I did attack, I encountered Knights and Musketeers.

Ack! That IS bad! My own recent test along those lines did catch them with Feudalism not Gunpowder, and after I took about four cities, their knights now began to show up, so I took peace, demanding several techs.
I'll try to let you know how my Korean experiment goes -- if it's as bad as that, it won't be pretty

I find resource denial is often too difficult. I look for opportunities, but often the source is 3-4 cities in.

That makes it MUCH harder, but it doesn't seem to be THAT hard to find one key resource to deny. Even if the AI has all resources (often he'll be missing one), Knights need both iron AND horses, cav need saltpeter AND horses. If you deny iron around the time of Feudalism, you can cripple a civ for good. Deny saltpeter after chivalry and you have a knight army, and they're likewise in big trouble. On Deity, if they have all those, and their supplies are 3-4 cities deep.... kiss up!! Be their best buddy, sell them lux at discount, ally with them, pick on another civ to beat up on for tech. Then later in the game, when you have cav and Wall Street and Mr Fancy Pants Xerces the superpower thinks he's something special with his infantry and declares war on you, buy an alliance from everyone else in the game and watch him go down in flames. Building an economy that lets you punish the fool who declares war on you in late middle ages or later with multiple alliances is a key component of the 'passive' strat to diety.

I hope that helps -- I'm don't know everyone's playstyle at Apolyton, and don't know if these passive deity strats are old hat, novel ideas, or if they seem like pure "crazy talk"!? Txurce covers some of these in his builder diety articles, although the general reaction seemed to be 'wow that's really different!'

If you do this, see if you can't get some hard numbers on the retreat percentage and the artillery miss percentage against towns. From experience, I believe it's 50%, but I haven't seen that verified anywhere, and I haven't had the patience to test it empirically.

Hehe, I was going to ask if you or the others had a definitive link. I know that Firaxis said it was "near 50%, with some effect of promoted units" -- my own 'read' on that is that the retreat% is the fast unit's max hp vs the other unit's max hp. So 50% for reg vs reg, vet vs vet, 58% for vet vs reg, etc. I'll have to dig around for artillery vs town formula, I can't recall seeing it offhand

Charis

PS in Edit -- at the risk of blathering on about stuff that's common knowledge to the strong players in this forum, here are my summary notes from a recent deity game that did well with a passive strat on deity.

It's from a competetion game at Realms Beyond -

648955

http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/message?forumid=189557&messageid=1037592229

Network 54 Forum

The game was deity, with "honorable" rules - no razing, starving, reputation hits, sneak attacks, etc.
We were the Babylons, and ran into a situation where nearby Egypt had a gazillion cities and we were lucky to get eight.

* Egypt had a massive expansion at the start, and we only had four core
cities by the time they were a sprawling empire, in 1150BC
They completed the Pyramids in 1700BC
* First tribute was demanded and given, to Egypt in 900BC
Fifty years later we finished our opening with a solid 9 cities
* Building game followed through 1000AD, with us as richest nation in 250AD
* Forbidden Palace hand-built in 500AD in Ashur
* We get Shakespeare Theater in 880 AD and Wall Street in 830 AD
-- so far this is pure passive, cave-in strategy, behind in techs, as I described in my post...

* Egypt sneak attacks us in 1020AD

Here is our total military :
12 rifles and 8 spears for defense,
3 Bowmen for offense

That doesn't sound too good does it?

We pull in the entire world in alliances against Cleo!

* I buy Replaceable Parts and use my economic advantage to assemble the
best defense money can buy. We set off our Golden Age with a Bowman killing
a straggling Knight.
* Our only Great Leader, Agum, in 1100AD from an elite longbow getting straggler
* War ends after we capture Thebes, with Pyramids, GL, Great Wall and JS Bach
-- That was the ONLY war the whole game

* ToE and Hoover, both via prebuilds, letting us keep our leader (who rushes Suffrage)
* 1645 we research Fission and with prebuild make the UN, butter up my friends
* 1660 AD win a diplo victory vs Xerces, all but Egypt vote for me, Cleo abstains
* Final score 4398, RBCiv-17 the Magnificent

Here's my peaceful core, as established in 850 BC...

CivFanatics.Net

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/CharisRBCE17-CoreDone850BC.jpg

Here's the nicely expanded empire after Cleo's "unwise decision", after the
great war from 1020AD to 1250AD...

CivFanatics.Net

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/CharisRBCE17-PeaceTimeAgain1250AD.jpg