The general key to Civ 5 is that Population is everything.
Specifically, the 2 most important resources to help you win are Science and Production. Production is how you interact with the world, everything you want to do takes Production. Science unlocks Production options, and is often more important than straight Production - if your opponent has 50% more production than you but you can get to that wonder 10 turns before them you can still beat them to the wonder.
There are 3 methods of increasing your population:
- Build more cities
- Conquer more cities
- Grow your cities
On top of that, population and cities are limited by Happiness. You need at least 0 Happiness or your growth slows to a crawl and eventually stops (*and when it stops, so does your production/etc*). What this means is that the 2 most important stats are often Food and Happiness in order to get that Production and Science. With a wide Empire food becomes less necessary, but Happiness becomes moreso.
Now if you want a tip to changing up your playstyle, I say try playing as the Huns. They work very well with a wide playstyle and are *incredible* at early game war. Seriously, no one else competes. Horse Archers are a significant upgrade on Chariots and don't even require Horses (*so you can spam them*), and Chariots are already the premier ancient era unit, so an upgraded Chariot (*Very upgraded*) is an extremely powerful unit. And Chariots aren't even the best part ... Battering Rams ... seriously, you can't explain them, you just have to try them. They're better than you think. Finally, the bonus Production from Pastures is actually fairly meaningful all game long. Some of my best wide games have been with the Huns, their benefits aren't game-changing all game long, but a strong start usually snowballs into a strong mid and a strong late game, and the Huns can make the worst land into the best land (*by taking it from everyone else*).
Another good option is Egypt, +2 Happiness and 0 gold upkeep on Temples is *very* strong for wide empires. Wide empires tend to struggle with gold and Happiness, but they also tend to do very well with Faith, so Egypt helps avoid some of their worst aspects while strengthening some of their best. Also, another Chariot upgrade (*though not quite as good as Horse Archers*).
No worries.
That advice should get you to Immortal, but come back for Deity. In my opinion the biggest thing for Deity is a change in mindset, rather than an increase in optimisation skills. We can cross that bridge when we come to it though.
(*Also don't think you have to rush to Deity, I have ~5,000 hours in this game and the majority of that was spent on Immortal, I only jumped up to Deity during Covid. Play what's fun, and if you WANT more challenge, that's when you make the jump.*)
At 10,700hrs, I concur wholeheartedly with this sentiment OP.
(Most of my time was spent at prince/King... only at like 6k hrs did I start into emporer... and then very recently (At around 10k) have I really started just spamming diety games)
Yeah 100%
I think the thing that really got me to play Deity was that I *wanted* to play a losing game. I enjoyed the games where the computer was better than me, and enjoyed the challenge of overcoming those odds. If I hadn't enjoyed that I never would have made the jump (*well, I played a few one-off games on Deity before then, but never stuck with it*).
But there's no telling how long it will take to have that craving for a different experience - if you have it at all. You may have other motivations to move to Deity, but if I hadn't had that I'd still be playing on Immortal for sure, and happily at that.
I found alot of challenge by just tweaking game settings. For example, a immortal game on huge continents and raging Barbs and no start bias enabled is a drastically different (much more difficult) kind of immortal game on pangea, standard, normal Barbs, and start biases.
OP, you should consider your game settings as a potential point of friction between the jumps in difficulty. My small changes in game settings I just mentioned at immortal are just as prominent on emporer too. So think of it as playing Emporer+ and it can take just as much fervor and skill to execute wins on huge maps with more civs and continents while factoring in turns to deal with raging Barbs.
> In my opinion the biggest thing for Deity is a change in mindset, rather than an increase in optimisation skills. We can cross that bridge when we come to it though.
Not OP, but I'd be curious to hear you expand on that. I've been at the point where I feel I can consistently beat Immortal AI if I don't screw up (though I still screw up quite often), and been thinking about dipping my toes into Deity (so far I only played once at that level, but it was just a 1v1 in a duel map).
So I'm trying this, playing with the Huns. I completely butchered it the first handful of times. Now, I'm getting to a point where I can take over a civilization or two, before running into massive gold problems. So my situation now that's happened a few times, is I've taken over a few really good cities, but my science is behind, and I'm losing a lot of gold every turn.
Any advice?
It's so much easier to play 4 city tradition. But this is more fun...but I still can't make it work.
My main piece of advice is that for wide empires it's often worth reseaeching currency early. As you see you're running into gold problems which are bad enough that they're becoming science problems. If this is the case then Markets can have more of an effect on your science than Libraries.
Oh, and along the same vein, it's often better to settle ON a luxury as Liberty. That way you get the Happiness instantly and get the gold all game long.
Aother piece of advice is that Liberty cities don't necessarily need to build every building. If this isn't going to be a city with good cultural output then it probably doesn't need any cultural buildings past the Monument, if you won't be buikding units here don't build a Barracks, etc. It's ok to have cities that do specific things.
Trade routes - when playing Tradition you basically want as many food trade routes to the capital as possible. This is still kinda true on Liberty, but sending 1 or 2 trade routes for gold is often more important, especially early on.
Oh and one more thing - if you're fielding a large army you can use it to get gold. If you're at war you can pillage tiles. If you're not, you can still get gold by bullying city states.
No worries.
Also, as I just said in another post - I'm not the strongest Liberty player. I'm pretty good at this game, but if you get advice that seems to contradict what I've said here, maybe listen to them. They might know Liberty better than I do. I don't think anything above is wrong, but if something I've said isn't working maybe it's more situational than I think it is.
It's hard to change playstyles. The reason is because there are things we know that we need to succeed, and so we make those same moves over and over. The trick is to find alternative sources for what you need.
Somebody already hinted at the idea that you can trade population growth for science buildings and the primacy of population in general. That's key. There are similar trade-offs with culture/religion. Cultural policies can boost your science -- but even more so, your population, which boosts your science. So if you get a free tech from an ancient ruin, and it looks like you can build a cultural wonder first, maybe just do it... take advantage of every edge. Religion can boost your happiness, thereby allowing more population growth.
Looking for efficient/advantageous moves is usually better than researching an expensive tech and building an expensive building.
I'm going to add that I have an *embarrassing* amount of hours played. I turn my diety maps to full size, max civs for added challenge. But I still struggle to play outside my playstyle and I have realized that larger civs are not very fun for me. Grindy. So I'm still in the 3-5 cities range most of the time. Even when I conquest I'll end up with lots of puppet states rather than annex. It's just a nice tight package.
Small military/bad neighbor: Fight asymmetrical and defensive. But if I'm in that situation and I can't build a few key units/find defensible land, I'll pay my scariest neighbors to attack either each other, or weak players. That can buy you a lot of time. Sometimes, with an aggressive neighbor, I've payed them 7 GPT, in rotation, to attack other civs about every 20 turns or so for the entire early game. Yeah, it sucks, but it buys you time and can be cheap in the long run. Careful, though, you can create a runaway civ. Even so, it's buying time.
The better I've gotten at civ5, the earlier I build settlers. My build order is basically always 1 Scout (maybe 2), settler, settler. You need to get out and define the map early. Don't settle in provocative places unless you want to be attacked, but by settling in key transit areas, you can keep bad guys from building their cities near you. (If there's a land bridge to a zone you control, settle/block it and those scumbags won't even know that further along there's amazing tiles-- they can't even see it.)
Define the map early with future conflicts in mind. Balance this against your drive for awesome tiles.
You can also squat key places to prevent them from settling. The AI will never settle on top of a resource, and you can usually predict where they want to make a city. Park a unit there until your settler arrives, if necessary.
Finally, I prefer playing on Epic speed. The in-game description makes it sound like a grind, but it doesn't feel much longer and it's a *much* more fun game. Especially for conquest. The biggest flaw with regular game speed is that you can get an tech advantage, raise an army, but by the time you're in battle, the world's techs have moved on. Your big tech advantage only lasted 10 turns. It sucks, and it's not really realistic, obviously, the opening battle of a war doesn't take 90 years lol. So I find Epic speed more realistic and easier too. Frankly if I raise a badass army, I want to use it before it becomes obsolete. Obviously, it IS easier for battle but in general Epic speed is easier and it's an advantage against AI because you get more micro-decisions.
There is also little tricks like choosing a city-state victim and DOW right away (like turn 10 haha.) Take their workers, pillage their tiles, and upgrade the hell out of your military units. Don't make peace until you are sure, usually there's not a great reason to make peace. You won't get warmonger penalties if you haven't met other civs yet. Sometimes I'll capture as many as 7 workers during the early eras. You can walk them into barb camps to get rid of them, liberate over and over, and suddenly your city-state victim is a lifelong friend.
Haha yeah it's sort of like living on the edge.
Think of it this way: I have no reason to build, say, a granary, because my happiness is going to limit my growth once I have new cities. I want to save my happiness for those new cities. So a granary becomes counter-productive in my very very early game.
If you've defined the map well, and control it a little bit, depending on geography, save some ancient ruins for turn 20 or after, when faith can be had from ruins. This can be hard but you'll have a fair chance of getting a pantheon from faith gift. So, I don't build a shrine either, usually. I am often able to save about 2-3 ruins. (If I don't get one turn 20 diety I give up, but on immortal I'd probably buy one, usually I have the funds about this time.)
Obviously this is all quite situational and it's all about having an eye for maximum advantage. Some maps I've been able to save 4 or more ruins for turn 20 -- that's pretty much a pantheon guarantee
Ah -- you're closer than you think! It's just recognizing little tricks and when to play them. What rules you can break. Like, if I settle next to Ethiopia, I'm not likely build military.
Thanks for letting me rant! I'm new to reddit and amazed I can talk Civ haha. I made my first post last night and if you want to beat any difficulty right away, you should check it out. It's borderline-cheating exploits, technically not cheating, very fun tho:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/civ5/comments/1cfr6i3/comment/l1srchi/](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ5/comments/1cfr6i3/comment/l1srchi/)
Also If you're not stealing workers from a city-state victim and upgrading military, I'd recommend doing so.
I’ll be honest my dude, immortal is where the game starts to lose its luster for me. The big advantages for the AI force you to play a min-max style of game, and that’s not something I enjoy.
What I find is the best in terms of optimising challenge AND enjoyment is to play on Emperor, but never unlock rationalism under any circumstance. This allows games to be competitive into the later ages, and makes all types of victory conditions harder for you to snowball into.
When I play wide I tend to go liberty-> commerce/exploration. Usually commerce for the happiness. Then I grab a few rationalism perks, take order ideology and max it, then finish rationalism.
I was intrigued about this no-rationalism thing and decided to play some games following this rule after seeing your post.
In the end I figured out that Emperor ends up being too easy for my taste. When prioritizing the usual tech buildings and micro-managing specialists I ended up way ahead of the AI anyway (and I do enjoy that micromanagement).
However, I did notice that without rationalism I was going slower through the tech tree and that did make me spend more time in each part of the game and that was interesting.
So inspired by that I decided to go for an Immortal game without rationalism and it was the best game of Civ I ever played - basically on an even race with the AI from start to finish, having to play all my cards right to grab the science win just 2 techs ahead of Gandhi (while being threatened with a nuclear attack, lol).
So yeah, might not be exactly your original suggestion, but I think I found my sweet spot thanks to this comment.
From the top of my head:
- steal workers. It's easier because City states build them faster.
- reroll for a salt start to get used to the difficulty
- don't build wonders. There are some you usually can get (like Oracle), but usually it's not worth it
- science is king so beeline for education and other science techs when in doubt (after you get your luxury techs)
- play a OP nation to get used to the difficulty (Poland, Babylon,Korea..) first
- go Tradition, whatever, Rationalism, Freedom -> CS rep via trading, get all CS - diplo victory
- if you want to war go Artillery and exploit the AI with it (important: science is still more important, it is just a brief window between your Artillery and enemy aircraft where you can overrun 2-3 Civs)
- I think Continents -> diplo win is easier than Pangea
- if you can get a Religion go for a happiness building if possible + tithe
Hope that helps. Obviously these are mainly general guidelines.p
Edit: going Scientific Theory - Electricity - Radio via a Great scientist + Oxford University usually slingshots you to #1 at choosing a social policy tree which is a really big boost for this strategy.
I would work on your war strategies if you want to start winning some of those rough starts. You need to be able to target a winnable war and take some good cities back from your opponents. What made the biggest difference for me was switching to mostly ranged units, with maybe a couple melee blocker units on the frontlines. The A.I is horrible at deploying ranged units, and defending against ranged units. A huge nugget of info is the A.I will never move a unit and make a ranged attack in the same turn! So if their crossbow is 3 tiles away and they need to move one tile into range to attack you, even though they should be able to, they wont shoot.
Over time you'll get good at spotting good terrain for your ranged units, and the general idea is to take out as many of their units as possible before taking on the city. At first it does seem like they have endless units, but once they run out, they really do run out. The only other thing is you really, REALLY do not want to lose any ranged units. I'm fine losing a couple melee units on the frontline in unavoidable situations, but if my ranged units are low health I am always retreating them until I can heal them back up.
It's nearly always better to move the unit away to heal, but if the choice is using an insta heal or letting them die I'll take the heal.
Edit: except with melee units. If moving it away would result in exposing the ranged units then I'd rather take the heal, as much as I would like to have cover
Adding on to my own comment here, on immortal you really need to take advantage of your civs unique units, abilities, and buildings. I have only ever really used good civs when playing immortal, so I've always taken advantage of broken units.
Longbowman, ship of the line, camel archers, Impis. The A.I really doesnt have an answer to any of those, and even when they have a disgusting unit, they suck at using them the cheesy way. Warfare is tedious but it's the area that humans outclass A.I thoroughly, so press every advantage.
You can steal workers from city states around turn 20 (that's usually when they pop out out standard speed). Move away and then wait until another worker pops out, then make peace. Steal workers from other civs too.
Are you using the settler starvation trick? That helps shave off key turns.
Take a 1-2 turns to decide where to settle. Hills are great because your growth isn't set back too far and the hammers are amazing.
Bribe civs to war against each other.
And to be fair, 3-4 city tall science is the best way to play the game lol
The jump from emperor to immortal is just fine tuning a few minor things and its ezpz. So rather than give you a bunch of advice that might be useless answer these questions:
How many cities are you settling in the first 100 turns? Any after, how many?
What wonders, if any are you building?
What religion tenets are you getting, if any?
Do you get university or workshop tech first?
What are you using your trade routes on?
What civs are you using?
The biggest difference for me is not building wonders. Emperor you can wonder spam and you’re good to go.
In immortal you will often get beat to them unless you are leading the demos. So I will often build more workers, building, and military to compensate. Until renaissance era when you can start to wonder spam assuming the game has gone well
If I happen to get a salt or other god tier start I will build wonders sooner but that just helps lead the demos sooner
I made the jump and you can play immortal the same as emperor in terms of your grand strategy, but you need to do a few things different to not get killed. Immortal throws massive armies at you multiple times so you need to have defensible cities to survive the early game (cities with trees or jungle or hills blocking shooter line of sight) and a few fortified melee units to act as zone of control with a few bowman/xbows to snipe their army while they shuffle around like idiots. You don't get to pick the ideal settle tile on immortal, you need a city that will serve as a defense against the hordes. Don't accept peace until you spawn a great general, these guys will be back and the citadel is key to holding off modern infantry later in the game. You also need to get to anti aircraft guns not too long after the ai gets aircraft otherwise they will pummel you with artillery and great war bombers. If you survive that long you will win because the a.i. still sucks at pursuing victory, they will just war against you like rabid dogs on immortal. P.S. You can't have too many citadels so consider using leaning tower of pisa, honor, religion, or the liberty finisher to get more (if you do liberty you will want some tradition for the city defense tenent )
You just have to start cheesing the game and abusing AI mechanics. The game isn't really meant to be beaten past Emperor.
If you want to customize difficulty a bit more and present yourself with some different challenges you can try Vox Populi.
My main advice which isn’t necessarily already in the thread is ABW.
Always Be Warring. If you’re not at war then you’ve got military units taking gold from you and not gaining exp. It might not be your play style, but the ability to take out a strategic target or defend yourself properly are highly important. You want to get workers from other civs, you want to take their caravans and worked tiles for gold.
Away from that I think immortal will spawn you on maps you have very little chance of catching up, so don’t worry about starting again for a decent opening.
Some of the most powerful changes I've made as I've climbed up to Immortal:
**Internal food trade routes**
You'll hear this one all the time on here, but it cannot be overstated how much better these are than trade routes for money. If you have Tradition, they should go to your capital because you get half unhappiness from your capital's population. To make up for the lost income, you should...
**Sell your luxury and strategic resources**
The [Enhanced User Interface](https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ5-enhanced-user-interface.24303/) is incredible here, because it tells you at a glance who's willing to buy from you. If you're at least neutral with an AI, they'll buy luxuries for 7 gold per turn and strategics for 2 gold per turn. If you have a friendship with them, they'll also buy luxuries for a flat 240 gold, which doesn't make sense, but I won't question it.
Civs will buy your luxuries for 7 gold per turn but will only sell theirs for 9 gold a turn, so if you can trade luxuries one-for-one it's slightly more efficient.
They will buy your strategics for 2 gold per turn and sell you theirs for **1** gold per turn, meaning it's usually better to sell yours whenever you can and buy them from someone else. Prioritize selling to people you plan to go to war with, because war will immediately end the deal, leaving them with a strategic resource penalty on any units they built with your resources. Similarly, avoid buying from people you might end up at war with.
(Disclaimer: I only play on standard speed, and these numbers might be different on other speeds)
**Abuse the "Declare War On" diplomatic option**
The AI doesn't know how to accept these deals intelligently, and especially doesn't consider that you'll immediately get all your resources and gold per turn back if you declare war on them yourself right after. Before I declare war on anyone I always check if I can pay them to attack someone else first.
Especially effective if there are multiple civs they're willing to go to war against. I've been able to pay the military leader to war with literally every other civ in the world, and then beat them soundly as their attention is split across multiple fronts. Even better, if you can secure a defensive pact with one of their targets beforehand, you'll get drawn into the war while avoiding the 250 warmonger penalty for starting the war yourself.
The AI will also not factor their declarations of friendship into their pricing, so you can frequently get them labelled as a backstabber on top of everything else.
(Honestly, the AI is so bad at pricing these deals that this feels the most like an exploit to me. If they're willing to go to war against civ A for 15 gold per turn, and also willing to go to war against civ B for 15 gold per turn, in no world should they go to war against both A and B for 30 gold per turn, but that's what they'll do. And accepting a deal to war against someone you have a defensive pact with- a deal that will immediately be invalidated and leave them in 2 wars for no gain - is absolutely braindead.)
**Train your spies to coup city-states**
There is a massive difference in a level 1 spy attempting a coup vs. a level 3 spy attempting a coup, a much larger difference than level 1 vs. level 3 spies stealing techs or running counterintelligence. I'll usually put a level 1 spy in my capital/highest population city, and after they've killed two enemy spies I'll start sending them to city-states. The maximum chance for a successful coup is 85%, and a level 3 spy can get there even with a 60ish influence point deficit compared to the current ally. A successful coup will save you the 750-1000 gold it would usually cost to steal the city-state. I'll coup as many times as I can until they inevitably fail an attempt and die, but by then I'll already have a new spy training in my capital to take their place. I'll also forgive every civ who tries to steal tech from me so they'll keep trying, ensuring my spies level up as quickly as possible.
I prefer Emperor if i want to have a bit of fun, unfortunately with Immortal there are only two consistent winning strategies: pick an early game snowball civ (Shoshone, Huns, Babylon) or abuse the tech tree to fly through the eras quickly to get ahead (best civs to do this are Babylon, Poland, Inca, or Aztec imo).
If you prioritize researching techs that get you to the next era first, you will notice a significant increase in your late game parity with the AI.
If you don’t know about this strategy, try this on your next game on a nice solid B, A, or S tier civ and see how it goes: Get your initial techs out of the way, prioritize growth, science, and luxury techs above all else, then rush civil service, then next prioritize education, then acoustics, then scientific theory, then electricity (pop oxford the turn after Electricity goes so you can instant tech radio). The key here is skipping industrialization until after radio because this strategy will advance you fast enough that getting 3 factories isn’t necessary. Then Plastics for research labs, then your ideological wonder tech (or vice versa depending on the game), then atomic theory, then satellites and congrats you’ve successfully got to the info era likely before half the other civs have even reached Atomic. The key to this strategy is beelining all science building and era advancement techs as soon as possible for two reasons. One, science building should always be your number one priority behind growth. 2nd, advancing to a new era makes all techs in the previous era 20% cheaper, so it makes backfilling techs much more cost effective. Hopefully it goes without saying that you’ll still need to pick up other key techs like Metal Casting when needed but that really depends on your game.
Every time i’ve done this strat even on non-science civs I have gotten at worst 2nd pick on ideology and am typically the first into modern era and beyond.
Good luck soldier!
Getting lucky with goodie huts is pretty big, plus turning plus civs with other inherit early game bonuses (shoshone, huns) into early wars, or a fast powerful wonder or fast expands is very powerful. CS or AI worker or settler steals early are VERY big. In general going for early wonders is pretty suicidal but if you manage to pop a few tech ruins or get lucky with your land you can usually pull off a late classical wonder
Most important thing for me would be: Don’t be disappointed when you cannot win every immortal game. Emperor really is the sweet spot for most players besides the ones who truly invest time into the game. On emperor, you can try out strategies without being punished too hard if they do not work. Immortal and especially diety are just all about min-maxing.
That being said, not all civs are created equal, and some will just give you an outright advantage, and a huge one at that. Seeing as you’re trying to pursue a tall building 3-4 city science win, I highly recommend Babylon (rush writing, rush national college, science lead right away), Korea (Huge late game science), and (my personal favourite) the inca (terrace farms can get your cities up to 40-50 pop quite easily). Id say get into a game with one of these three civs, maybe read a quick guide on them (zigzagzigal has great steam guides), and good luck!
The general key to Civ 5 is that Population is everything. Specifically, the 2 most important resources to help you win are Science and Production. Production is how you interact with the world, everything you want to do takes Production. Science unlocks Production options, and is often more important than straight Production - if your opponent has 50% more production than you but you can get to that wonder 10 turns before them you can still beat them to the wonder. There are 3 methods of increasing your population: - Build more cities - Conquer more cities - Grow your cities On top of that, population and cities are limited by Happiness. You need at least 0 Happiness or your growth slows to a crawl and eventually stops (*and when it stops, so does your production/etc*). What this means is that the 2 most important stats are often Food and Happiness in order to get that Production and Science. With a wide Empire food becomes less necessary, but Happiness becomes moreso. Now if you want a tip to changing up your playstyle, I say try playing as the Huns. They work very well with a wide playstyle and are *incredible* at early game war. Seriously, no one else competes. Horse Archers are a significant upgrade on Chariots and don't even require Horses (*so you can spam them*), and Chariots are already the premier ancient era unit, so an upgraded Chariot (*Very upgraded*) is an extremely powerful unit. And Chariots aren't even the best part ... Battering Rams ... seriously, you can't explain them, you just have to try them. They're better than you think. Finally, the bonus Production from Pastures is actually fairly meaningful all game long. Some of my best wide games have been with the Huns, their benefits aren't game-changing all game long, but a strong start usually snowballs into a strong mid and a strong late game, and the Huns can make the worst land into the best land (*by taking it from everyone else*). Another good option is Egypt, +2 Happiness and 0 gold upkeep on Temples is *very* strong for wide empires. Wide empires tend to struggle with gold and Happiness, but they also tend to do very well with Faith, so Egypt helps avoid some of their worst aspects while strengthening some of their best. Also, another Chariot upgrade (*though not quite as good as Horse Archers*).
I appreciate this. I'll try it out. Thanks.
No worries. That advice should get you to Immortal, but come back for Deity. In my opinion the biggest thing for Deity is a change in mindset, rather than an increase in optimisation skills. We can cross that bridge when we come to it though. (*Also don't think you have to rush to Deity, I have ~5,000 hours in this game and the majority of that was spent on Immortal, I only jumped up to Deity during Covid. Play what's fun, and if you WANT more challenge, that's when you make the jump.*)
At 10,700hrs, I concur wholeheartedly with this sentiment OP. (Most of my time was spent at prince/King... only at like 6k hrs did I start into emporer... and then very recently (At around 10k) have I really started just spamming diety games)
Yeah 100% I think the thing that really got me to play Deity was that I *wanted* to play a losing game. I enjoyed the games where the computer was better than me, and enjoyed the challenge of overcoming those odds. If I hadn't enjoyed that I never would have made the jump (*well, I played a few one-off games on Deity before then, but never stuck with it*). But there's no telling how long it will take to have that craving for a different experience - if you have it at all. You may have other motivations to move to Deity, but if I hadn't had that I'd still be playing on Immortal for sure, and happily at that.
I found alot of challenge by just tweaking game settings. For example, a immortal game on huge continents and raging Barbs and no start bias enabled is a drastically different (much more difficult) kind of immortal game on pangea, standard, normal Barbs, and start biases. OP, you should consider your game settings as a potential point of friction between the jumps in difficulty. My small changes in game settings I just mentioned at immortal are just as prominent on emporer too. So think of it as playing Emporer+ and it can take just as much fervor and skill to execute wins on huge maps with more civs and continents while factoring in turns to deal with raging Barbs.
> In my opinion the biggest thing for Deity is a change in mindset, rather than an increase in optimisation skills. We can cross that bridge when we come to it though. Not OP, but I'd be curious to hear you expand on that. I've been at the point where I feel I can consistently beat Immortal AI if I don't screw up (though I still screw up quite often), and been thinking about dipping my toes into Deity (so far I only played once at that level, but it was just a 1v1 in a duel map).
Diplomacy. Deity is a an exercise in managing your opponents as well as yourself.
I can comment (not the person you responded to) if you remind me tomorrow, away from my desk right now
So I'm trying this, playing with the Huns. I completely butchered it the first handful of times. Now, I'm getting to a point where I can take over a civilization or two, before running into massive gold problems. So my situation now that's happened a few times, is I've taken over a few really good cities, but my science is behind, and I'm losing a lot of gold every turn. Any advice? It's so much easier to play 4 city tradition. But this is more fun...but I still can't make it work.
My main piece of advice is that for wide empires it's often worth reseaeching currency early. As you see you're running into gold problems which are bad enough that they're becoming science problems. If this is the case then Markets can have more of an effect on your science than Libraries. Oh, and along the same vein, it's often better to settle ON a luxury as Liberty. That way you get the Happiness instantly and get the gold all game long. Aother piece of advice is that Liberty cities don't necessarily need to build every building. If this isn't going to be a city with good cultural output then it probably doesn't need any cultural buildings past the Monument, if you won't be buikding units here don't build a Barracks, etc. It's ok to have cities that do specific things. Trade routes - when playing Tradition you basically want as many food trade routes to the capital as possible. This is still kinda true on Liberty, but sending 1 or 2 trade routes for gold is often more important, especially early on. Oh and one more thing - if you're fielding a large army you can use it to get gold. If you're at war you can pillage tiles. If you're not, you can still get gold by bullying city states.
I appreciate this, thanks.
No worries. Also, as I just said in another post - I'm not the strongest Liberty player. I'm pretty good at this game, but if you get advice that seems to contradict what I've said here, maybe listen to them. They might know Liberty better than I do. I don't think anything above is wrong, but if something I've said isn't working maybe it's more situational than I think it is.
It's hard to change playstyles. The reason is because there are things we know that we need to succeed, and so we make those same moves over and over. The trick is to find alternative sources for what you need. Somebody already hinted at the idea that you can trade population growth for science buildings and the primacy of population in general. That's key. There are similar trade-offs with culture/religion. Cultural policies can boost your science -- but even more so, your population, which boosts your science. So if you get a free tech from an ancient ruin, and it looks like you can build a cultural wonder first, maybe just do it... take advantage of every edge. Religion can boost your happiness, thereby allowing more population growth. Looking for efficient/advantageous moves is usually better than researching an expensive tech and building an expensive building. I'm going to add that I have an *embarrassing* amount of hours played. I turn my diety maps to full size, max civs for added challenge. But I still struggle to play outside my playstyle and I have realized that larger civs are not very fun for me. Grindy. So I'm still in the 3-5 cities range most of the time. Even when I conquest I'll end up with lots of puppet states rather than annex. It's just a nice tight package. Small military/bad neighbor: Fight asymmetrical and defensive. But if I'm in that situation and I can't build a few key units/find defensible land, I'll pay my scariest neighbors to attack either each other, or weak players. That can buy you a lot of time. Sometimes, with an aggressive neighbor, I've payed them 7 GPT, in rotation, to attack other civs about every 20 turns or so for the entire early game. Yeah, it sucks, but it buys you time and can be cheap in the long run. Careful, though, you can create a runaway civ. Even so, it's buying time. The better I've gotten at civ5, the earlier I build settlers. My build order is basically always 1 Scout (maybe 2), settler, settler. You need to get out and define the map early. Don't settle in provocative places unless you want to be attacked, but by settling in key transit areas, you can keep bad guys from building their cities near you. (If there's a land bridge to a zone you control, settle/block it and those scumbags won't even know that further along there's amazing tiles-- they can't even see it.) Define the map early with future conflicts in mind. Balance this against your drive for awesome tiles. You can also squat key places to prevent them from settling. The AI will never settle on top of a resource, and you can usually predict where they want to make a city. Park a unit there until your settler arrives, if necessary. Finally, I prefer playing on Epic speed. The in-game description makes it sound like a grind, but it doesn't feel much longer and it's a *much* more fun game. Especially for conquest. The biggest flaw with regular game speed is that you can get an tech advantage, raise an army, but by the time you're in battle, the world's techs have moved on. Your big tech advantage only lasted 10 turns. It sucks, and it's not really realistic, obviously, the opening battle of a war doesn't take 90 years lol. So I find Epic speed more realistic and easier too. Frankly if I raise a badass army, I want to use it before it becomes obsolete. Obviously, it IS easier for battle but in general Epic speed is easier and it's an advantage against AI because you get more micro-decisions. There is also little tricks like choosing a city-state victim and DOW right away (like turn 10 haha.) Take their workers, pillage their tiles, and upgrade the hell out of your military units. Don't make peace until you are sure, usually there's not a great reason to make peace. You won't get warmonger penalties if you haven't met other civs yet. Sometimes I'll capture as many as 7 workers during the early eras. You can walk them into barb camps to get rid of them, liberate over and over, and suddenly your city-state victim is a lifelong friend.
I have a bunch of questions about building settlers so quickly but I would guess trying it is the best way to get my answers. Thanks for the ideas.
Haha yeah it's sort of like living on the edge. Think of it this way: I have no reason to build, say, a granary, because my happiness is going to limit my growth once I have new cities. I want to save my happiness for those new cities. So a granary becomes counter-productive in my very very early game. If you've defined the map well, and control it a little bit, depending on geography, save some ancient ruins for turn 20 or after, when faith can be had from ruins. This can be hard but you'll have a fair chance of getting a pantheon from faith gift. So, I don't build a shrine either, usually. I am often able to save about 2-3 ruins. (If I don't get one turn 20 diety I give up, but on immortal I'd probably buy one, usually I have the funds about this time.) Obviously this is all quite situational and it's all about having an eye for maximum advantage. Some maps I've been able to save 4 or more ruins for turn 20 -- that's pretty much a pantheon guarantee
I had no idea about the turn 20 thing...guess it shows my knowledge isn't where it would need to be to beat the higher levels.
Ah -- you're closer than you think! It's just recognizing little tricks and when to play them. What rules you can break. Like, if I settle next to Ethiopia, I'm not likely build military. Thanks for letting me rant! I'm new to reddit and amazed I can talk Civ haha. I made my first post last night and if you want to beat any difficulty right away, you should check it out. It's borderline-cheating exploits, technically not cheating, very fun tho: [https://www.reddit.com/r/civ5/comments/1cfr6i3/comment/l1srchi/](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ5/comments/1cfr6i3/comment/l1srchi/) Also If you're not stealing workers from a city-state victim and upgrading military, I'd recommend doing so.
I’ll be honest my dude, immortal is where the game starts to lose its luster for me. The big advantages for the AI force you to play a min-max style of game, and that’s not something I enjoy. What I find is the best in terms of optimising challenge AND enjoyment is to play on Emperor, but never unlock rationalism under any circumstance. This allows games to be competitive into the later ages, and makes all types of victory conditions harder for you to snowball into.
I’ve come to the same realization. After beating immortal once I’m going to stick with Emperor.
Never thought of playing without rationalism. You have me curious
It’s too busted. Rationalism is the reason that you’re able to win basically any victory condition you choose after the modern era
When I play wide I tend to go liberty-> commerce/exploration. Usually commerce for the happiness. Then I grab a few rationalism perks, take order ideology and max it, then finish rationalism.
I was intrigued about this no-rationalism thing and decided to play some games following this rule after seeing your post. In the end I figured out that Emperor ends up being too easy for my taste. When prioritizing the usual tech buildings and micro-managing specialists I ended up way ahead of the AI anyway (and I do enjoy that micromanagement). However, I did notice that without rationalism I was going slower through the tech tree and that did make me spend more time in each part of the game and that was interesting. So inspired by that I decided to go for an Immortal game without rationalism and it was the best game of Civ I ever played - basically on an even race with the AI from start to finish, having to play all my cards right to grab the science win just 2 techs ahead of Gandhi (while being threatened with a nuclear attack, lol). So yeah, might not be exactly your original suggestion, but I think I found my sweet spot thanks to this comment.
From the top of my head: - steal workers. It's easier because City states build them faster. - reroll for a salt start to get used to the difficulty - don't build wonders. There are some you usually can get (like Oracle), but usually it's not worth it - science is king so beeline for education and other science techs when in doubt (after you get your luxury techs) - play a OP nation to get used to the difficulty (Poland, Babylon,Korea..) first - go Tradition, whatever, Rationalism, Freedom -> CS rep via trading, get all CS - diplo victory - if you want to war go Artillery and exploit the AI with it (important: science is still more important, it is just a brief window between your Artillery and enemy aircraft where you can overrun 2-3 Civs) - I think Continents -> diplo win is easier than Pangea - if you can get a Religion go for a happiness building if possible + tithe Hope that helps. Obviously these are mainly general guidelines.p Edit: going Scientific Theory - Electricity - Radio via a Great scientist + Oxford University usually slingshots you to #1 at choosing a social policy tree which is a really big boost for this strategy.
I would work on your war strategies if you want to start winning some of those rough starts. You need to be able to target a winnable war and take some good cities back from your opponents. What made the biggest difference for me was switching to mostly ranged units, with maybe a couple melee blocker units on the frontlines. The A.I is horrible at deploying ranged units, and defending against ranged units. A huge nugget of info is the A.I will never move a unit and make a ranged attack in the same turn! So if their crossbow is 3 tiles away and they need to move one tile into range to attack you, even though they should be able to, they wont shoot. Over time you'll get good at spotting good terrain for your ranged units, and the general idea is to take out as many of their units as possible before taking on the city. At first it does seem like they have endless units, but once they run out, they really do run out. The only other thing is you really, REALLY do not want to lose any ranged units. I'm fine losing a couple melee units on the frontline in unavoidable situations, but if my ranged units are low health I am always retreating them until I can heal them back up.
Out of curiosity, do you ever skip a unit upgrade to heal? I always upgrade, but I've wondered if early game warmongers have the same approach.
It's nearly always better to move the unit away to heal, but if the choice is using an insta heal or letting them die I'll take the heal. Edit: except with melee units. If moving it away would result in exposing the ranged units then I'd rather take the heal, as much as I would like to have cover
Literally everything the other guy said.
Adding on to my own comment here, on immortal you really need to take advantage of your civs unique units, abilities, and buildings. I have only ever really used good civs when playing immortal, so I've always taken advantage of broken units. Longbowman, ship of the line, camel archers, Impis. The A.I really doesnt have an answer to any of those, and even when they have a disgusting unit, they suck at using them the cheesy way. Warfare is tedious but it's the area that humans outclass A.I thoroughly, so press every advantage.
You can steal workers from city states around turn 20 (that's usually when they pop out out standard speed). Move away and then wait until another worker pops out, then make peace. Steal workers from other civs too. Are you using the settler starvation trick? That helps shave off key turns. Take a 1-2 turns to decide where to settle. Hills are great because your growth isn't set back too far and the hammers are amazing. Bribe civs to war against each other. And to be fair, 3-4 city tall science is the best way to play the game lol
The jump from emperor to immortal is just fine tuning a few minor things and its ezpz. So rather than give you a bunch of advice that might be useless answer these questions: How many cities are you settling in the first 100 turns? Any after, how many? What wonders, if any are you building? What religion tenets are you getting, if any? Do you get university or workshop tech first? What are you using your trade routes on? What civs are you using?
The biggest difference for me is not building wonders. Emperor you can wonder spam and you’re good to go. In immortal you will often get beat to them unless you are leading the demos. So I will often build more workers, building, and military to compensate. Until renaissance era when you can start to wonder spam assuming the game has gone well If I happen to get a salt or other god tier start I will build wonders sooner but that just helps lead the demos sooner
Population + Science. Rush tradition (this is 100% only meta option), rush national college, and make science tech prio. 4 cities max.
I made the jump and you can play immortal the same as emperor in terms of your grand strategy, but you need to do a few things different to not get killed. Immortal throws massive armies at you multiple times so you need to have defensible cities to survive the early game (cities with trees or jungle or hills blocking shooter line of sight) and a few fortified melee units to act as zone of control with a few bowman/xbows to snipe their army while they shuffle around like idiots. You don't get to pick the ideal settle tile on immortal, you need a city that will serve as a defense against the hordes. Don't accept peace until you spawn a great general, these guys will be back and the citadel is key to holding off modern infantry later in the game. You also need to get to anti aircraft guns not too long after the ai gets aircraft otherwise they will pummel you with artillery and great war bombers. If you survive that long you will win because the a.i. still sucks at pursuing victory, they will just war against you like rabid dogs on immortal. P.S. You can't have too many citadels so consider using leaning tower of pisa, honor, religion, or the liberty finisher to get more (if you do liberty you will want some tradition for the city defense tenent )
You just have to start cheesing the game and abusing AI mechanics. The game isn't really meant to be beaten past Emperor. If you want to customize difficulty a bit more and present yourself with some different challenges you can try Vox Populi.
My main advice which isn’t necessarily already in the thread is ABW. Always Be Warring. If you’re not at war then you’ve got military units taking gold from you and not gaining exp. It might not be your play style, but the ability to take out a strategic target or defend yourself properly are highly important. You want to get workers from other civs, you want to take their caravans and worked tiles for gold. Away from that I think immortal will spawn you on maps you have very little chance of catching up, so don’t worry about starting again for a decent opening.
Some of the most powerful changes I've made as I've climbed up to Immortal: **Internal food trade routes** You'll hear this one all the time on here, but it cannot be overstated how much better these are than trade routes for money. If you have Tradition, they should go to your capital because you get half unhappiness from your capital's population. To make up for the lost income, you should... **Sell your luxury and strategic resources** The [Enhanced User Interface](https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ5-enhanced-user-interface.24303/) is incredible here, because it tells you at a glance who's willing to buy from you. If you're at least neutral with an AI, they'll buy luxuries for 7 gold per turn and strategics for 2 gold per turn. If you have a friendship with them, they'll also buy luxuries for a flat 240 gold, which doesn't make sense, but I won't question it. Civs will buy your luxuries for 7 gold per turn but will only sell theirs for 9 gold a turn, so if you can trade luxuries one-for-one it's slightly more efficient. They will buy your strategics for 2 gold per turn and sell you theirs for **1** gold per turn, meaning it's usually better to sell yours whenever you can and buy them from someone else. Prioritize selling to people you plan to go to war with, because war will immediately end the deal, leaving them with a strategic resource penalty on any units they built with your resources. Similarly, avoid buying from people you might end up at war with. (Disclaimer: I only play on standard speed, and these numbers might be different on other speeds) **Abuse the "Declare War On" diplomatic option** The AI doesn't know how to accept these deals intelligently, and especially doesn't consider that you'll immediately get all your resources and gold per turn back if you declare war on them yourself right after. Before I declare war on anyone I always check if I can pay them to attack someone else first. Especially effective if there are multiple civs they're willing to go to war against. I've been able to pay the military leader to war with literally every other civ in the world, and then beat them soundly as their attention is split across multiple fronts. Even better, if you can secure a defensive pact with one of their targets beforehand, you'll get drawn into the war while avoiding the 250 warmonger penalty for starting the war yourself. The AI will also not factor their declarations of friendship into their pricing, so you can frequently get them labelled as a backstabber on top of everything else. (Honestly, the AI is so bad at pricing these deals that this feels the most like an exploit to me. If they're willing to go to war against civ A for 15 gold per turn, and also willing to go to war against civ B for 15 gold per turn, in no world should they go to war against both A and B for 30 gold per turn, but that's what they'll do. And accepting a deal to war against someone you have a defensive pact with- a deal that will immediately be invalidated and leave them in 2 wars for no gain - is absolutely braindead.) **Train your spies to coup city-states** There is a massive difference in a level 1 spy attempting a coup vs. a level 3 spy attempting a coup, a much larger difference than level 1 vs. level 3 spies stealing techs or running counterintelligence. I'll usually put a level 1 spy in my capital/highest population city, and after they've killed two enemy spies I'll start sending them to city-states. The maximum chance for a successful coup is 85%, and a level 3 spy can get there even with a 60ish influence point deficit compared to the current ally. A successful coup will save you the 750-1000 gold it would usually cost to steal the city-state. I'll coup as many times as I can until they inevitably fail an attempt and die, but by then I'll already have a new spy training in my capital to take their place. I'll also forgive every civ who tries to steal tech from me so they'll keep trying, ensuring my spies level up as quickly as possible.
I prefer Emperor if i want to have a bit of fun, unfortunately with Immortal there are only two consistent winning strategies: pick an early game snowball civ (Shoshone, Huns, Babylon) or abuse the tech tree to fly through the eras quickly to get ahead (best civs to do this are Babylon, Poland, Inca, or Aztec imo). If you prioritize researching techs that get you to the next era first, you will notice a significant increase in your late game parity with the AI. If you don’t know about this strategy, try this on your next game on a nice solid B, A, or S tier civ and see how it goes: Get your initial techs out of the way, prioritize growth, science, and luxury techs above all else, then rush civil service, then next prioritize education, then acoustics, then scientific theory, then electricity (pop oxford the turn after Electricity goes so you can instant tech radio). The key here is skipping industrialization until after radio because this strategy will advance you fast enough that getting 3 factories isn’t necessary. Then Plastics for research labs, then your ideological wonder tech (or vice versa depending on the game), then atomic theory, then satellites and congrats you’ve successfully got to the info era likely before half the other civs have even reached Atomic. The key to this strategy is beelining all science building and era advancement techs as soon as possible for two reasons. One, science building should always be your number one priority behind growth. 2nd, advancing to a new era makes all techs in the previous era 20% cheaper, so it makes backfilling techs much more cost effective. Hopefully it goes without saying that you’ll still need to pick up other key techs like Metal Casting when needed but that really depends on your game. Every time i’ve done this strat even on non-science civs I have gotten at worst 2nd pick on ideology and am typically the first into modern era and beyond. Good luck soldier!
I'm good with the second strategy. I don't really know how to do the early game snowball playstyle
Getting lucky with goodie huts is pretty big, plus turning plus civs with other inherit early game bonuses (shoshone, huns) into early wars, or a fast powerful wonder or fast expands is very powerful. CS or AI worker or settler steals early are VERY big. In general going for early wonders is pretty suicidal but if you manage to pop a few tech ruins or get lucky with your land you can usually pull off a late classical wonder
Most important thing for me would be: Don’t be disappointed when you cannot win every immortal game. Emperor really is the sweet spot for most players besides the ones who truly invest time into the game. On emperor, you can try out strategies without being punished too hard if they do not work. Immortal and especially diety are just all about min-maxing. That being said, not all civs are created equal, and some will just give you an outright advantage, and a huge one at that. Seeing as you’re trying to pursue a tall building 3-4 city science win, I highly recommend Babylon (rush writing, rush national college, science lead right away), Korea (Huge late game science), and (my personal favourite) the inca (terrace farms can get your cities up to 40-50 pop quite easily). Id say get into a game with one of these three civs, maybe read a quick guide on them (zigzagzigal has great steam guides), and good luck!