You have to abuse terrain and the ******ed AI to win. You just can't afford to lose the hammers dying units represent.

There was absolutely no way in hell for me to fend off an army larger and more advanced than mine without losing units in that game. The best I could do was surround my cities, which were all covered with forest, with melee units and put archers on the few hill tiles I had. Montezuma had cities on all of my borders.

I just started another deity game in which I actually got a decent start. The peninsula I was on had quite a bit of gold, so GWash early on decided to send a settler right next to my cities to steal some of my gold. Every time I've seen this happen it's only a short matter of time before the encroaching AI declares war, so I preemptively declared war and captured his settler to avoid having a hostile city so close to me and to protect my gold monopoly. I was able to set up defenses in the mountain ranges to the north and easily take out all of his advancing units. Despite his absolute failure at waging war against me, he refuses to make peace and continues to send me ever more ridiculous peace offerings, asking for more cities and more booty each time. So clearly success on deity is heavily dependent on starting location, proximity to AI and terrain.

No ****.

You're meant to stop him getting that many cities. If he doesn't start near you, build your 2nd city next to him.

You need to be at war with somebody as soon as you get something like 2 warriors and an archer (a scout with ruins weapons upgrade is ideal.) If you can't capture 2 or 3 cities early you'll never catch up in terms of production and research.

If your starting position sucks with no terrain for you to exploit or no close neighbor for you to conquer, then you're just SoL.

What a cluster f%^k.

Where do I "store" my troops? I have crap all over the place.

What do you mean store them?

You really shouldn't have too many units. The way the game is setup you should really only have a couple elite units with loads of exp.

Why is expansion through conquest better than expansion through settlers? Either way I'm expanding to my happiness limit as quickly as possible. I understand the importance of buffer cities against very aggressive AI, but what's the edge?

Settlers cost hammers.

Conquest costs you nothing... and actually levels your units. More importantly, conquest gets you great generals that's good for golden ages you really need to keep pace with the AI.

As the game is constructed right now, there is no penalty to waging war at all. The AI isn't even that aggressive in destroying improvements (not to mention they are fast/easy to repair now) so as long as you don't lose units, there is no reason to not be at a constant state of war.

I am actually pretty convinced, especially at higher difficulty levels, if you're ever at peace, you're doing something wrong. Even if you got nobody to fight, camp a city state and let your infantry units soak in 4 exp (with honor policy) per turn and your ranged units 6exp a turn for doing 1 dmg a turn to the city.

After playing this nothing beats Civ 4 with 50 nations on Earth map that was soooo sweeet good times might actually start to play civ 4 again lol

How can I tell as I play the game the "score" of the time victory? Does C5 not have this? TY

expand the diplomatic info window.. it drops down from near the upper left.

first major patch is out today

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=393480

Changes:

You get absolutely owned on happiness by conquest via war. If you're not taking over a city that gives you 2+ luxury items you didn't have before, you're going to be in a huge happiness deficit very very quickly and there's not a lot you can do to speed up the building of a courthouse. Obviously you can build circus' and colloseum's etc via money, but you definitely need to make sure you have the funds to do this pre-conquest.

The only way I've been able to balance this successfully is by barb-hunting with the 3x bonus... it really really helps and basically puts you in God mode if you do it correctly.

It's been a few weeks since I've last played, but I think leaving a city as a puppet state does not ding your happiness/culture.

If you're playing on deity you'll already have a good handle on how to avoid happiness problems.

It's called resetting the map until you get a good starting position.

My favorite starting positions have hill tiles on rivers... with gold/silver deposits.

It does, just not as bad.

I've always considered this cheating but to each their own I guess.

Well, then it's lottery time. Without good starting position you just won't beat deity, ever.

Maybe if you were put on your own little island and went for some kind of build victory (AI is absolutely ******ed) but that kind of falls under good starting position too I think.

I dunno, I think I can get away with a start anywhere on pangea and beat deity now, at least on a duel map. Horses are important, but you almost always get them from city states at the very least.

I've randomly been reading some Civ IV game reports on his site, starting with this one, a multiplayer team democracy game (each turn lasts 1-2 days, each civ is run by a group of ppl that post on a private forum, extensive diplomatic relationships with other human teams, cool stuff), and they're really interesting and exciting to read about. Do recommend!

I love hill tiles on rivers as well. They make great plots with farms.

That isn't true.

Holy christ this is a long read. Very entertaining though. The skill of the Realms Beyond team is insane. Very, very good micro skills.

How beatable is deity in a max AI civs massive map scenario?

I never could pull it off on Civ4.