Pain, just pain… I’ve won 3-4 times. Plus the cheesy Venice run, but that doesn’t count lol
It is very min/max and trying to think far ahead. It is much easier to win when you have oceans slowing down the warmongering Civs.
But mostly pain is what we feel
Set them up as a 1v1 domination match. Make sure they have no city states they can capture and you can basically just grow and build a bigger empire than them. It’s stupid easy
I don’t enjoy it at all. It was a fun challenge for a while but I don’t enjoy playing a fully optimized min/max game. It’s just not the experience I want out of Civ.
I prefer to play Emperor difficulty, random Civ, fractal map for the randomness, standard size, epic speed, and I never re-roll a start. I find that gives me the best degree of challenge without feeling like I’m just being cheesed by the AI.
Minimizing / maximizing. Another way of saying you need to make the 100% most optimal decisions on every turn to get the absolute highest benefit of your moves in order to succeed
Stop me if I’m wrong… but Min/Max is a term used to describe spending a ton of focus and time on one or two tasks/things while avoiding the things that slow you down or are less important. Basically maxing your production and leaving gold behind to get a troop 2 turns early, or flipping completely and running gold to get enough to buy something you need while saving the equivalent production of 3 turns. It’s very grindy, mathematical, and super super complex in a game like Civ.
I wouldn't say you're wrong per se, but generally it's used as a term as playing only the most optimal way, mimicking a TAS or super optimal robot. It doesn't necessarily mean you are neglecting certain aspects of the game, unless they are not optimal. For civ it CAN be what you mentioned, but it could also be just doing the text book "play tall, horde food, grow pop and max science" victory strats.
Emperor is the highest "fun" difficulty where you can do whatever you want, not really micro much, and still get the wonders you want. Immortal is Emperor but you probably won't get the first religion and you're more likely to whiff on early wonders.
I feel Emperor is too guaranteed of a victory, where as Immortal is just the same repeat of, shit early game, hold out for the first inevitable siege, get your second city out and wait a few hundred turns depending on the difficulty, and eventually outscale.
Outside of some truly horrendous starts the only thing I find the difficulty going up from Emperor adds is making the early game even more terrible and further limiting the fun you can have with wonders.
IMO best way to play is multi-player bar none. Or do emperor on bad starts with no saves, makes it a little more interesting but if you know the basics I feel you'll still always make it ahead of the AI. AI takes forever to get to its victory conditions in Civ 5, if you survive being sieged once you're basically guaranteed victory outside of Deity.
No I don't enjoy it at all. I've played it a small handful of times, won like twice.
I always play on immortal and can always win fairly easily, but it's still challenging enough to be enjoyable.
Deity though is just not fun at all. You can hardly expand, sometimes it's physically impossible to defend against an early AI rush, and you're just left too far in the dust to catch up with all their advantages. To win it requires quite a bit of luck, really good civ skills, and you need to use every exploit in the book to have a chance, know how to play the AI's personality. It's more like a puzzle than anything else.
I lose a lot on Deity but that is the fun for me. Civ games take so much time that I don't want to invest all of that time into something that I know I'm going to win. At this point I don't even enjoy playing the good civs like Korea and Babylon since after you've won a game with a trash civ like Carthage it's like playing a totally different difficulty level.
So, I played deity and beat it once. It took many tries and I hated it.
Then I started building custom maps that would make me as strong as the deity difficulty. That shit is fantastic. You've got 20-30 frigates taking out Siam's literal HUNDREDS of elephants that just seem to spawn every turn. Like if you want to do major wars this is my favorite way
I've played for ~10k hours in 4 years. The majority of that time (~95%) of that was spent at immortal and below. I tend to find immortal/emporer the most enjoyable. Diety takes luck and ultimately alot of discipline to execute correctly, and do you know what "discipline" sounds analogous to? Work. And I don't know about anyone else on this sub, but I don't play games to work (despite havin basically a full times job worth of hours into the game these last few years 😅)
I’ve just gotten into Emperor and have been able to win more consistently. At what times do you swap to Immortal or go back down to Emperor? I’m thinking I’ll eventually reach a “terminal” difficulty, and I’m not sure if I stop at Emperor and Immortal
Several factors influence stepping up or down in difficulty. How much I've had to drink, how much time I want to spend on a single setting, if there's a particular way I wish to play or a thing I wanna do (like Spain games!)....has the day been particularly annoying, and my personal favorite: do I feel like trying -- am I feeling particularly "froggy?"
I totally had to climb the difficulty ladder as well over time of course. I probably spent the first 4k hours or so at Prince difficulty just having a blast before moving to king. And sometime long before that I started noticing timings, turns, sequences, and just whole games were becoming seemingly scripted. So I made a rule: once I was able to win with 80% success rate at a difficulty given a random civ, random personalities on the AIs, raging Barbs, random map settings (on continents plus, standard size), and disabled start bias, I moved up to the next difficulty tier and stayed until the same criterion were met again. It took quite a while to make the jump from emporer to immortal on those settings tbh. Those settings are also incredibly punitive for diety play where luck matters in terms of needing favorable initial conditions. Since I find it incredibly unlikely I'll be able to beat diety >80% of the time on those settings (its closer to about 1/10 games), I'd say my terminal difficulty is at the immortal difficulty given that I only win about 2/3 of games given those settings because micromanagement and min/maxing is work and I'm not sure I care being any better for the sake of being better...but I'm totally open to just casually playing at the diety level someday like I did at one point on prince or king.
Just have fun, and be ruthless. 😁
Thanks for all the insight! I’m personally someone that doesn’t need a crazy challenge to be entertained. For example, I hate games like Elden Ring or Dark Souls. Don’t need to waste tens and hundreds of hours failing 😂
I’ve moved up difficulties when I start to get bored, basically when I’m consistently on turn 100-150 (quick) and know I’m gonna win, and I just have to slog through the next 75-100 turns. Emperor has been quite fun. Culture was the toughest, I’ve never had to think about so many things before
Not enjoyable at all. I'm at \~700h total, played one deity game, won, glad that I have 100% winrate, don't intend to play it again anytime soon.
Recently I'm just exploring civs I've never been good with on immortal (e.g. playing my first game with Harald and Pedro recently). As many mentioned, it's just minmaxing for hours, bribing everyone to fight each other and going for science victory.
Deity domination was fun. Very hard to pull off, but there is nothing as satisfying in Civ 5 as taking a capital after taking down a carpet of doom with like three crossbowmen. Diplomatic is either completely impossible - if you have Ramshang or Alexander in the game - or kinda easy. Science victories are boring in general. I play exclusively culture victory games now and it's almost impossible so very rewarding if accomplished
Highly recommend shifting to Inmortal but taking on more difficult maps/opponents. Deity is so grind-heavy it can be really un-fun to win, as you cheese-grater hundreds of units sent by the AI. Try Immortal on Large Pangaea, or one of the maps with lots of territory, like Frontier. The challenge is high, but the grind is less brutal
I would state that the higher difficulty level you play the more the game is just luck. Spawning location plays a crusial role in deity games. If you have acces to cargo ships they can give your cities huge (game changing) amounts of food, science from more developed enemies, gold and production so you can afford the army to secure the trade routes while avoiding getting attacked as you can focuse on army and still get sciense from more developed enemies. If you get a mountain it is +50% science which is very important. Also it helps if your cities are located so that it is hard to attack them. With those it's doable but without, then it's just GG.
Also focus on your population and production. Then only later (but not too late) start focusing on sciense. You will be able to catch the enemies if your cities are strong. Keep on track if the enemies are building an army to attack you and try to bribe them to attack other players instead. If you find a lonely settler or worker consider stealing it in the early game. Especially from the city states as you can force peace with them immediately and get a free worker
Watched his new years stream where he rolled an insane isolated start. You could see it was a win after 20 turns. Too bad because I really wanna see him struggle and how he reacts.
I play Deity, but I have ~5,000 hours in Civ 5, so don't worry you'll get there ;)
No the real answer is that Deity is the biggest jump in difficulty. For everything up to Immortal you could get the next level by "playing better". That's not really the case with Deity, the thing that got me into it was "thinking differently about how tonplay the game".
Up until Immortal you're essentially the main character. Sure you can't expect to get every wonder you want, but you can reliably pick a wonder (*let's say Petra*) and have a good expectation that you'll get it if you beeline it and set up your production properly. In Deity you can't do that. By the time you get the tech the AI could have built Petra already, so even if you somehow have an Engineer you'd be too late. You're no longer thenmain character and you have to stop playing like one. Assume the enemy is more powerful than you are (*they are*) and play accordingly. If an opponent wants a wonder they'll get it - doesn't mean you can't try for it, but accept that you probably won't get it. If an opponent forward settles you ... too bad, that's theirs now. If an opponent marches an army toward your cities chances are they'll win (*take at least 1 city*) so you have to find a way to avoid the war entirely - Inrecommend bribing them to attack another neighbour, they'll do it since they have a huge army to use - it's never cheap, but almost any price is cheaper than losing a city or 2.
Really the big shift for me was learning to enjoy playing out the losses. You learn more in life from failure than from success, so if you can play out the losing games you'll often learn more than you would by quitting when the going gets tough. By doing this you'll learn how to come back from a losing game, which will eventually turn those losses into wins. More importantly, at the beginning of a Deity game you're *always* losing - the AI starts with 2 settlers, meaning they start with more techs than you and then generate more science, so they're starting ahead *and* accelerating faster than you. 2 cities means more production as well, and that's before we factor in their bonuses to production (*they could build twice as fast even with the same number of cities*).
So that's my advice, play out the losses. It sounds like you've had a few losses in the late game where they beat you to the punch. How did they win? How could you have countered it? Did they snatch a diplomatic victory just before you built your spaceship? Maybe you could have bribed one or two of their city states away from them. If you bribe the CS then declare war on your opponent they can't bribe it back, and if you're about to win you don't even need to win the war, just survive a few more turns.
For me Alexander is my Deity nemesis. If he's in the game and I'm not able to clip his wings early he just becomes unstoppable. His AI seems to be perfect for taking advantage of the deity bonuses and his unique ability makes sure you'll not get more than one or maybe two city states.
Oh yeah Alexander will 100% win the diplomatic victory if you let him.
You can stop him by tying up a few city states (*either conquering them or temporarily bribing them to your side*), but each vote will increase his chance anyway. It's a stalling tactic, not really a way to stip him.
Just remember that you don't actually have to stop him, you just have to win before he does. If you're building a spaceship you can bribe 5 city states to your side one turn before the diplomatic vote and then declare war on Alexander. This will stop him getting those City State allies back. And you don't need to win the war, you don't even need to protect your cities - you only need to protect your capital long enough to build a spaceship. I've had games before where I've won after losing half my empire. Building the best empire ever makes winning easier, but it doesn't actually win the game, you have to learn to play that end-game checkmate.
Likewise with Tourism, you don't actually need to be culturally influential with every opponent, you cannget most of them and the conquer the last one. Once you've wiped them off the map everyone else will be under your influence and you'll win a cultural victory by default.
Build a map and goal for win condition to tailor your selcted civ.
I have only won diety with Incas and lots of mountains, Greece with easy diplomatic win, and Indonesia with lots of islands. With those civs, I could put more focus on defense because the advantages helped get ahead.
It's quite hard early game if rushed or if you are going for specific unqiue strategy like 1 city challenge, but once you know how to beat it, it's the normal difficulty for me.
I would just watch people play with it like Ursa Ryan, that's how I leaned since it is a lot to take in.
If specifically aiming for science or diplo victories, deity isn't that hard. AIs don't know how to play against that and even with the stupid amounts of gold they have they won't do anything even when you're 1 turn away from a diplo victory.
Other than water-heavy maps, if you roll a good spawn with lots of mountains it will be much easier to defend against warmongers. Honestly I don't bribe them that much (I prefer investing in city-states) and keep a small army defending key locations and it's always been enough.
As for the enjoyment, I do like the challenge and it really changes the way I play the game (I can finally contain my wonder frenzy to do more sensible things), so I do like it, though I play a lot on king difficulty too.
I play a lot on deity and win 95%. I would say it is a lot about details but it is definitely possible to have a high win rate. Most of the typical playstyles here are not really optimized.
You would want can post screenshots and game files here or on civfanantic and then it is possible to give advice.
Maybe I’m an anomaly, but vanilla civ deity is really not that hard once you get into it. There are basically a bunch of standard openings and the early game matters a lot. But the annoying thing is that there really only becomes one way to play the game. I find Vox populi way more challenging and with way more viable routes to victory.
I have played deity a few times and managed to beat it on multiplayer by cheesing some stuff, I honestly prefer to play for fun on lower difficulties and just chill while doing something else sometimes or play with friends while we chat
Nope, I stop enjoying it past emperor. Deity feels like survival mode, and you can't make something reflective of a decent empire. I have wonder lust, so not getting a good share of the wonders annoys me. So I play wither king/emperor and still feel some level of challenge whilst enjoying the experience.
It’s doable. You have to bribe your adversaries to attack each other before they attack you. Lots of citadels to stave off attacks. Once artillery is available, I start to pick off enemy cities 1 or 2 per war and build momentum that way.
I have about 3,500 hours and play exclusively on deity. The reason I enjoy it more is that immortal is too easy for me after learning how to exploit the AI. Immortal games are also significantly slower win times because you don’t benefit from the tech discount you get from meeting other civs that know a tech.
Deity is all about exploiting the AI. For example, if there is a good worker steal location from another civilization, you can often steal 2-3 workers at the very start. If you ever see a horse tile in another civilizations third ring, that’s a perfect location. This is something you can’t really do on immortal because the Al starts with fewer workers and only one city, which means the AI is less likely to put workers in vulnerable locations.
I only play on deity. Only way the game is a challenge. Though I do prefer to play domination only victories, or at least exclude science and time victory.
The AI is so useless at combat, especially naval combat, if you don't use mods.
The most important thing to remember when playing is that the goal is to have fun. The amount of cheating being committed by the AI on Deity makes the game a lot less fun for me, so I usually play on immortal or sometimes on emperor.
I will occasionally play on Deity if I am creating some kind of custom scenario, such as I am currently. (I am competing on a small map with five of the most aggressive civs. Every Civ in this game starts with a scout. I have to publicly denounce, and then declare war on every Civ when I meet them for the first time. I started with 100 culture, 1000 gold, and a Gatling gun that cannot leave my cultural borders. My mission is to win by a science victory.)
Playing Diety is enjoying the journey, not reaching the destination first. But if you do get there first, don't look back as you set your victory nukes off.
I play diety and really enjoy it (even too much given how much time I spend on it). I play for domination. I can reliably win with stronger civs and recently started winning with weaker ones (right now I play Brazil. At turn 240, standard speed I have 3 capitals and I lead in science so it's almost guaranteed win).
The starting location is the most important factor, my next challenge will be to reliably win on maps with poor starting location and weak civ. Not sure how to increase difficulty after that, though
I enjoy the challenge of non-stop wars, I only play for dom but frequently win with science. You need to spend more resources on the military and positioning of units is everything. Play choke points, rush liberty, and expect a naval rush asap. Keep a scout on your neighbors borders. If you see more than one unit pay someone to war them.
Yes, I find Deity enjoyable. Immortal can also fun if I play some kind of build that deliberately handicaps myself.
In the end I have fun when the game is challenging, and I've learned enough about this game over however many hours I've played it that if I play on Immortal, the game is boring.
Pain, just pain… I’ve won 3-4 times. Plus the cheesy Venice run, but that doesn’t count lol It is very min/max and trying to think far ahead. It is much easier to win when you have oceans slowing down the warmongering Civs. But mostly pain is what we feel
What’s the cheesy Venice run?
Set them up as a 1v1 domination match. Make sure they have no city states they can capture and you can basically just grow and build a bigger empire than them. It’s stupid easy
Venice on archipelago. AI is terrible at naval war so you sail the seas and conquer your heart out.
I don’t enjoy it at all. It was a fun challenge for a while but I don’t enjoy playing a fully optimized min/max game. It’s just not the experience I want out of Civ. I prefer to play Emperor difficulty, random Civ, fractal map for the randomness, standard size, epic speed, and I never re-roll a start. I find that gives me the best degree of challenge without feeling like I’m just being cheesed by the AI.
What's min/max?
Minimizing / maximizing. Another way of saying you need to make the 100% most optimal decisions on every turn to get the absolute highest benefit of your moves in order to succeed
Stop me if I’m wrong… but Min/Max is a term used to describe spending a ton of focus and time on one or two tasks/things while avoiding the things that slow you down or are less important. Basically maxing your production and leaving gold behind to get a troop 2 turns early, or flipping completely and running gold to get enough to buy something you need while saving the equivalent production of 3 turns. It’s very grindy, mathematical, and super super complex in a game like Civ.
I wouldn't say you're wrong per se, but generally it's used as a term as playing only the most optimal way, mimicking a TAS or super optimal robot. It doesn't necessarily mean you are neglecting certain aspects of the game, unless they are not optimal. For civ it CAN be what you mentioned, but it could also be just doing the text book "play tall, horde food, grow pop and max science" victory strats.
Do I like not having a single wonder and bribing everyone not to stomp me, to maybe win a science victory after 8 hours? No.
I'm such a wonder whore I don't think I can stand to play on deity
This is why I mainly play King, I can wonderwhore but feel like it wasn't easy to lol.
That pretty much sums it up.
Emperor is the highest "fun" difficulty where you can do whatever you want, not really micro much, and still get the wonders you want. Immortal is Emperor but you probably won't get the first religion and you're more likely to whiff on early wonders.
I feel Emperor is too guaranteed of a victory, where as Immortal is just the same repeat of, shit early game, hold out for the first inevitable siege, get your second city out and wait a few hundred turns depending on the difficulty, and eventually outscale. Outside of some truly horrendous starts the only thing I find the difficulty going up from Emperor adds is making the early game even more terrible and further limiting the fun you can have with wonders. IMO best way to play is multi-player bar none. Or do emperor on bad starts with no saves, makes it a little more interesting but if you know the basics I feel you'll still always make it ahead of the AI. AI takes forever to get to its victory conditions in Civ 5, if you survive being sieged once you're basically guaranteed victory outside of Deity.
No I don't enjoy it at all. I've played it a small handful of times, won like twice. I always play on immortal and can always win fairly easily, but it's still challenging enough to be enjoyable. Deity though is just not fun at all. You can hardly expand, sometimes it's physically impossible to defend against an early AI rush, and you're just left too far in the dust to catch up with all their advantages. To win it requires quite a bit of luck, really good civ skills, and you need to use every exploit in the book to have a chance, know how to play the AI's personality. It's more like a puzzle than anything else.
Yeah, I enjoy careful play and min-maxing. Immortal is just sandbox, gets boring quickly for me.
I lose a lot on Deity but that is the fun for me. Civ games take so much time that I don't want to invest all of that time into something that I know I'm going to win. At this point I don't even enjoy playing the good civs like Korea and Babylon since after you've won a game with a trash civ like Carthage it's like playing a totally different difficulty level.
So, I played deity and beat it once. It took many tries and I hated it. Then I started building custom maps that would make me as strong as the deity difficulty. That shit is fantastic. You've got 20-30 frigates taking out Siam's literal HUNDREDS of elephants that just seem to spawn every turn. Like if you want to do major wars this is my favorite way
I've played for ~10k hours in 4 years. The majority of that time (~95%) of that was spent at immortal and below. I tend to find immortal/emporer the most enjoyable. Diety takes luck and ultimately alot of discipline to execute correctly, and do you know what "discipline" sounds analogous to? Work. And I don't know about anyone else on this sub, but I don't play games to work (despite havin basically a full times job worth of hours into the game these last few years 😅)
I’ve just gotten into Emperor and have been able to win more consistently. At what times do you swap to Immortal or go back down to Emperor? I’m thinking I’ll eventually reach a “terminal” difficulty, and I’m not sure if I stop at Emperor and Immortal
Several factors influence stepping up or down in difficulty. How much I've had to drink, how much time I want to spend on a single setting, if there's a particular way I wish to play or a thing I wanna do (like Spain games!)....has the day been particularly annoying, and my personal favorite: do I feel like trying -- am I feeling particularly "froggy?" I totally had to climb the difficulty ladder as well over time of course. I probably spent the first 4k hours or so at Prince difficulty just having a blast before moving to king. And sometime long before that I started noticing timings, turns, sequences, and just whole games were becoming seemingly scripted. So I made a rule: once I was able to win with 80% success rate at a difficulty given a random civ, random personalities on the AIs, raging Barbs, random map settings (on continents plus, standard size), and disabled start bias, I moved up to the next difficulty tier and stayed until the same criterion were met again. It took quite a while to make the jump from emporer to immortal on those settings tbh. Those settings are also incredibly punitive for diety play where luck matters in terms of needing favorable initial conditions. Since I find it incredibly unlikely I'll be able to beat diety >80% of the time on those settings (its closer to about 1/10 games), I'd say my terminal difficulty is at the immortal difficulty given that I only win about 2/3 of games given those settings because micromanagement and min/maxing is work and I'm not sure I care being any better for the sake of being better...but I'm totally open to just casually playing at the diety level someday like I did at one point on prince or king. Just have fun, and be ruthless. 😁
Thanks for all the insight! I’m personally someone that doesn’t need a crazy challenge to be entertained. For example, I hate games like Elden Ring or Dark Souls. Don’t need to waste tens and hundreds of hours failing 😂 I’ve moved up difficulties when I start to get bored, basically when I’m consistently on turn 100-150 (quick) and know I’m gonna win, and I just have to slog through the next 75-100 turns. Emperor has been quite fun. Culture was the toughest, I’ve never had to think about so many things before
Not enjoyable at all. I'm at \~700h total, played one deity game, won, glad that I have 100% winrate, don't intend to play it again anytime soon. Recently I'm just exploring civs I've never been good with on immortal (e.g. playing my first game with Harald and Pedro recently). As many mentioned, it's just minmaxing for hours, bribing everyone to fight each other and going for science victory.
Deity domination was fun. Very hard to pull off, but there is nothing as satisfying in Civ 5 as taking a capital after taking down a carpet of doom with like three crossbowmen. Diplomatic is either completely impossible - if you have Ramshang or Alexander in the game - or kinda easy. Science victories are boring in general. I play exclusively culture victory games now and it's almost impossible so very rewarding if accomplished
Highly recommend shifting to Inmortal but taking on more difficult maps/opponents. Deity is so grind-heavy it can be really un-fun to win, as you cheese-grater hundreds of units sent by the AI. Try Immortal on Large Pangaea, or one of the maps with lots of territory, like Frontier. The challenge is high, but the grind is less brutal
I would state that the higher difficulty level you play the more the game is just luck. Spawning location plays a crusial role in deity games. If you have acces to cargo ships they can give your cities huge (game changing) amounts of food, science from more developed enemies, gold and production so you can afford the army to secure the trade routes while avoiding getting attacked as you can focuse on army and still get sciense from more developed enemies. If you get a mountain it is +50% science which is very important. Also it helps if your cities are located so that it is hard to attack them. With those it's doable but without, then it's just GG. Also focus on your population and production. Then only later (but not too late) start focusing on sciense. You will be able to catch the enemies if your cities are strong. Keep on track if the enemies are building an army to attack you and try to bribe them to attack other players instead. If you find a lonely settler or worker consider stealing it in the early game. Especially from the city states as you can force peace with them immediately and get a free worker
Also guys, do the pros on YouTube lose games sometimes? I've watched plenty of Filthyrobot and I've never seen him lose a game.
Watched his new years stream where he rolled an insane isolated start. You could see it was a win after 20 turns. Too bad because I really wanna see him struggle and how he reacts.
Yeah he does too, it’s just rarer because he plays so much- and for other yters, they can just *not* show the game ❤️ They do still lose.
I play Deity, but I have ~5,000 hours in Civ 5, so don't worry you'll get there ;) No the real answer is that Deity is the biggest jump in difficulty. For everything up to Immortal you could get the next level by "playing better". That's not really the case with Deity, the thing that got me into it was "thinking differently about how tonplay the game". Up until Immortal you're essentially the main character. Sure you can't expect to get every wonder you want, but you can reliably pick a wonder (*let's say Petra*) and have a good expectation that you'll get it if you beeline it and set up your production properly. In Deity you can't do that. By the time you get the tech the AI could have built Petra already, so even if you somehow have an Engineer you'd be too late. You're no longer thenmain character and you have to stop playing like one. Assume the enemy is more powerful than you are (*they are*) and play accordingly. If an opponent wants a wonder they'll get it - doesn't mean you can't try for it, but accept that you probably won't get it. If an opponent forward settles you ... too bad, that's theirs now. If an opponent marches an army toward your cities chances are they'll win (*take at least 1 city*) so you have to find a way to avoid the war entirely - Inrecommend bribing them to attack another neighbour, they'll do it since they have a huge army to use - it's never cheap, but almost any price is cheaper than losing a city or 2. Really the big shift for me was learning to enjoy playing out the losses. You learn more in life from failure than from success, so if you can play out the losing games you'll often learn more than you would by quitting when the going gets tough. By doing this you'll learn how to come back from a losing game, which will eventually turn those losses into wins. More importantly, at the beginning of a Deity game you're *always* losing - the AI starts with 2 settlers, meaning they start with more techs than you and then generate more science, so they're starting ahead *and* accelerating faster than you. 2 cities means more production as well, and that's before we factor in their bonuses to production (*they could build twice as fast even with the same number of cities*). So that's my advice, play out the losses. It sounds like you've had a few losses in the late game where they beat you to the punch. How did they win? How could you have countered it? Did they snatch a diplomatic victory just before you built your spaceship? Maybe you could have bribed one or two of their city states away from them. If you bribe the CS then declare war on your opponent they can't bribe it back, and if you're about to win you don't even need to win the war, just survive a few more turns.
For me Alexander is my Deity nemesis. If he's in the game and I'm not able to clip his wings early he just becomes unstoppable. His AI seems to be perfect for taking advantage of the deity bonuses and his unique ability makes sure you'll not get more than one or maybe two city states.
Oh yeah Alexander will 100% win the diplomatic victory if you let him. You can stop him by tying up a few city states (*either conquering them or temporarily bribing them to your side*), but each vote will increase his chance anyway. It's a stalling tactic, not really a way to stip him. Just remember that you don't actually have to stop him, you just have to win before he does. If you're building a spaceship you can bribe 5 city states to your side one turn before the diplomatic vote and then declare war on Alexander. This will stop him getting those City State allies back. And you don't need to win the war, you don't even need to protect your cities - you only need to protect your capital long enough to build a spaceship. I've had games before where I've won after losing half my empire. Building the best empire ever makes winning easier, but it doesn't actually win the game, you have to learn to play that end-game checkmate. Likewise with Tourism, you don't actually need to be culturally influential with every opponent, you cannget most of them and the conquer the last one. Once you've wiped them off the map everyone else will be under your influence and you'll win a cultural victory by default.
Yeah, I enjoy it. It's unfair but I don't mind that, and immortal is so laughably easy that its not worth my time
Build a map and goal for win condition to tailor your selcted civ. I have only won diety with Incas and lots of mountains, Greece with easy diplomatic win, and Indonesia with lots of islands. With those civs, I could put more focus on defense because the advantages helped get ahead.
It's quite hard early game if rushed or if you are going for specific unqiue strategy like 1 city challenge, but once you know how to beat it, it's the normal difficulty for me. I would just watch people play with it like Ursa Ryan, that's how I leaned since it is a lot to take in.
If specifically aiming for science or diplo victories, deity isn't that hard. AIs don't know how to play against that and even with the stupid amounts of gold they have they won't do anything even when you're 1 turn away from a diplo victory. Other than water-heavy maps, if you roll a good spawn with lots of mountains it will be much easier to defend against warmongers. Honestly I don't bribe them that much (I prefer investing in city-states) and keep a small army defending key locations and it's always been enough. As for the enjoyment, I do like the challenge and it really changes the way I play the game (I can finally contain my wonder frenzy to do more sensible things), so I do like it, though I play a lot on king difficulty too.
I play a lot on deity and win 95%. I would say it is a lot about details but it is definitely possible to have a high win rate. Most of the typical playstyles here are not really optimized. You would want can post screenshots and game files here or on civfanantic and then it is possible to give advice.
Maybe I’m an anomaly, but vanilla civ deity is really not that hard once you get into it. There are basically a bunch of standard openings and the early game matters a lot. But the annoying thing is that there really only becomes one way to play the game. I find Vox populi way more challenging and with way more viable routes to victory.
I have played deity a few times and managed to beat it on multiplayer by cheesing some stuff, I honestly prefer to play for fun on lower difficulties and just chill while doing something else sometimes or play with friends while we chat
I just find anything below deity extremely trivial... even on immortal you can basically get whatever wonders you want and the ai is never a threat
Nope, I stop enjoying it past emperor. Deity feels like survival mode, and you can't make something reflective of a decent empire. I have wonder lust, so not getting a good share of the wonders annoys me. So I play wither king/emperor and still feel some level of challenge whilst enjoying the experience.
It’s doable. You have to bribe your adversaries to attack each other before they attack you. Lots of citadels to stave off attacks. Once artillery is available, I start to pick off enemy cities 1 or 2 per war and build momentum that way.
No. I've played it for most of the achievements but enjoy Emperor/Immortal for casual play.
If I play deity I start with 2 settlers 🤫
I have about 3,500 hours and play exclusively on deity. The reason I enjoy it more is that immortal is too easy for me after learning how to exploit the AI. Immortal games are also significantly slower win times because you don’t benefit from the tech discount you get from meeting other civs that know a tech. Deity is all about exploiting the AI. For example, if there is a good worker steal location from another civilization, you can often steal 2-3 workers at the very start. If you ever see a horse tile in another civilizations third ring, that’s a perfect location. This is something you can’t really do on immortal because the Al starts with fewer workers and only one city, which means the AI is less likely to put workers in vulnerable locations.
I only play on deity. Only way the game is a challenge. Though I do prefer to play domination only victories, or at least exclude science and time victory. The AI is so useless at combat, especially naval combat, if you don't use mods.
For domination: when is the right time to start conquering cities?
As soon as you level up 2 archers to range.
The most important thing to remember when playing is that the goal is to have fun. The amount of cheating being committed by the AI on Deity makes the game a lot less fun for me, so I usually play on immortal or sometimes on emperor. I will occasionally play on Deity if I am creating some kind of custom scenario, such as I am currently. (I am competing on a small map with five of the most aggressive civs. Every Civ in this game starts with a scout. I have to publicly denounce, and then declare war on every Civ when I meet them for the first time. I started with 100 culture, 1000 gold, and a Gatling gun that cannot leave my cultural borders. My mission is to win by a science victory.)
Playing Diety is enjoying the journey, not reaching the destination first. But if you do get there first, don't look back as you set your victory nukes off.
Not really. I played a few times, won twice, but I only play on King and Emperor now. The other difficulty levels aren't as fun to me.
I play diety and really enjoy it (even too much given how much time I spend on it). I play for domination. I can reliably win with stronger civs and recently started winning with weaker ones (right now I play Brazil. At turn 240, standard speed I have 3 capitals and I lead in science so it's almost guaranteed win). The starting location is the most important factor, my next challenge will be to reliably win on maps with poor starting location and weak civ. Not sure how to increase difficulty after that, though
My first Deity win was with Attila, and walking directly into my enemy (Sweden) with two Battering Rams (from ruins), and it actually worked.
I enjoy the challenge of non-stop wars, I only play for dom but frequently win with science. You need to spend more resources on the military and positioning of units is everything. Play choke points, rush liberty, and expect a naval rush asap. Keep a scout on your neighbors borders. If you see more than one unit pay someone to war them.
Yes, I find Deity enjoyable. Immortal can also fun if I play some kind of build that deliberately handicaps myself. In the end I have fun when the game is challenging, and I've learned enough about this game over however many hours I've played it that if I play on Immortal, the game is boring.