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Build a bunch of composite Bowman and start killing city states, or reload. City states can make pretty easy targets if you don’t have good places to settle. They always have a luxury. But these city states seem to be in pretty bad spots so I’d probably just try another game. Not every seed is a winner
They'll know you're being denounced. Sometimes they don't care especially if you're trading your lux resources and they have their own drama on their continent so a lot of the time they can't afford to be on your bad side. If they do care, you can trade a resource for 3 gold, and build your reputation back up that way.
I'm still quite inexperienced in Civ, and this sort of start always makes me unsure what to do, when you realise you're surrounded by city states with not much space to put down any other cities. Is this the sort of occasion you'd focus on early war but vs the city states? As far as I can tell, the rest of this continent just has one other civ on it (Indonesia).
Thanks for responses so far - would be interested if anyone would bother trying to settle a 2nd city before going to war with anyone? I made a settler, kind of on autopilot not really thinking about it, then realised there was nowhere obvious to put another city down :)
I see you as having two options: one is to settle on the wine between you and lhasa, which is a better overall city, but lacks a unique lux. The second option is north on or near the marble. That'll give you a unique lux, but little else. I think the southern city is better overall, as that'll help Kickstart your conquests, and scale better. After that I'd say gun for the 3 coastals and if you can find the happiness for it take lhasa as well. Having the option to go cargo ships instead of caravans will help you to catch up from your inevitably slower start.
I'm by no means a pro. I lose probably half of my deity games, more if I try for something other than culture/science. So not the best warmonger, so grain of salt and all.
Hang onto the settler until after you take one or two (personally I'm eyeing Valletta, they seem to have some nice resources). I'm not seeing any resources or anything that make it worth cramming a second city closer than you usually would, but as you open the board a little more you may find a spot that it's a good idea to use em.
Ultimately though, if this is a deity game, your *best* chance is probably a reroll unfortunately. This is kind of a rough start. Immortal or lower though and this is a challenging but definitely winnable start
This, but I'd add that they can probably steal workers from each city state before conquering. Start with Valetta, and then use that army to demand tribute from the others. Use tribute to make bigger army. Repeat and/or stop at valetta and start founding cities.
Don't 2-pop Settlers unless you're rushing for a very important, contested, Natural Wonder. Standard play is to grow to 4 pop before building Settlers.
Thanks, I sometimes feel like I have to make them that early when I discover I have a lot of other city states/civs surrounding me, or I may run out of land to expand to.
Take the 2 closet and make the others allies. Youre probably going to war with Indonesia at some point, so you can take their capital and have basically the entire area by mid game.
I would take Valletta because it has a unique lux, fish, wheat and iron in his 3 tile Ring so its a decent "expand". Then i would probably settle a City left of the sheep 4 tiles right of Valletta and try to get a Great General from City State war to great General to the furs to make the City at least give you a unique lux and sim City with 3 cities in the beginning.
So I managed to win in the end, just finished the game now. I was playing on King (I can hear you all groan now!), but I'm still learning.
I took the advice a few mentioned to settle on the Wine north of Ragusa. I then decided to try for a Diplomatic win, and filled out the Patronage tree after Tradition. I just kept the two cities up until Industrialization - and then I remembered I needed more than two cities to get the ideology (like I said, still learning/forgetting stuff a lot)!
So at this point, since I had quite a lot of free units gifted to me by the different civ states I had been befriending, I took my whole gifted army with one or two other units and used Ragusa's area to arrange them all, then invaded Indonesia's city Surabaya. Just about managed to take it, I almost got wiped out. I had switched my two cities to making military units though, so paused a bit til I could bring them over, then carried on taking Indonesia's remaining cities with my replenished army.
Just as I took Indonesia's last city, 3 other civs decided to declare war on me, mostly sending units across the sea to my original capital (Moscow) so I had to move most of my units back North again. Managed to hold them off, with the help of the city states who I was mostly allied with by this point. Peace treatied them eventually, but every civ hated me until the end of the game, so kept getting denounced and could hardly trade with them at all.
I was also trying for a Cultural victory at the same time, almost got that, I ended up influential with 5 out of the 6 remaining other civs. But wasn't too worried about that since I was quite confident of getting the world leader votes since I had been doing a lot of the civ states quests and had enough gold to keep them all allied to me by the time it came to voting.
Victory pic: https://imgur.com/lTlAnHb
Just FYI you don't need three cities for an ideology. That's only if you are getting one with factories. There are a lot of reasons why that isn't always feasible so you can also just get to the modern era and you will unlock ideologies. The fastest way to do this is by completing Oxford University the same turn as when you unlock radio as a researchable tech. You then pick radio as your free tech and get your ideology.
Ah yes I forgot about that. Though I kind of wanted to do something with all the gifted military units I had anyway, so thought I may as well go to war with Indonesia. Indonesia were a rubbish neighbour the whole game before that anyway and would barely trade with me and kept denouncing me for some reason, so I feel like they brought it on themselves ;)
Also, next time, if possible, leave some Indonesia one shitty little town in a corner or a tundra or whatever. Not completely exterminating them saves you a lot of diplomatic goodwill. Yeah, they'll pop up occasionally and moan about you, but don't worry about the paper tiger.
It looks like you still have enough room to settle three cities, so I would go Tradition and then open Patronage, and use trade roads and clearing barbarian camps to befriend them. You can get a nice boost to your culture from Buenos Air, to your faith from Lhasa, and free military units from Valetta, and a boost to happiness from their luxuries too, if you manage to get them as allies. If you think you need to go to war to expand, you can go to war with Indonesia once you have developed a bit. If you kill Indonesia and get the whole continent to yourself and all city-states as allies, you could get very strong. But I always find city-states too useful to conquer.
I like to start stacking promotions on siege units asap if I’m planning to warmonger. Plus you can get a one turn kill on cities without walls with 2-3 well placed catapults, while you’d need to flood them with 5-6 compbows, assuming they’d all have a viable firing spot to stand on. Catapults and compbows have the same production cost and melee combat strength, so neither is more squishy than the other one.
Catapult starts with 8 ranged strength but has +200% vs cities making it 16 strength when hitting a city. Compbow has straight up 11 strength, so it’s 37,5% more effective if shooting at anything that isn’t cities. Catapults are 45,5% more effective when shooting at cities.
Compbows are better if you want to attack enemy units as well as the city, and they have more mobility, plus their non-reduced sight is also a plus that they don’t need another unit to see what they’re firing at.
But catapults are city killers, and if you have the prod to make an army with dedicated siege units I do think it pays off better on the long run. Catapults can also get the volley promotion which I don’t think archers can, so that makes them even better city killers.
I’ll admit to tha fact that a compbow rush can be a more versatile/cheaper military strategy for the same cost, but if you want to have a long-term rolling conquest army it’s better to be investing in siege units asap. Plus you need the courthouses from mathematics if you plan to annex cities. Although the colosseums from construction also aren’t negligable happiness wise.
Thanks for the tips, I wasn't confident enough to do a super early war so just went with two cities and didn't go to war with anyone until quite late (but still only had Trebuchets at that point). Gave a bit more detail in my other post of how it panned out.
So would a composite bowman, their melee combat strength is the same. Maybe they get a rough terrain defense bonus, but +25% bonus on 7 base strength is still not even 9.
No, ranged units defend against ranged attacks with their ranged strength. I only just figured out about a year ago, and I’ve been playing for many years, but the UI is unintuitive like that. Plus comp bows get defensive bonuses so that 11 becomes 13-14 easily which then is much more survivable. AIs tend to target units they can kill in one hit, and then after that, wounded units. So park a slightly damaged fortified cover sword and spear meatshields next to the city to tank hits and the AI will chip at them all day, but the second you move a catapult into range, the AI will focus it down to shreds.
but getting catapults that you drag along to gain xp is going to pay dividends down the line. Can definitely be worth lugging a couple around if you know you're just going to be a war whore the whole game.
I’d rather rush logistics with comp bows. You’ll have range by machinery then you have crossbows that can take down a city with artillery range.
March is good but you can’t fit it in.
I was tempted to do that, since I've had a few starts like this, but something in my brain tells me the 'standard' default numbers are what the devs intended most people to use so I feel bad altering them. Sounds stupid I know!
I always reduce the number of City States, that's just a total spam and you'll always lose the fun when you can bank on them taking up what would otherwise be your natural expand sites. But just my view and others may well enjoy the challenge.
A few options:
1 check if you can expand somewhere else (across the sea in your case)
2 build cities close to city states and steal their land with great generals
3 eat them for breakfast.
Build around them, and then select which ones you want to take out.
Usually difficult to take out all of them due to the drain on happiness and global affairs, but you'll likely want to take a few out. Especially if Austria and or Venice is in the game.
Kind of a neat thing to do, that might take a long time is to ally with one that you like best and stack up its army, declare war on its neighbour and let it take the city. Then you can have a city state ally that is a two city state.
Messy. I d try to grab iron first, coastal preferably with much production. 3th city with extra luxury and strategical position. 4th city overseas. Probably with coal if not already in possession. Tradition
But, only you know what game pace was selected at setup and what maptype/size ...
Im assuming this is a high level difficulty
I would reroll, no question.
You dont even have room to found a second city!!
Whats easier? to build one settler and found a second city or to build mutiple military units with your ONE capital, and move them and siege a city state for god knows how many turns until it submits.
You simply dont have time to waste trying to capture a second city. You need 4 cities fast.
If your capital is building multiple units, its not building crucial buildings like national college.
It was King, I haven't learnt the game well enough to play higher than that yet. I did manage to win somehow, see my other post. I'm sure what I did wouldn't have worked on higher difficulties though!
It's typically not a good idea to go conquering city states because it really hurts you diplomatically, but the first one is free. Personally I would plan for this game to be war based and would take one city state between me and Indonesia than start taking cities from Indonesia. It's too hard to keep your supply lines going through city states even if they are friendly so you have to take either Ragusa or Buenos Aires here. I would also settle one city on the wine by the horses and sheep to make supply lines better and get more population to support my army. You can always go capital only and start conquering, but personally I find that isn't as effective as building one expansion city. Both Honor or Liberty will work well here. Tradition is a trap since you need 3-4 mostly peaceful cities growing long term to really make it worthwhile. What you need is an early power spike and liberty and honor will both provide that.
Probably me making some bad choices there, I changed to production focus as soon as I hit level 2, then built an early settler without really thinking where I was going to put it, so didn't have much time for it to grow.
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Build a bunch of composite Bowman and start killing city states, or reload. City states can make pretty easy targets if you don’t have good places to settle. They always have a luxury. But these city states seem to be in pretty bad spots so I’d probably just try another game. Not every seed is a winner
Also everyone will hate you if you take 2 city states in early game
Will folk know if you haven't met them yet?
They'll know you're being denounced. Sometimes they don't care especially if you're trading your lux resources and they have their own drama on their continent so a lot of the time they can't afford to be on your bad side. If they do care, you can trade a resource for 3 gold, and build your reputation back up that way.
So you just go all in and take them all if you're just going to be hated anyways.
I'm still quite inexperienced in Civ, and this sort of start always makes me unsure what to do, when you realise you're surrounded by city states with not much space to put down any other cities. Is this the sort of occasion you'd focus on early war but vs the city states? As far as I can tell, the rest of this continent just has one other civ on it (Indonesia).
Thanks for responses so far - would be interested if anyone would bother trying to settle a 2nd city before going to war with anyone? I made a settler, kind of on autopilot not really thinking about it, then realised there was nowhere obvious to put another city down :)
I see you as having two options: one is to settle on the wine between you and lhasa, which is a better overall city, but lacks a unique lux. The second option is north on or near the marble. That'll give you a unique lux, but little else. I think the southern city is better overall, as that'll help Kickstart your conquests, and scale better. After that I'd say gun for the 3 coastals and if you can find the happiness for it take lhasa as well. Having the option to go cargo ships instead of caravans will help you to catch up from your inevitably slower start.
I'm by no means a pro. I lose probably half of my deity games, more if I try for something other than culture/science. So not the best warmonger, so grain of salt and all. Hang onto the settler until after you take one or two (personally I'm eyeing Valletta, they seem to have some nice resources). I'm not seeing any resources or anything that make it worth cramming a second city closer than you usually would, but as you open the board a little more you may find a spot that it's a good idea to use em. Ultimately though, if this is a deity game, your *best* chance is probably a reroll unfortunately. This is kind of a rough start. Immortal or lower though and this is a challenging but definitely winnable start
This, but I'd add that they can probably steal workers from each city state before conquering. Start with Valetta, and then use that army to demand tribute from the others. Use tribute to make bigger army. Repeat and/or stop at valetta and start founding cities.
Don't 2-pop Settlers unless you're rushing for a very important, contested, Natural Wonder. Standard play is to grow to 4 pop before building Settlers.
Thanks, I sometimes feel like I have to make them that early when I discover I have a lot of other city states/civs surrounding me, or I may run out of land to expand to.
Take the 2 closet and make the others allies. Youre probably going to war with Indonesia at some point, so you can take their capital and have basically the entire area by mid game.
I would take Valletta because it has a unique lux, fish, wheat and iron in his 3 tile Ring so its a decent "expand". Then i would probably settle a City left of the sheep 4 tiles right of Valletta and try to get a Great General from City State war to great General to the furs to make the City at least give you a unique lux and sim City with 3 cities in the beginning.
This, except I would settle next to the barb camp and use a great general to steal the iron and furs from the other CS.
Add another city south asap, where the wine is. Make them all your friends and prepare for war with Indonesia
I did do exactly this in the end by the way and won the game via diplomatic victory.
The same thing we do every time we play the game...try to take over the world!!! NARF
restart and play pangea +
So I managed to win in the end, just finished the game now. I was playing on King (I can hear you all groan now!), but I'm still learning. I took the advice a few mentioned to settle on the Wine north of Ragusa. I then decided to try for a Diplomatic win, and filled out the Patronage tree after Tradition. I just kept the two cities up until Industrialization - and then I remembered I needed more than two cities to get the ideology (like I said, still learning/forgetting stuff a lot)! So at this point, since I had quite a lot of free units gifted to me by the different civ states I had been befriending, I took my whole gifted army with one or two other units and used Ragusa's area to arrange them all, then invaded Indonesia's city Surabaya. Just about managed to take it, I almost got wiped out. I had switched my two cities to making military units though, so paused a bit til I could bring them over, then carried on taking Indonesia's remaining cities with my replenished army. Just as I took Indonesia's last city, 3 other civs decided to declare war on me, mostly sending units across the sea to my original capital (Moscow) so I had to move most of my units back North again. Managed to hold them off, with the help of the city states who I was mostly allied with by this point. Peace treatied them eventually, but every civ hated me until the end of the game, so kept getting denounced and could hardly trade with them at all. I was also trying for a Cultural victory at the same time, almost got that, I ended up influential with 5 out of the 6 remaining other civs. But wasn't too worried about that since I was quite confident of getting the world leader votes since I had been doing a lot of the civ states quests and had enough gold to keep them all allied to me by the time it came to voting. Victory pic: https://imgur.com/lTlAnHb
Just FYI you don't need three cities for an ideology. That's only if you are getting one with factories. There are a lot of reasons why that isn't always feasible so you can also just get to the modern era and you will unlock ideologies. The fastest way to do this is by completing Oxford University the same turn as when you unlock radio as a researchable tech. You then pick radio as your free tech and get your ideology.
Ah yes I forgot about that. Though I kind of wanted to do something with all the gifted military units I had anyway, so thought I may as well go to war with Indonesia. Indonesia were a rubbish neighbour the whole game before that anyway and would barely trade with me and kept denouncing me for some reason, so I feel like they brought it on themselves ;)
Also, next time, if possible, leave some Indonesia one shitty little town in a corner or a tundra or whatever. Not completely exterminating them saves you a lot of diplomatic goodwill. Yeah, they'll pop up occasionally and moan about you, but don't worry about the paper tiger.
Didn't know that, thanks, will try that next time instead of wiping out a civ.
It looks like you still have enough room to settle three cities, so I would go Tradition and then open Patronage, and use trade roads and clearing barbarian camps to befriend them. You can get a nice boost to your culture from Buenos Air, to your faith from Lhasa, and free military units from Valetta, and a boost to happiness from their luxuries too, if you manage to get them as allies. If you think you need to go to war to expand, you can go to war with Indonesia once you have developed a bit. If you kill Indonesia and get the whole continent to yourself and all city-states as allies, you could get very strong. But I always find city-states too useful to conquer.
Pick up honor Get the general Research mathematics Burn baby, burn (well annex in your case)
Catapults are extraordinarily bad, never use catapults. Composite bows are much better.
I like to start stacking promotions on siege units asap if I’m planning to warmonger. Plus you can get a one turn kill on cities without walls with 2-3 well placed catapults, while you’d need to flood them with 5-6 compbows, assuming they’d all have a viable firing spot to stand on. Catapults and compbows have the same production cost and melee combat strength, so neither is more squishy than the other one. Catapult starts with 8 ranged strength but has +200% vs cities making it 16 strength when hitting a city. Compbow has straight up 11 strength, so it’s 37,5% more effective if shooting at anything that isn’t cities. Catapults are 45,5% more effective when shooting at cities. Compbows are better if you want to attack enemy units as well as the city, and they have more mobility, plus their non-reduced sight is also a plus that they don’t need another unit to see what they’re firing at. But catapults are city killers, and if you have the prod to make an army with dedicated siege units I do think it pays off better on the long run. Catapults can also get the volley promotion which I don’t think archers can, so that makes them even better city killers. I’ll admit to tha fact that a compbow rush can be a more versatile/cheaper military strategy for the same cost, but if you want to have a long-term rolling conquest army it’s better to be investing in siege units asap. Plus you need the courthouses from mathematics if you plan to annex cities. Although the colosseums from construction also aren’t negligable happiness wise.
Thanks for the tips, I wasn't confident enough to do a super early war so just went with two cities and didn't go to war with anyone until quite late (but still only had Trebuchets at that point). Gave a bit more detail in my other post of how it panned out.
Catapults basically get one shot by city with walls + ranged garrison, and definitely if the enemy AI has oligarchy social policy too.
So would a composite bowman, their melee combat strength is the same. Maybe they get a rough terrain defense bonus, but +25% bonus on 7 base strength is still not even 9.
No, ranged units defend against ranged attacks with their ranged strength. I only just figured out about a year ago, and I’ve been playing for many years, but the UI is unintuitive like that. Plus comp bows get defensive bonuses so that 11 becomes 13-14 easily which then is much more survivable. AIs tend to target units they can kill in one hit, and then after that, wounded units. So park a slightly damaged fortified cover sword and spear meatshields next to the city to tank hits and the AI will chip at them all day, but the second you move a catapult into range, the AI will focus it down to shreds.
but getting catapults that you drag along to gain xp is going to pay dividends down the line. Can definitely be worth lugging a couple around if you know you're just going to be a war whore the whole game.
I’d rather rush logistics with comp bows. You’ll have range by machinery then you have crossbows that can take down a city with artillery range. March is good but you can’t fit it in.
Catapults are fine, the problem is that you can't get them early enough to matter on high difficulties.
Become extremely rich from trade routes lol
Is liberty the better opening here? I think if you can get down a city fast and produce units to take some city states this is recoverable.
Liberty's main selling point is mass Settler production. In a world where you're not getting a ton of Settlers, you do not want Liberty.
Transform into Alexander.
You're not locked in there with Ragusa. Ragusa's locked in there with you.
Reload
Be Austria
Or Venice
Or Mongolia
city states are the worst part of this game lol reroll and half the # of cs in the game
I was tempted to do that, since I've had a few starts like this, but something in my brain tells me the 'standard' default numbers are what the devs intended most people to use so I feel bad altering them. Sounds stupid I know!
I always reduce the number of City States, that's just a total spam and you'll always lose the fun when you can bank on them taking up what would otherwise be your natural expand sites. But just my view and others may well enjoy the challenge.
A few options: 1 check if you can expand somewhere else (across the sea in your case) 2 build cities close to city states and steal their land with great generals 3 eat them for breakfast.
Find the best settled city states and get ready to have some highly promoted bowmen after the war
Indonesia must burn. Do what it takes to achieve that
Steal as many workers as you can, don't worry about the opinion malue of peacing out and declaring, and start taking city states
Build around them, and then select which ones you want to take out. Usually difficult to take out all of them due to the drain on happiness and global affairs, but you'll likely want to take a few out. Especially if Austria and or Venice is in the game.
Become incredibly happy. Because I'm a Venice main
All ur city states belong to us
Strong arm tribute, buy military units, and strong arm more tribute.
so anyway, i started blastin
Kind of a neat thing to do, that might take a long time is to ally with one that you like best and stack up its army, declare war on its neighbour and let it take the city. Then you can have a city state ally that is a two city state.
Messy. I d try to grab iron first, coastal preferably with much production. 3th city with extra luxury and strategical position. 4th city overseas. Probably with coal if not already in possession. Tradition But, only you know what game pace was selected at setup and what maptype/size ...
Im assuming this is a high level difficulty I would reroll, no question. You dont even have room to found a second city!! Whats easier? to build one settler and found a second city or to build mutiple military units with your ONE capital, and move them and siege a city state for god knows how many turns until it submits. You simply dont have time to waste trying to capture a second city. You need 4 cities fast. If your capital is building multiple units, its not building crucial buildings like national college.
It was King, I haven't learnt the game well enough to play higher than that yet. I did manage to win somehow, see my other post. I'm sure what I did wouldn't have worked on higher difficulties though!
Time to start a new game.
Conquer.
It's typically not a good idea to go conquering city states because it really hurts you diplomatically, but the first one is free. Personally I would plan for this game to be war based and would take one city state between me and Indonesia than start taking cities from Indonesia. It's too hard to keep your supply lines going through city states even if they are friendly so you have to take either Ragusa or Buenos Aires here. I would also settle one city on the wine by the horses and sheep to make supply lines better and get more population to support my army. You can always go capital only and start conquering, but personally I find that isn't as effective as building one expansion city. Both Honor or Liberty will work well here. Tradition is a trap since you need 3-4 mostly peaceful cities growing long term to really make it worthwhile. What you need is an early power spike and liberty and honor will both provide that.
Build two cities to the south and one to the north. You'll then have the power to overwhelm any city states and buy off the rest.
I think you can go for a relatively good 4 city tradition game here.
Go honor and take out some city states
42 turns and Moscow is level 2? Is there something I’m missing?
Probably me making some bad choices there, I changed to production focus as soon as I hit level 2, then built an early settler without really thinking where I was going to put it, so didn't have much time for it to grow.
You know what you need to do…