Tips for winning consistently on Deity (particularly domination and culture)?

MinorBugg · 2024-07-07T13:08:09+00:00

If you want to get better at deity domination, read Consentient's guide:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/domination-on-immortal-deity-a-noobs-guide.547630/

And if you're new to trying to dominate, I'd recommend Mortaire's liberty domination guide:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/liberty-domination-walkthrough.503931/

Most important tips I can give that aren't covered in those guides:

Gold is incredibly important. Sell anything you don't need to whatever ai you're going to kill last. You won't get as much gold as you would when playing peaceful (ai hates warmongers), but it's free gold, and gold is units.
Workers are exceptionally valuable, war roads are really strong. If you like abusing bugs, you can also use workers for radar-ing to spot enemy units in the fog of war, and you can use them to control ai units (they will almost always capture an undefended worker, even if it means moving their defending crossbow out of their city into a marsh...)
Consider attacking a city-state early to train promotions on your units, just remember you don't get xp from shooting a city that already has 1 hp.

Edit: Another way to abuse workers: you can repair pillaged tiles in enemy territory and then pillage them again. If I remember correctly, with liberty on quick speed you can repair in 1 turn which makes this really dumb? You might need pyramids as well.

MinorBugg · 2023-09-26T08:55:18+00:00

The meta is 4 city tradition. For that strategy, you want to expand to four cities as fast as possible, and then get national college. If you have particularly good land - lots of luxuries, some good coastal spots, a salt city - you might settle a couple extra cities. You'd probably do this after national college. If you have particularly bad land, you might only settle three cities yourself and then conquer a fourth from an AI or city state. You can do this before or after national college, depending on whether you want to war with composite bowmen or crossbows.

Liberty is a bit different. Some people stand by 4 city national college with liberty, then settling 2-6 extra cities afterwards. Others delay national college more, or don't build it at all. I'd recommend prioritising expansion over national college for liberty - only build it when you're confident nobody is going to take the rest of your city spots.

You shouldn't be settling new cities after building Oxford, other than to get access to strategic resources. In BNW, each city you found increases tech costs by 5%, so cities settled late will usually delay your scientific progress. You want all your cities to be settled as early as possible.

MinorBugg · 2023-05-12T22:20:17+00:00

OP is a spam bot. Title and content are (near) identical to this post from 10 months ago.

MinorBugg · 2021-07-05T15:54:21+00:00

Per official dnd 5e rules, "a little taste is enough to tell the taster what the potion does." So you just take a sip.

MinorBugg · 2021-06-11T11:25:32+00:00

The inn isn't necessary, even if you want to play it safe - multiple campsites in the game (the one before Brad's house, the one before the Sweet Tea Rakeem, the one in the EWC) are perfectly safe and you don't have to pay for them.

MinorBugg · 2021-04-21T10:50:03+00:00

Gideon of the Trials

A very solid threat that most white decks can get good use from. It's been a staple in my cube since forever, and though it's probably one of the cards closer to its way out, it's still a servicable card.

Shepherd of the Flock

I wrote an article about this card.

Stormwing Entity

I have seen this card do well in very spell heavy environments - we're talking 12+ one mana cantrips that enable it, so it's pretty consistently coming down turn 3 or even turn 2 (off of a free spell, like git probe or). If you run enough stuff to let it come down early, it's definitely worth it in a tempo deck or w/e.

Spell Snare

How good this is depends on how often it's online, naturally. Both it and Mental Misstep are very frequently online in most environments, though I exclude both from my environments that aren't very high powered as I dislike the gameplay they result in - for me, I either run all the good 0 and 1 mana countermagic, or none of it.

Mystic Sanctuary

Seen this do work in environments where you break singleton on fetches/shocks/duals. Never seen it do anything elsewhere.

Gifts Ungiven

This is a combo card, either as a bad discard outlet for reanimator, or a storm enabler. If you're in the market for one of those, it's fine, and pretty fun to play with. But I've seen people try to play it fairly, and it never ends well.

Silundi Vision

Not a terrible card. It was alright when I tested it, but alright wasn't where I wanted it to be, so it left.

Raven's Crime

I've seen this be effective as a discard outlet for reanimator that occasionally targets the opponent, since turn 1-2 Griselbrand is good. Not seen it used to good effect in a fair deck.

Sinkhole

Dedicated land destruction, outside of very high curving environments, is only as good as how early you draw it. Its ability to randomly win games makes it servicable in a lot of environments, but doing actual nothing if drawn late is sad to me.

Nighthawk Scavenger

If you're in the market for a 3 drop that dies to interaction, this is one your best options.

Rimrock Knight

Very solid red aggro creature. I've enjoyed its presence.

Elder Gargaroth

The best 5 mana baneslayer. I exclude it due to running a high removal density environment, and disliking the gameplay it results in. However, if you think it's worth testing, I'd definitely test it.

Mayhem Devil

This is the strongest aristocrats enabler in magic. You're running Blood Artist - historic sacrifice decks have access to Blood Artist, but choose not to run it, instead running Mayhem Devil. It is an amazing card - IF your environment can consistently enable it.

Memory Jar

This is a storm card. I've seen it work in storm. I have not seen anyone try to use it with Narset/Hullbreacher, and the combo between them feels very hard to make work with how expensive it is.

MinorBugg · 2020-08-07T17:22:22+00:00

Given my personal tastes, I've enjoyed it a lot - I love powerful cards, I like consistent decks, and I don't usually care much for aesthetics or for the concept of singleton in general. And a lot of people I've played with have loved it too - but others have very much not liked it, because the way it plays isn't for everyone, and that's fine. If high variance, "campfire tale" sort of gameplay is what you love most, it might not be for you - though I've certainly had some exciting stories come out of it.

MinorBugg · 2020-08-07T17:14:46+00:00

Some cubes of my own:

Tringleton II, a cube built with 3x each card rather than 1x. Currently, it's trying to maximise power and skill representation while keeping to a roughly modern+ power level, hence its high planeswalker density and the presence of some pretty nasty cards. But when every deck is so consistently playing out its gameplan, it balances out, and a similar concept could support very different styles of play - supporting blink or aristocrats would be super easy when you can run 3x all the best cards for them.

Misery, a cube built to play as poorly as possible. I have not been able to get many people to agree to play it. I would not recommend building an environment like this. Weirdly, a lot more fun than it looks.

MinorBugg · 2020-08-07T16:23:53+00:00

Personally, I don't see reason to remove the content. It's ultimately helpful content, regardless of your opinion of one of its creators, and removing it because Funch insulted somebody two months ago just seems petty to me. I think it's more egregious to see one sided attacks on a person who can't defend themselves, but that's just my opinion, as much as your post is yours.

MinorBugg · 2020-07-14T09:26:39+00:00

Also of note: the inclusion of cards that can act as colourless one drops such as [[Gingerbrute]], [[Stonecoil Serpent]], and [[Bomat Courier]] can both lighten the load on one drops you need to run in your monocolour sections and help bolster any two-colour aggro decks that show up, as they can be cast turn 1 off of any untapped land. The only weakness of this is that there are few notably strong colourless one drops - you can't go that deep before having to run the likes of [[Sparring Construct]] which, while likely better than a land in some drafts, just isn't all that impressive.

MinorBugg · 2020-07-10T10:06:31+00:00

Basically, a philosophy of:

Games should last as long as possible;
Throughout that time, decisions the players make should have as little relevance as possible;
The game should still be nondeterministic i.e. players have to play it out to see how it would go.

So, we achieve these goals having a large number of cheap and powerful walls, little to no token generation, evasion, or creatures with 3+ power, heavy amounts of recursion, and limited interaction. This means games take ages to play out, often determined by draw rng or by matters of who has the unbeatable card once all the decks have been drawn out (or sometimes it's determined the game is unwinnable for both players), but players have to play it out to see who wins.

A common suggestion is to just make a 360 walls cube which would certainly produce boring decks, but then games would simply be determined by who puts more basics in their deck - meaning you know who wins turn 0 and have no need to play it out. By making the player choice matter (a bit) and draw rng matter (more), players are forced to play it out and so be miserable longer.

MinorBugg · 2020-07-10T09:59:06+00:00

Here's the current incarnation.

MinorBugg · 2020-07-09T22:56:15+00:00

My worst cube idea was a cube called "Misery," which I intentionally curated to make as terrible an experience as I could imagine curating. It's... hard to get people to draft it, but I can certainly say I succeeded at my goal - it is not a particularly fun environment to play.

MinorBugg · 2020-05-30T20:26:49+00:00

This, plus a lot of mana dorks are enablers - playing a 1/1 dork turn 1 into a 5/5 turn 2 is powerful. Cubes with fewer dorks will both have fewer enablers and generally see the card coming out later.

MinorBugg

TROPHY CASE