There’s a four year old thread for this game but I didn’t want to bump that. (aside: I think Discourse is mistaken in saying this topic is similar to “Video Games for 4 year olds”, unless they are VERY precocious).
Bought it last week, played over 100 hours, kinda obsessed. So how do I, like, win?
Game I (Japan): Just kind of hung around, never came close to any victory condition, spent the last several dozen turns frantically sending spies in an unsuccessful effort to prevent someone from winning the Science condition around turn 475.
Game II (Greece): Attacked my neighbor early on because it said my military strength was much stronger than him. It ended disastrously and I gave up around turn 200 when I was dead last in every category.
Game III (Scythia, in progress): Attacked neighbor earlier it because it said my military strength was much, much, much stronger than him. This worked out very well. Next, tried attacking neighbor I was only much, much stronger than, and am currently planning to plead for peace on any terms at the first opportunity. Apparently Rome has enough gold to actually mobilize the armies of all four nearby city-states they control. Also, 2 of the other 5 remaining civs are at war with me and the other has denounced me, though they are all too far away for it to make any immediate difference. All my cities are impressively walled so I am hoping to pivot to a Tourism win, or possibly Religion (well on my way to converting the Roman Empire to Judaism currently), if I survive this mess. Overall though I am not optimistic. On the bright side, I learned where Scythia was.
First impression is that the Domination wincon seems nigh impossible to acheive. Once cities are walled it takes forever to capture them even with overwhelming forces, and fairly early in the game it seems everyone else will unite against a warmonger.
Military conquest is incredibly difficult until later in the game because cities are ludicrously difficult to take down. You need to completely dominate the field AND surround cities with bombardment capability, reducing them from afar, before taking them, and until the late game even catapults and cannons might not get the job done in less than twenty turns.
Once you get bombers - damn late in the game - cities fall very easily. A few bombers and a city is toast in a few turns and you can just walk in. Stupid though that sounds, your best approach is often to simply spread peacefully as much as possible, be the suzerain of as many city states as possible, and build your economy and science until you get bombers and tanks and then kick ass.
What version are you playing? The “original”, “Rise and fall”, “Gathering storm”? What difficulty level? Size of game?
A lot comes down to practice. You’ve figured out that just comparing military strength is insufficient. You also need to look at economy, city state relationships, supply lines, terrain and technological advantage.
I’ve mainly played the “original” version. Just bought the platinum package to try out “rise and fall” and “gathering storm” and turns out I don’t enjoy them as much. Too fiddly. Before that I had a couple of wins at Deity difficulty level, one domination and one religion (IIRC). In both cases I lucked out a little and was able to do an early war against a weaker neighbor to jumpstart my population numbers. Important in Deity because the AIs gets such a massive head start.
I’ve learned a lot from youtube videos, like those from PotatoMcWhiskey. He has a few that are just straight up early game tutorials.
