I have beaten Civ5 on almost every nation on Immortal level, but can not win as Brazil! What is wrong with Brazil!
But seriously, what is it? Is it the Jungle / desert start? Why is Brazil so hard?
Posted Jan 20, 2020, 11:39 AM UTC
Jungle start is terrible. theres no production and you cant improve the tiles for ages. I find jungle good for a late starting city if you want to make it scienced focused and can buy it a workshop/factory/windmill/water mill etc and theres a few hammers around but as a capital it sucks for me.
when you think about the advantages the AI is given and the disadvantages that Brazil is given inherently with their jungle start it makes sense why they're so hard to win with. you need to get extremely lucky with a good regional lux, meeting a faith CS or getting faith ruins for first pantheon, and having many production tiles around your cap in order to even stay steps behind the AI. the trade off is that brazilwood camps + jungle pantheons + universities give you arguably the best non-production tile in the game.
Or just turn off start bias :D and hope you get a good capital start location and then some jungle tiles for future cities once you can support them. 1-4 jungle tiles on the capital is fine but anymore and it starts to become a problem I find.
A pure Brazil start of almost 100% jungle is just not possible
Same here but on deity. Started a project last year. Beat it with about 30 of the civs. Tried starts with Pedro for about 3 weeks straight. Got overrun by around turn 150 on quick every time. No hammers. Can't keep up. I like the Brazilwood camp but it comes too late on higher levels with the AI being so OP.
IKR! Even if you chop the jungle down you waste time and get no production from it. Also you feel tempted to go into culture which is a non starter anyway!
He's pretty decent at culture or science. Production is bad in CIV anyway, you don't need a whole lot, just mostly food. Jungle requires more workers to get going, and more turns to settle, but if you have a small tradition empire with Brazil, you can have stupidly huge science bonuses from the jungles once you get university.
Brazil is more reliant on gold loans from AI friends as well because of the low jungle production. You have to buy more buildings, but that's already the optimal science strategy anyway. You just might have less gold for research agreements or to bribe the AI to slap each other around.
Brazil is quite decent for tall / Freedom /Tradition play. You can try working all the workshop slots from very early on to get more engineers to compensate a little bit for your bad production. Usually this isn't that good because engineers "steal" great people spaws from scientists, but whatever. If you can rush culture wonders like Louvre, Uffizi or Sistine, it's quite worth it.
If you want an "easy" time, get a citrus start with a bunch of bananas and go Sun God. You'll have a stupidly gigantic capital very fast and Banana /Citrus tiles don't require any improvement to be good. Sadly the AI always takes the "culture from jungle" pantheon very early, but if not you can try that one with your citrus/banana start and blow through Tradition or Liberty tree very fast.
Production is bad in CIV anyway, you don't need a whole lot
Err... k.
Maybe he has experience from lower difficulties. Strong early game production is indispensable on higher difficulties.
The saying "production is king" is said for a reason. Production makes things happen and is way more efficient than using gold. The gold purchase cost of most things is at least twice much and is more than 4x the amount on most things in early game.
Gold helps with cs allies, unit upgrades and later on possibly mass discount purchasing after ideologies.
The only real reason you want food is to GROW to be able to work more hammers and greater science.
At some point that food is no longer useful because you are happiness capped anyway. DO NOT confuse this as "growth it not important. Throughout most of the game, growth is the most important thing in your game. More population literally drives everything else. But production and science are very close behind.
I'm talking about single player deity here. You don't get happiness or gold capped nearly as bad because the AI will trade with you so much.
In a 4 city tradition game you can often cash-buy most of your science buildings with loans from the AI. So you really need huge population to work all the slots on your guilds, especially with freedom and rationalism.
Jungles do catch up eventually if you can at least chop some of the hills for a bit of hammers and once you get a workshop / factory.
Yeah jungle is still bad for hammers either way.
Try an Amazon map. If everyone has a jungle start, your starting bias is no longer a disadvantage.