Is Glorious City State a sustainable position?

[Solaristics]

TL;DR: Is playing tall with only 5 regions a viable winning strategy?

Turn 25 or so for my first game as Athens. I'm a Glorious City State with 5 positive progress tokens but only 5 regions so far. Is it possible to just stay at this level, turtle and pump out culture to offset the decay? Or is it always better to try and expand to 10 regions as I'm not sure if the decay from expansion would offset the decrease in age and the decrease in the decay modifier from becoming a league.


As an aside, it took me a while to get my head around progress tokens because I was trying to understand what a negative token was (I have no tokens - but now I have one less?!). I think personally "regress token" is a better term with the added benefit of positive progress tokens then just becoming "progress tokens".

[Gray Fox]

No.

In my One Region Challenge, Rhodus rose to the top of the CDR chart as a continually glorious Tier II single region. However, you simply cannot generate enough Legacy to win anything by staying small. At 50k culture your regions max out to 5 Legacy per turn. You can get some structure Legacy, but it's not enough. From my experience, you need 100k Legacy to win by turn 500. So with that as a goal, I did a reverse plan of getting there. Rhodus as an expansionist glorious Tier III was able to accomplish this goal by conquering about 100 regions. On the other hand, you decide what is fun to do. If you like it, then go for it! Good luck!

[Solaristics]

No.

In my One Region Challenge, Rhodus rose to the top of the CDR chart as a continually glorious Tier II single region. However, you simply cannot generate enough Legacy to win anything by staying small. At 50k culture your regions max out to 5 Legacy per turn. You can get some structure Legacy, but it's not enough. From my experience, you need 100k Legacy to win by turn 500. So with that as a goal, I did a reverse plan of getting there. Rhodus as an expansionist glorious Tier III was able to accomplish this goal by conquering about 100 regions. On the other hand, you decide what is fun to do. If you like it, then go for it! Good luck!

Thanks for the response. So, through your reverse calculations, you think 100 regions is minimum for victory?

I honestly usually don't care about winning or losing these kinds of games - I just play them for the experience - but for some reason I feel I need to at least head in a winning direction (I'm taking this Athenian legacy thing seriously goddammit ... can't let those Spartan thugs, preening Persians or Roman barbarians eclipse me!).

[Gray Fox]

With the new diplomacy options, it may be possible to conquer the regions of a high Legacy faction and give them away to another faction, so that your own faction stays at a small size. A strategy might be to defeat the "preening barbarian thugs" on the battlefield, thus ending their Legacy growth, and then surpass their high mark. The AI doesn't make optimal army stacks, so that would not be a problem. However, you would have to be at war most of the time, which would not aid the turtle style. Everything works, if you let it!