Tier List for Gathering Storm

[Assault Squirt]

https://puu.sh/DPCbS.png

This is coming from someone with over 3000 hours (I previously made a tier list at 2,000 during R&F). A little explainer on the tiers:

God Tier
Civs so strong it feels silly giving them a letter grade. They just run away with games if left alone for even 30 turns. To keep them from stomping, you either have to have an uncharitably good start as a warmongering civ, or play Sumeria, the only civilization that can take either of them out on Emperor or above difficulty before they hit 10 population and 50 production.

SS-tier
Super strong civs that either were worthy of God status in the past (Hungary, Australia, Korea), or just have a slightly more difficult time running away with games. Consistently strong, occassionally God-tier

S-tier
Originally, I had just 1 S-tier, but I figured that the SS-tier civs were just way more consistently strong. Notably, all of these civs are HEAVY warmongering civs that get ridiculous early game units, or otherwise ridiculous warmongering benefits. However, warmongering is nowhere near consistent in any difficulty above King, and even then, bad spawns can trap your 3 warcarts behind a layer of mountains, hills, and rainforests, and by the time you get them through, the enemy civilization will have already built up a military too large to surmount without ranged units. They don't have the consistency of the 5 SS-tiers due to very little benefits outside of warmongering (Trajan aside)

A-tier
Everyone here is a really consistent civilization, with strong bonuses throughout the game, but none of them become gamebreakingly OP. Alexander's neverending war is good, until he comes up against a Black Army, Pitati Archer, War Cart, or Legion. Peter has the best start of any civilization, and can spend money on buying units instead of good land, but religion is far from consistent in higher tiers/multiplayer, and the Cossack comes in too late, even considering his bonus to trade routes being good in higher difficulties. Shaka and Genghis are good warmongers that start too late. Gitarja and Saladin are great at the religion game, with Gitarja being better at naval battle, and Saladin being better at being psuedo-Korea. Good, but not game-breaking.

B-tier
Far from consistent, these civs are do-or-die depending entirely on map generation. Teddy can get screwed by spawning on a small, or aquatic, continent. Lautaro has trouble placing the good Chemamull and timing an invasion with golden ages, Montezuma can get trapped in a land with little luxuries and little way to get slaves, Kupe can either be one of the best or one of the worst civs, depending entirely on what area of the ocean he spawns in and what the land situation looks like, Japan puts open land (with no luxuries/features that stop district placement) at a premium, and Kristina needs easy access to the 5 continent types. None of them are consistent, and can take several restarts to get the correct start, but with it, they can be, arguably, as good as some of the S-tiers.

C-tier
Generally, these civs lack any impressive bonuses, though they do have 1 or 2 stand out unique traits that make them somewhat threatening. For Chandragupta, Mvemba, and Jadwiga, it's their unique units. For Gorgo and Pericles, their ability. Some are cut off from important gameplay strategies post R&F/GS (Mvemba, Pedro), and then there's Emperor Qin, who inexplicably got nerfed in R&F. Qin might make it to B-tier if he still had his 60% Eureka/Civic boosts, and if his wonder bonus lasted through the medieval era, he could very well scrape A-tier, especially in multiplayer. Alas, he's just a lot weaker than he could, and should, realistically be.

D-tier
These civs are just downright bad. Sometimes they can be sort of good (Jayavaraman, Phillip), but most of the time they are consistently mediocre. Eleanor's leader bonus straight up doesn't work in any difficulty above Prince, or in multiplayer. Gandhi's faith bonus isn't even that good and relies on people not going to war (along with religion being inconsistent). Even the inconsistent ones barely reach the heights of B-tier at their best.

F-tier
There's nothing good about these civs. All of their bonuses suck. The strategy they are devised around is a bad one, for each of them. Forward settling coastal cities only sucks, leaving you with, at best, 1/3rd the normal tiles available for building, and leaving you open for the amazing naval units (which are normally useless because of harbors). Coastal raiding being good at the start of GS was still only enough to catapult Hardrada into C-tier, and now lends to him still being worthless. Turtling is not an effective strategy, because you MIGHT make it into the Industrial era, but the remaining civs will all have far more land, science, culture, tourism, and faith, leaving you no realistic pathway to victory. And as for Cleopatra, she might be legitimately worse than Civ V Iroquois, because her abilities are DETRIMENTAL to her. She has a preference for the least productive area of a map (bar snow), cut off from the ocean, giving benefits to those who wish to trade with her, and incapable of even building wonders due to lacking production.

[Assault Squirt]

As for things I'd recommend to fix some of the worse civilizations:

Harald Hardrada
Let him raid 2-tiles inland, as well as use coastal raiding to capture cities. That way you can punish players who hide behind harbors and keep their valuable pillageables away from the coast. People know he's a threat if he can constantly pillage tiles, so they just build stuff inland and put wonders/forts/etc on coasts. If that's not an option, at least make it so melee naval units can ferry land units at their speed. That way his berserkers aren't stuck slogging across an ocean at 2 tiles per turn, they can zoom across at 4, and raid inland as his ships raid the coasts. The first recommendation might put him at B, the second at C.

Cleopatra
Either give her Canada's unique ability, but for desert tiles, or turn her trader units back to what they used to be like pre-nerf in the base game. Giving her old traders would legitimately make her one of the best money civs in the game, making A-tier easily, just because she'd be almost as good at GPT as Mali, allowing her to bypass her low production and just buy her Maryannu Chariots, making her hard to take out early, and letting her snowball late. That also fits in with her role historically, where Augustus Caesar was able to alleviate an extremely large portion of the Roman debt accrued during the past 2 decades of conflict and strife just by liberating Cleopatra's personal wealth. Not only that, but the Egyptian trade routes during the Roman era were able to make money on a level not seen until the East India Companies came into existence.

Tamar
She's a hard civ to fix, considering both of her bonuses are straight up garbage, but I suppose she could be made into a solid C-tier by allowing her to choose dedications an era early (so, being able to choose the renaissance dedications in the medieval), without getting rid of the old dedications ever (permanent monumentality would make her consistent throughout the game, especially when accompanied with Sic Hunt Dracones). Turtling can't be fixed, though, unless you do something ridiculous like allowing ALL of her districts to attack like encampments.

Dido
It's really a shame that the civilization famous for getting the heaviest land animals on Earth over massive mountains doesn't have even one benefit related to that. I'd give her the ability to walk over 1 mountain tile, no penalty, or 2, at the cost of 50 hp. Not only that, but also make it so that whenever she switches a capital, it builds a Phoenician Mint in the new capital, which permanently increases the gold produced by the city by 10%, and also halves the amount of time it takes for another capital to complete the project to move back there. So, say she switches her capital to Carthage, which is now about to be captured in 6 turns, but it's taking her 10 turns to switch her capital back to Tyre. Currently, she'd be toast, but after this buff, she'd be able to make it back to Tyre in 5 turns.

[Oaks]

Thanks for posting, I always enjoy a good tier list.
Question: is this a tier list for players or ai?

[Royal Raven]

I want to save this, you should put this in Guide section later. Pretty good points though.

[Assault Squirt]

This is taking into consideration both AI (difficulty 4 through 8), and multiplayer. Since you can win with any civilization on the first 3 difficulties, there's not much point in factoring them into the tier list, since everyone would be really good.

@Raven_2012
Will do. I'll try to format it a bit better when I do.

[gimmethegepgun]

I'd say the England Eleanor should probably be a higher tier than the France Eleanor simply because Workshop of the World is still pretty good on its own.

[Demize]

YEp

[Assault Squirt]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

I'd say the England Eleanor should probably be a higher tier than the France Eleanor simply because Workshop of the World is still pretty good on its own.

Eh, I just think that France's ability synergizes more with Eleanor's ability, and England Eleanor is just a gimped Victoria. Workshop of the World is a fantastic ability, with the only downside being that it doesn't kick in for the first 50% of the game, the part where all the S/SS/God tiers are rampaging around and kicking your teeth in. England needs some sort of way to hold out until late game, like what Teddy has.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Assault Squirt:

Eh, I just think that France's ability synergizes more with Eleanor's ability

I don't really think it does. Eleanor doesn't have anything to do with tourism and France doesn't have anything to do with loyalty or generating great works.

[Assault Squirt]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Originally posted by Assault Squirt:

Eh, I just think that France's ability synergizes more with Eleanor's ability

I don't really think it does. Eleanor doesn't have anything to do with tourism and France doesn't have anything to do with loyalty or generating great works.

Plenty of wonders have slots for great works. I almost never play France, but I'm pretty sure they get a boost to building those mid-game wonders that have 3 - 4 great work slots.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Assault Squirt:

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

I don't really think it does. Eleanor doesn't have anything to do with tourism and France doesn't have anything to do with loyalty or generating great works.

Plenty of wonders have slots for great works. I almost never play France, but I'm pretty sure they get a boost to building those mid-game wonders that have 3 - 4 great work slots.

Yeah, but that doesn't particularly help them get the great works in the first place (unlike civs that actually have something to help with that, like Russia, Greece, and Japan). Those wonders also won't generally be where you need them to be if you want to push loyalty, because the cities you'd want them in would be newer cities that won't be able to make those wonders in the timeframe you need them.

[MikeNearLeigh]

I only play SP (usually Immortal level, epic or marathon, Island Plates) on a random leader so there are several leaders I've not managed to get around to using yet e.g. Aztec, Korea. However I have used Eleanor's ability to forge out a good win so it is doable. Oddly, my two highest scores in the game have been with Dido and Cleopatra. I'm not suggesting these need to be higher up btw, just mentioning they have their strengths. Dido's coton settler production helped immensely.

[gimmethegepgun]

Aztecs I think should be higher tier than B anyway. Even if there's no one to enslave early on, they still effectively have half price districts, for all districts, for the entire game, by just building Builders and using them to produce your districts (albeit with an extremely annoying level of micromanagement since you have to switch production twice every turn).

[Assault Squirt]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

Aztecs I think should be higher tier than B anyway. Even if there's no one to enslave early on, they still effectively have half price districts, for all districts, for the entire game, by just building Builders and using them to produce your districts (albeit with an extremely annoying level of micromanagement since you have to switch production twice every turn).

Unless you get monumentality and a good source of faith, there's no consistent way to get builders for every district. I pretty much use them to rush industrial districts only, and produce builders in cities that have nothing better to do when they run out of buildings.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Assault Squirt:

Unless you get monumentality and a good source of faith, there's no consistent way to get builders for every district.

The production you would spend in order to build a district in the first place is used to build a builder, which then adds more production than it cost to make it.