How to be OP in Millenia

The goal is to demystify how to be OP so that future reviews of Millenia take into account how strategy works. Or so that they stop treating strategy games like the Disney Magic Kingdom game or whatever. Strategy games arent going to hold your hand through everything. You need to be able to understand your ingame resources and your mental strengths as well as the situation.

Millenia unlike other games is obsessed with ensuring that no one resource is dominant throughout the game. Reloading the game isnt just a good idea but allows you to explore other scenarios without having to start a new map every time.

Before we start the game

Before you begin you have to ask yourself do I want to have a tall empire or a handful of cities that are huge or do I want to just have a lot of land which means many cities but not all of them are developed.

After deciding that you need to decide what type of playstyle do you want to have? Do you want to be a ruthless warrior and kill everything you come across? Do you want to be a peaceful trader who rules through commerce? Or do you want to be an technologically advanced civilization throughout most the game? Or do you want to be a combination of one or many of these or a mixture?

The mixture playstyle with a leaning towards being whatever you want is the best in this game. For you have to be a bit of everything in the beginning to get what you want towards the middle and throughout the rest of the game.

The first age is the weirdest because you dominate it not through development points, infrastructure or a massive army because there simply isnt enough turns in the stone age to beat all the AI on a medium map unless you only have one AI. And the early game development points cant do much without an army for until the bronze age, you dont have the research unlocked that enables you to buy buildings with money. So focusing on money in the stone age without an army is stupid.

The first age is also weird because with scouts you can gain resources from peaceful villages that disappear as the age progresses. And the barbarian outposts are weak enough that you can destroy them with three warbands combined with ease. And when you destroy an outpost you dont always get gold like in Civ 6 but you also get knowledge or development points or specialized points like warfare points. So having an army and a few scouts cranked out early on is overpowered if the AI neighbor isnt scouting your areas. If they do then you have to start over. But no army early on makes gold worthless in the stone age.

When you get to the age of kings or fourth era is when you may begin to specialize your playstyle more. For by that era onward more resources are available than previously and the role of your city buildings and vassals can easily outstrip any gains you would get from focusing solely on hitting barbarian tribes.

So from that exerpt above we can clearly see that you cant spend the whole game focusing on one specific playstyle like being a researcher because the players who get to the peaceful villages and destroy the barb outposts first will get more research points than the ones turtling in their first city. Rather in the beginning you have to make use of multiple resources and generalize before you can specialize in the later eras.

One last tip before we talk about the beginning of the game, knowledge early on is primarily acquired through civic points leading you to get the +1 knowledge per turn and the elder hut or whatever. It takes alot of resources to build an elder gathering place or hut. Its far more efficient to scout peaceful villages and conquer barb outposts that will give you knowledge than to focus just on building an elder hut. And you get civic points faster when you come across them in barb outposts/peaceful villages. So the main takeway is that turtling and specializing on research, trade or non warfare in the stone age is the dumbest thing you can possibly do.

Picking a map and surviving the stone age

All starts are not equal. If the AI is scouting your region early on then you will struggle more than someone whos region is left alone by the AI. For all the peaceful village the AI finds is one less village you can get resources from. That means less knowledge, less civic points, and less everything. So if you find the AI scouting your area in the very beginning of the game then either kill the AI early on or restart the game.

The best map is the one where the AI doesnt scout you early on and you can kill the closest AI near you in the stone age. If you kill off the AI early on near you that means you can take their land and resources and push your borders farther away.

The second thing to remember is that your main focus should be on building a military and an early economy to sustain it. That means your first cultural point should be used on generating an army and your second cultural point should be used on creating a town near your city. By doing that you can use these extra troops early on and gain more resources by wiping out barb posts. The town should be done second because if you develop land next to the town then you get one piece of gold. If you're lucky enough to get grapes or olives or deer then I suggest you upgrade that first.

In general the clay/pottery technology shouldnt be researched first because extra development points early on spill into more gold at best. But you want more soldiers and scouts because the quicker you can scout out new peaceful villages the quicker you get more knowledge, development points, military points or other resources you might want including labor for one turn. The quicker you clear out barb outposts you get the same deal. Usually the best thing they give is civic points because you can take the extra civic points and spawn a settler or get +1 knowledge which is huge in the stone age instead of having to build an elders hut or gathering house. So the potential opportunities are endless for your playstyle if you prioritize military and scouting over defense and buildings.

The caveat behind all of this though is that the defense tech in the stone age is OP because archers crush barb infantry. Barb infantry is what defends outposts so if you have archers then you can kill the barbs without having to destroy their wall making it OP in clearing outposts without having to rest and heal your troops. Not to mention archers are great at slaughtering AI at this age.

The last thing to remember in the stone age is that if you want to decide what age you want to pick for the iron age i.e age of blood or heroes then the best thing you can do is focus on building the infrastructure leading to greater research rather than focusing on research itself.

You can do this by prioritizing conquering the AI next to you followed by hoarding civic points to unleash your first settler and settle well before anyone else leading to more cities=more research. And building the elder hut after the first person has reached the bronze age. If its you then congratulations but you get a 10% discount for researching from the previous age and another 10% discount for each nation that researched the technology you're currently researching. This enables you to get a 50% discount on the cost to research it making it better to research it later than before.

Post Stone Age strategies in the bronze age

From the second age onwards many things unlock for you enabling more specialization and rewards for such gameplay.

Due to the complex nature of the game itself there is an endless combination of possible strategies. But you have to consider the following questions: am I playing wide or tall? Do i want to become a trader, warrior, researcher or a mixture of them? Once you can answer those two questions then picking a national spirit makes more sense. And making a research plan makes more sense as well.

For example if i want to play tall it makes no sense to pick the Chivalry national spirit or the Warrior national spirit in the second age. For both of them encourage conquest and conquest is what enables you to play wide or have a few cities but many vassals.

Of course if you don't care about playing tall or wide but want to do a mixture then what is more important is picking national spirits that synergize with your overall playstyle. Remember that the stone age and earlier ages prior to being able to play a more specialized playstyle is at most 100 turns unless you're really bad at the game. That's 1/5th of the 500 turn limit at most. After around turn 100 the game rewards you for specializing how you want to play. As a warrior, researcher or trader or mixture.

Honestly my playstyle is the mixture playstyle where i combine different playstyles into one in each game in different ways. To me my source of enjoyment is playing different combinations of playstyles in different ways to beat the game. I find it boring to always stick to playing wide or tall. And in my playthroughs I've always been able to get 8 cities or the maximum allowed number around age 5 or 6 or so with enough culture to unlock culture points every 2-4 turns. To me I prefer culture, civic points and things that encourage a mixed playstyle.

For example in age 2 I chose the Wild Hunters spirit which gives me +2 to meat. But I also lagged behind in research in age 1 to get ahead in age 2 so that I could unlock the age of blood. When you combine the age of blood with Wild Hunters national spirit you can unlock salt houses. Salt houses take 2 slabs of meat and turn it into 10+ food per meat which equates to 20 meat. The initial meat is 5 per slab so you get 30 food in total. I dont know why the game considers gathering food separate from refining it but the food you gather is considered separate from the refinement but added to the total which is why it sounds wonky. And all the intermediate products like flour from the mill for the bakery are ignored or arent added to the total when you convert the wheat into bread.

. It only costs 6 development points for a hunters camp or whatever and it only costs 21 development points for a salt house. So it costs me in total 12+21=32 development points to get 20 food whereas with a mill you need 24 points for 2 plots of farms and 16 more for the mill equating to 40 points. A farm will give you 4 per wheat with +1 wheat innovation unlocked or 8 food for 2 of them and then a mill will give you 12 food. That is 20 in total.

If you have an oven it takes 2 wheat and turns it into two bread which takes 6 and turns it into 10 or basically give you 10 per wheat which is 20 at full capacity. So you would have 28/26 food (depends on if +1 food to wheat innovation is taken) from 4 workers vs 30 food from 3 workers if you have a salt house with the Wild Hunters spirit idea unlocked. Of course you cant just unlock the wild hunters national spirit you have to allocate exploration points to the perk in the wild hunters tree to unlock. You're not going to get it by just picking that particular national spirit alone.

So you see 30 food for 3 workers vs 28 food for 4 workers reveals that when you combine national spirits with certain ages then you get an overpowered combination that saves you labor.

I personally like the Naturalist natural spirit when i start out in a dense forrest because if you have 12 workers on 12 trees then its the same as allocating 6 workers to lumber camps and 6 workers to farms. It balances out without having to use any development points. It becomes further overpowered when you get .5 culture for each person allocated to the forest turning it into a cultural power house.

Later on when bakeries arise the bonus for Wild Hunters goes away especially if you got the +1 culture per hunting camp unlocked, Wild hunters is less impressive. And Naturalists are better than Wild Hunters because prior to guns all units get 3x the defense bonus in a forest making it so that a longsword/broadsword unit can overwhelm a rifleman in a battle. And when you build cities surrounded by forrests the bonus becomes even more overpowered. And because you're not going to turn everything into a lumber camp your .5 culture will add up quickly and turn into 5 or 8 or +10 culture. Whereas when you replace your hunting camps the culture bonus goes away.

So when used correctly there is no wimpy national spirit. I'd say a wild hunter national spirit is useless when you have little prairie or open hunting ground. Also the moundbuilding bonus of only consuming 50% food becomes less impressive in the mid game because its usually religion or sanitation or luxury goods that become the bottleneck in your expansion rather than just food. So there is conditionality to early national spirits in terms of the resources you have around you and that will dictate which one you can use. But if you want a specific playstyle you have to scout the area and reroll the map until you've found an area that is the best for your national spirit.

I've never used moundbuilder and never plan on doing it because to me its only useful for playing tall early on and even then its kind of debatable.

Strategies in the Iron/Age of blood onwards

So after the bronze age ends either you have age of blood, iron or heroes. Age of blood is good with national hunter spirit primarily or playing wide. Age of iron is default and i recommend avoiding because it sets you up for the AI picking the age of plague and screwing you over. Age of heroes is good if you're playing tall or don't want to pick national hunter spirit and want to avoid endless war.

The benefit behind playing wide is that you can take more land early on. But later on towards the midgame you start to get bottlenecks in your culture so that every time you unlock a culture point you have to spend it on creating a town in one of your vassals which gets old after a while. Yet if you want tall vassals like 50+ pops you got to do that. To me its not enjoyable to do the same action 500 turns. You can avoid it through building more cities which leads to having an easier time of generating engineering points. Engineering points allow you to upgrade a town that way you dont have to keep spamming towns everytime your vassal needs another development level to advance. That is why I like to build my cities after i expand when playing wide so that i dont run into such bottlenecks as often.

I've gotten to 24 vassals before and trust me it gets real old after a while building new towns through culture points.

I've also played tall and i like the benefits behind playing tall but early on you get into more bottlenecks like sanitation forcing you to pick mound builders not for food but for sanitation purposes. So to me playing tall is kind of lame early on. But to each their own.

Hopefully this guide has given you some ideas on how to play through the first three ages so as to set you up for success in the later ones. Personally i've been able to conquer the entire continent every time by the end of the third age in each game if i set it up right making it so that if you just follow the ideas in my guide they will make your life infinitely easier.

For mathematicians they get enjoyment out of solving equations in different ways. For me I get enjoyment by playing the game in different ways and beating it using the understanding acquired from such a playstyle. I love to see the world in different ways so as to combine different perspectives into concrete strategies and i feel like playing this game exercises that strength. That's why I enjoy doing it.

[mdeha004]

Well the naturalists also have the advantage of having 3x defense on all unit types until gun units are available. If played right it is almost impossible to lose your towns to an enemy early on.

[skausmaus]

Very good guide. I play similarly but wasn't aware of some of the possibilities you highlight. I'm going to be trying out Naturalists if I start in a densely wooded area next game. Not tried them yet. Lots more to learn and try in this very entertaining game. Thanks for the useful insights and not just your thoughts on naturalists, but other useful info too.