Overview
Some general tips and strategy to guide your deity difficulty playthrough of the Jadwiga’s Legacy scenario to earn the associated achievement. It’s easier than you think.
Introduction
Achievements in Civilization that require you to be playing on the highest difficulty setting, Deity, are pretty imposing sounding and for that reason a lot of players never even attempt them. When those achievements involve a Scenario (like Jadwiga’s Legacy), the truth is that the difficulty level is more about properly leveraging the rules of the scenario than it is about the advantages the game gives to the AI players. Jadwiga’s Legacy is easily winnable on Deity difficulty, and this collection of tips will give you what you need to do just that.
What to know going in
The single most important thing to bear in mind is that the scenario only runs for 60 turns. This isn’t a lot of time, which is a double edged sword. You can’t spend your time reacting to the AI, but instead have to plan in advance of it. It also means you don’t have time for long strategies involving techs/civics that are several levels deep, although they can be a nice bonus if you can manage to unlock them before the end of the scenario. On the positive side, it means the AI doesn’t have a lot of time to recover once you get the jump on it before the scenario ends.
The second most important thing to bear in mind is that the scenario automatically ends with a loss if the city state of Vienna is conquered. And one of the late game invasion spawn points is on the south edge of the map, just a few squares east of Vienna’s position. If you don’t have some way of blocking, slowing or annihilating that force when it spawns, on Deity level it will steamroll the Vienna AI in just a few turns. For that reason I recommend playing as Stanisław Potocki. Potocki starts just northeast of Vienna, allowing you to expand right on top of it and act as it’s defense. If you play as another power the AI playing Potocki might manage to protect Vienna on it’s own, but risking it means potentially losing the scenario right as it approaches it’s end so it’s a risk I don’t recommend.
The third most important thing to understand is that the barbarians aren’t your true enemy, the two other polish civs controlled by the AI are. You have to have a higher score at the end than they do, and you can’t directly act against them. Yes, you have to keep from being overwhelmed by barbarians (laughably easy) and keep the barbarians from taking VIenna (also simple), but you have to do it with the highest score at the end. So keep an eye on the score tab every turn, every other turn. Everything else is meaningless if you can’t keep yourself in the top spot.
Strategy
Okay, so ultimately our goals are:
1. Prevent the barbs from conquering your cities
2. Prevent the barbs from conquering Vienna
3. Have a higher score than the two polish civs controlled by the AI.
Fortunately, there’s a simple strategy that deals with all three of those goals: city spam, with each city spamming an encampment, and a crossbowman stationed in each city and encampment.
That’s literally it. Here’s the breakdown on why it works:
1. Prevent the barbs from conquering your cities
If you chose to play as Potocki you’ll easily have time at the beginning of the scenario to get 4-5 or more cities started before you have more than a barbarian or two come your way. Once your cities are started, get them going on industrial zones, water mills and walls, but produce crossbowmen throughout and try not to leave any of your cities exposed for longer than neccessary. You’ll usually have enough time to move a unit from a garrison in one city to another in time to head off any barb advances, but try to fill up the ranks as quickly as you can because shortly you’ll be dealing with groups of 6-8 barbs at one time. But by that time, you’ll have cities with encampments supporting them with crossbowmen stationed in each providing more than adequete defence to deter them and keep them getting through or causing problems.
The only units you want to garrison with are crossbowmen (and, towards the end of the scenario if you get them available, field cannons). Crossbowmen are the only military unit you need and the only ones you should build. You will garrison them in a city or an encampment and they will never move again once placed there. The enemies will come to you or through you, and should never be chased down except in the unlikely event that a number of them make it past you to Vienna at the same time. Don’t let that happen.
You’ll need colonists, and the earlier the better. Considering buying one right on turn 2.
You don’t need builders. The constant influx of barbs means improvements are only going to survive for a very short time, and it will be too dangerous to constantly be sending builders out to repair them. You don’t need iron and you don’t need horses because you’re only building crossbowmen. You don’t need niter (when you get the tech for it) because you won’t be building musketmen or bombards.
2. Prevent the barbs from conquering Vienna
The easiest way to do this is to follow the above strategy, but just make sure to plant a city just east of Vienna (and just west of the mountain range along that part of the map). Between the city, encampment and the terrain somewhat restricting the barbarians, you’re covered.
3. Have a higher score than the two polish civs controlled by the AI.
The main component of the scenario’s score is your empire rating, so the more cities and land you have the higher your score is. City spam solves that goal wonderfully, although it does mean that by scenario’s end you will need somewhere between 6 and 9 cities to outscore your opponents. If they expand aggressively, you may run out of available land to found cities on. In that case, feel free to use your military engineers to build forts adjacent to tiles they control (but within your own territory). That culture bombs those tiles, stealing them for your civ – raising your score and lowering theirs
Watch the score screen regularly. If one of the AI civs is gaining on you, it means you must make the effort to expand with a few more cities or gobble their territory with culture bomb forts.
City States, Financial Crisis and Finding God
City States
There are three city states in this scenario, one of which (Vienna) you have to keep alive. Needless to say this should be the city state you send most of your envoys to. You really want suzerain status here if you can manage it, as a failsafe to fall back on if things go wrong if nothing else.
Gdansk is a commercial bonus city state and you’ll want to send at least an eventual envoy or two here at least (for reasons that will become apparent in the next section), but sending any here is a risk. There’s a very real chance that Gdansk will be conquered during the scenario, potentially quite early. So I don’t recommend developing that relationship too far, as the loss of envoys if they get conquered can be painful.
Finance (or, Hey Brother, Can You Spare A Defense Budget?)
About 20 turns in you’re going to start to feel a real cash flow problem between building and unit upkeep if you haven’t been developing commercial districts and trade, and since you’ve probably been scrambling to get your cities and defenses established you probably haven’t been. Not developing tiles with builders certainly doesn’t help the situation, but as I mentioned previously the life expectency of tile improvements in this scenario is too tiny to be worth it. This financial drain can quickly become crippling and lead to your entire army deserting you if you run out of gold, which is clearly not something you want to happen. So realize that as quickly as you can transition from early set up and unit building you have to get your cash flowing by building commercial districts and their improvements, as well as civic cards that cut exenses or raise revenue.
This is really only a problem if you aren’t prepared for it. If you’re forewarned and expecting it, it’s just a bump in the road.
Religion
There’s really only one good pantheon choice here, Lady of the Reeds, but it’s only good if you get swampland near your starting position. If you don’t, feel free to pick whatever suits you.
It is potentially worth it, however, to develop religious districts and their improvements with the goal of switching governments to theocracy once that becomes available to you. The ability to buy military units with faith points can be very handy if you need to produce a few very quickly, but it’s up to you if it’s worth it as I didn’t find it neccessary. If you do go for it, make sure to choose some faith boosting civic cards to make the most of it.
Wrap Up
And that’s pretty much it. City spam, fixed crossbowmen garrison defenses, cover Vienna, keep an eye on the score and expand/grab territory if you start to drop below someone else, and don’t go broke.
It’s not hard. I played through the scenario on Settler three times to get the achievements associated with each playable civ in the scenario, but armed with the knowledge from those playthroughs I was able to defeat it on Deity on my first attempt. You might try the same path, if you want all the achievements from this scenario. It’s certainly easiest if you’re already familar with it before diving in to Deity.
I don’t claim this is the only approach that will work to get this achievement, nor do I claim it’s the best. But if you follow it you should have a relatively easy time obtaining the God-Like Legacy achievement.
Have fun, good luck, and don’t be intimidated by the difficulty level. Worst thing to happen is that you’ll waste 60 turns; I do that looking for good starting locations in the regular game all the time 😀