Civ 5 Fall of Rome Pax Romana Aeternum Deity Achievement
Channel: Andrew FLDC
Date: 2020-01-23

(Source: handheld phone video) Civ 5 Fall of Rome "Pax Romana Aeternum" achievement: have all of your original cities & the highest score at the end of the 70 turn scenario on Deity. 



A technique that ended up working for me as Eastern Rome was to focus on producing cheap, expendable units in order to occupy territory. The first 10 turns are very important. Setting Antioch to starve (locking max production tiles) to get a bowman within 3 turns was important, as was setting Alexandria to starve to speed out the first few units.  I was able to hold Mistra, Seleucia and Melitene, keeping my city losses to Trebizond (Hun), Theodosiopolis (Persia), Sirmium & Naissus (Goths). 



Policy order was Neglected Infrastructure, Rise of Serfdom, Currency Debasement, Barbarian Conscription. By spamming cheap scouts/warriors at first (and keeping wounded ones around as disbanding choices), I was able to keep producing good units such as bowmen, dromon, cataphracts and the occasional catapults. As a rule of thumb, if it couldn't be built in 4-5 turns, build a cheaper unit. At points, my GPT was -100 or worse and I would have a unit disbanded every turn. By the time I had to take Barbarian Conscription, I had more Great Generals than I actually needed to make up for the -10% fighting penalty.


I had captured Persia's capital at turn 36 and was fairly confident at that point that I would be able to get the achievement, so the approach after securing those 3 key cities of Mistra, Selucia & Melitene was to be aggressive against Persia and knock them out as soon as possible, razing every city as I went and starving them. 



The Goths were held at bay and later pushed back by creating a few key forts with your legions while building  roads to keep the troops coming in. Two dromons were needed to help push back the Huns and recapture Trebizond.


In this playthrough, Persia ended up taking Theodosiopolis which was unusual. Perhaps the fighting between the Hun & The Persians weakened each other. The other strategy I used for those two cities was to try to wound units but not kill them, trying to trick the enemy AI to go for each other's wounded units first (instead of my cities). 



By the time I had Persia under control and felt confident that I could hold off the subsequent waves of attack, cities I felt I could take "offline" started building markets and then afterwards, switched to gold focus. I stopped having money issues in the final third of the game.



This was a fun challenge and it took me quite a while to find the right approach that worked for me. Other online resources (like the map at kalle-online) were very helpful, but my approaches have ended up being a little different. In this case, it was all about those cheap units and the economy.


Thanks for watching!