Hello, I'm Roman Holiday, maker of the AI mod for Civ 6. I have quite a few hours in Civ 6, Civ 5, a lot of time in the development files. Based on the early access I've had to Civ 7 for quite a few weeks now, thank you so much again to 2K and Fraxis for giving that to me as part of the Civ show, and spending a very, very long time studying all the potential combos and other hidden effects, like the Civ and Leader start biases in the files. In this video, I'm going to show you the top 10 most broken combinations of Leaders, Civs, and importantly, mementos for the most game-breaking stacking combinations for the antiquity and exploration ages.
Civ 7 is deliberately not a balanced game. That's because in my opinion and the developer's opinion, a game where every single ability is perfectly balanced and there are no combos is boring. Kind of reminds me of what happened to Babylon and BBG. I can understand why they did that, but it was so fun to be able to get tanks in the classical era and troll your friends. This is why I have to show you the top 10 most broken combos in Civ 7 for the antiquity and exploration eras.
Now, you may be asking, what on earth is a memento? And no, this is not a story told from the end to the beginning in reverse chronological order about a man of short-term memory loss trying to find out who murdered his wife. No, that's a very good film, though.
You should go and watch it. Memento is the new bonuses that you earn from leveling up certain leaders. And now, when I first saw this, I was a bit skeptical.
I'm like, another mechanic to, you know... to try to make you play the game more. Yeah, it felt very EA-like.
I was a bit concerned. Even the leveling up sound sounds a bit like something you get in Battlefront 2. I was a bit skeptical at first, but having now played with them, I kind of realized that, you know, Civ's a game that you spend absolutely ages on anyway. And what they unlock are very, very OP bonuses that you can get, like a triple combo of the Civ, the Leader, and the Mementos as well. I'm going to show you all of the best combinations.
But you might be thinking, Roman, I don't want to play. Two three hundred hours as Friedrich to get the level 9 memento or to you know to level your lead up to level 40 50 to get the the civ wide mementos Well good news you don't have to because there's already a mod that unlocks all of the mementos in one click so So yeah, I'll link that in the description. Thank you so much that all right number 10 We have to come sir This is especially op and single player because in multiplayer people might take out city states really compete with you for them right but In single player, the AI actually gets no influence scaling on the high difficulties.
So you can really go ham and take most of the city-states. Now, this is the OP bit. To Comp's ability, one combat strength for every single city-state you're suzerain of.
Then, you stack it with the War Club Memento, that's also one combat strength for every city-state you're suzerain of. And then, you stack it with the Greek tradition that gives your hoplites one combat strength again for every city-state you're suzerain of. All of a sudden, you're suzerain of four city-states.
And you have plus 12 combat strength on all your hoplites. In addition, if you have 4 city states, that would be 8 food, 4 production per settlement, in addition to 8 culture, as long as you use Tecumseh's ability combined with the Potesk Watt memento. And that would double to 16 food, 8 production per settlement in the Expiration Age.
So, with 4 city states, not only do your hoplites get plus 12 combat strength so they can demolish, Everybody at battle at the same time back at home your city your cities are getting eight food for production Per settlement and you're getting a culture from the Greek tradition This is nuts and to top it all off Greece has extra influence from buildings free influence from the civility And they get a policy card that gives you 50% towards converting city-states This is stupid Make sure to explore as much as of the map as possible to be as many cities days as possible and this combination of will be insane. OP combo number 9, although some may argue this is far far more powerful than that, is Ahsoka, World Renouncer. Why is Ahsoka so good? Well in Civ 7 there's a city settlement limit. Right, so for every 1 you go over this limit, so say you have 6 cities when your limit is 5 in the antiquity era, you're gonna get minus 5 happiness in all cities.
However, this caps out at minus 30 happiness. So as a soaker, a super happiness focused civ, you can actually go just way over that cap and ignore the happiness penalty and just have thus unlimited cities. And because the AI doesn't tend to center that many cities, especially some AIs go for tool and leave large parts of the map with tons of OP resources unsettled, this strategy is ridiculous.
You can just get like, you know, twice as many cities as the next person. Now, how do you make this work? First of all, Ahsoka gives all buildings one happiness adjacency for all improvements.
That's really good. Every single building is getting additional happiness adjacency. That means it can stack if you've got multiple improvements next to one building, or multiple buildings next to one improvement.
There's also potential for a ton- More food if your cities are happy. Then, when you combine that with Moria, that's a guaranteed 6 happiness from the two buildings, in addition to the science and culture they provide, another 10% happiness from completing the quarter, and just the 2 happiness already immediately from your unique settler. This is all going to boost food significantly, and you're going to get to celebrations much quicker for that 10% food. Now, here's where the combo comes in. You go for Saki Branch for 25% towards happiness buildings So you build those two buildings and get the unique cause that even quicker Then you put in Charles Adonis heel for two culture and free gold on on all of those unique Buildings you've built giving you huge culture and gold yields and then in the expiration age you swap that out for Kasanagi Hopefully I said that correctly That would be giving you six culture per happiness building and you would have spammed these everywhere six culture minus two science per happiness building in addition to the free culture and free gold you've gotten them already from the other memento.
You want to use this to go for a culture victory in the exploration age and this should be super achievable considering you're going to have an absolute ton of cities over the city cap hopefully. Next up is Harriet Tubman. Now she's one you definitely want to forward settle your friends in multiplayer with because if they try attacking you that plus five war support you immediately get is crippling.
and you know i like stacking bonuses this is where we add in the anti macavel which gives you another two free war support as soon as they declare war and then anchors as well that's one more war support that can be if you declare or they declare now if you really want to troll your friends in multiplayer you could go for persia who get 30 towards gate of all nations giving another two war support on all wars so the total war support if they declare war on you would be plus 10 crippling But realistically, I'll definitely pick Grease. That 3 influence per turn on the Palace means you can put that into combating the opponent's own influence investment into the War Support. Especially since the Parthlon building is such a solid creation of influence.
Especially when you're almost guaranteed to spawn in rough terrain. Because of Harriet Tubman's strong 20 start bias towards spawning in vegetated terrain. Obviously for her other ignore movement penalty ability.
That's also OP. And you can put... even more investment into espionage actions against your friends which are already quite an op mechanic like stealing technology and hindering their military and seeing where their military are now you can put even more influence at half cost into that next up is katherine the great another really op leader i mean the list goes on she's really interesting because she has a start bias of 10 for the tundra so you're pretty likely to spawn there you And that's one of the things that makes it OP, in fact, you can just settle a ton of cities, spam culture, and then have good science as well. I would like to say somebody else, but weirdly the best civ for her, just like Tubman, is Greece again. That's because the Odeon and the Parthlon churn out so much culture, especially if they're adjacent to wonders, and the really powerful bonuses towards city-states that we just talked about actually can help you get some even more OP culture bonuses that you can then convert into science.
Now, as Catherine, you want to get as many codices in the Antiquity Era, because remember, they count as great works. And every single great work gives you two culture per age. So that already 10 codices is 20 culture in the Antiquity Age that then gets converted to science. Make sure to convert these to cities and then combine this with Great Imperial Crown, giving 5%.
Science per great work. And then Eagle Banner giving an extra 5% science efficiency. And you get every single city having 25% more science and 25% more science efficiency on top of this. This leader alone is busted, but this 7 leader combo is something else.
At number 6 is Machiavelli. If you've played him. you'll know what I'm talking about because if you send an AI deal and it gets rejected it's 100 gold if they accept it it's 50 gold influence is already perhaps one of the most powerful systems in the game so the fact that you're getting a win more mechanic fluence like influence is even better than it currently is not only do you get money on deals but you also get free influence per age seems pretty good to me stack that with grace we get free influence per turn on the palace and you get the op Parthenon building as well and then my two favorite mementos for this are bifocals 50 influence whenever you do a tech and civic mastery and a lot of the tech and civic masteries are really good so you want to go for them anyway so that's a lot of free influence really really good at the start of the game and then golden seal stone one influence per age on science buildings i mean library is a building that you want to rush anyway so the fact that you get influence on it That is good. You probably want to swap out bifocals for something else in the exploration era because 50 influence is not that good anymore.
But otherwise, what an OP combination and you're going to have so much gold in the antiquity era that you're going to be able to blow away anybody else. This build is particularly good against the AI. Probably my favourite leader combo in the whole game just because it's so satisfying to see the AI reject or accept your deals and just have that money pouring in.
And one final thing, in the most recent patch... Frax has made a huge balance change to city-states, something that you're going to get tons of influence towards. City-states are no longer deleted on era transition, so all of the tons of influence you're going to get in the antiquity era is going to pay off for the exploration of modern eras as well.
Because you have so much influence you can control most of the city-states and those bonuses are going to stick for the rest of the game. This is a huge buff to Machiavelli and Greece in general. Next up is Potato's favourite leader. If Potato had his way, he would play this combination every single game.
Augustus makes towns a lot better. You get two production in the capital for every town. You can purchase culture buildings in towns, some of the best buildings, especially in the early game.
And the craziest bit, 50% gold for purchasing all buildings in towns. So suddenly purchasing buildings, you know, all you need to do is just focus gold and just forget about converting your towns to cities. Stack that with Rome's one culture on every single city centre in a town.
The ability to easily make cities by promoting their army command to level 3. And best of all, the Basilica, which gains one influence for every adjacent culture building, something that you can buy for half gold. And the Basilica gives you gold as well. So not only do you get adjacency for these culture buildings, but you get a load of gold towards purchasing them. Literally the ideal building. And the adjacency is influence.
You have one of the most powerful currencies in the early game. So, as a strategy, you want to really spam those towns and really focus on that gold. to buy as many buildings as possible. Also worth attacking some independent people with your legions and your army commander so you can level them up to level three and not only have a stronger army commander but be able to get some free cities out of that very quickly as well. To top it all off you want to use Clippus Virtuitus to increase that production you get for every town in the capital from two to three.
I mean that that's just insane. If you quickly get out four towns that's immediately an extra 12 production in the capital. Super powerful.
and then you've got to have breastplate two food per age in towns now this is a card i would i wouldn't even say to swap out like keep it in i mean in the next age there's going to be four food in all of your cities especially if you don't get the economic golden age that allows your cities to remain and not be converted back to towns not that you're going to have that many cities anyway as rome but another reason that's great is i love food because obviously population is one of the things that always remains in the next age so any investment in your population now is going to pay off throughout the entire game. And finally, when you're swapping out Clippius Virtuitous in the Exploration era, if you don't know what to pick for your memento, of course, I'd always advise you to pick one specific to your situation, but this one, Glass Amonica, is a pretty good general one, 10% science and happiness, because you're pretty likely to be in alliance, considering that at least one AI is normally pretty friendly, even on deity. Number four, we have Benjamin Franklin. Now, in Civ V and Civ VI, one of the big...
Factors in determining how good a leader or civ was, was the consistency. And my god, this guy has insane consistency. Build as many production and science buildings as you can, especially if you're playing my recommended civ, which is the Mayans. That kunar and the bonus on vegetated terrain from your leader will get you a lot of science very quickly, meaning you can get more production buildings that you're at half cost towards.
Now, Franklin is very versatile. You can use it with a range of mementos and strategies, but Golden Seal Stone is so powerful. That influence is going to allow you to do a lot more research agreements, which combos directly with the fact that Franklin is a diplomatic scientific civ.
And so you can spend all that influence on a million research agreements for dramatically higher science, especially at the start of the game. It's weird how in Civ 7, the type of leader which affects the type of trade deals actually makes a huge difference, because for me, the scientific research agreement trade deal is so good. You increase your science from 10 to 16. from the very start of the game basically.
Secondly, I wouldn't normally recommend this, but one scientific attribute point is actually really good here, because you'll find when you're playing Maya, Benjamin, and Franklin, the 25% towards tech masteries is so good towards the end of the antiquity era, when you're just doing all of the masteries to get codices, obviously. And then the 15% production towards buildings stacks so well with your existing 50% production towards production buildings. So as Franklin, I would pick this for the antiquity era, and then Do as many of the science quests as possible to get as many scientific attributes as quickly as possible. Because not only do you get a strong bonus now, but some of those later scientific attributes are really, really powerful.
Number 3 is Shalameen and this man is particularly powerful in single player where the sheer amount of units you get you can use to exploit the AI's cities. The so called father of Europe and this is immediately giving me like PTSD back to Basil in Civ 6 Thanks Carl! So, a shuttle in the main, as soon as you unlock any cavalry unit, you get two, three of them whenever you enter celebration. Already, without focusing on it, you can get a celebration pretty quickly.
Like, they're pretty regular things, like every 10 to 15 turns kind of thing. Additionally, you get five combat strength for every cav unit when you're in the celebration, and military and science buildings receive a happiness adjacency for being next to a quarter. To quickly explain what a celebration is, the more excess global happiness you have, the quicker it comes, So you can, you know, you can have them every three or four turns if you really stack it, or potentially even less. For me, this leader's already incredibly OP, and the best antiquity-age combination has to be Moria. They're one of the only two antiquity civs to have a unique cav unit in this, which I won't try to pronounce.
Giving you an extra five combat strength against fortified districts, i.e. people, cities, and the fortifications they can now build around them in Civ 7. You can build a lot. You can build like four or five, and sometimes the AI does as well. They ignore Zone of Control so they can just run rampant without any barriers to their movement.
And you get two of them, of course, whenever you have a celebration. Which is a lot easier as Moria already because as you get the Nagarika. Now, unfortunately, you don't start with this unit. You only start with a founder.
So you can't start with this unique settler, which is a shame. But every single town you make gets plus two happiness straight away. Additionally, the Moria has an OP unique quarter that...
That, um... immediately gives you plus 10% happiness in this settlement. So you can get those celebrations even more quickly.
Now, how do you build a unique quarter? It's very simple. You build two of these following two buildings in the same district.
So districts can only have maximum of two buildings. Make sure to put these two in the same district. Do not put one in a district that already has, say like one granary in it, because that district will become full and you won't get the unique quarter.
So put these two together and you're going to get free happiness Free happiness, 10% from the quarter, and of course the 2x happiness just from founding the city in the first place. Even better, both of these buildings are ageless, unlike most of the buildings in Sub 7, other than the Chad's Granary that is. So they won't get deleted when you go on to the next era.
So you're going to get to keep the 6x happiness, and the sciences and culture adjacency, and the 10% happiness for the rest of the game. And then, you're definitely going to want to stack that with joyous, that means happiness in French. Had to look that up. Um...
Ha ha! I'm more of a German learner. I know nothing about French. Ha ha! Big up my Duolingo buddy, Riddick Acidic.
But, you're gonna have at least... 10 Cav units. Probably 20, right? If you've got 20 Cav units, that's 40 happiness per age.
Well, 40 happiness in the... Antiquity era and then ATC happiness and exploration. That's ridiculous So you're definitely gonna want to have that and then I would definitely go for Don Son drum declaring any war within any other civilization starts a celebration So not only are you gonna have a celebration every three or four turns anyway because of your happiness, but if you don't have one You can just declare a war and you would get another one. So You're gonna have a million cav units spawning everywhere And all of them are gonna have plus five combat strength. So this is just OP, Basel PTSD, broken combination.
Now to continue this snowball into exploration, all you need to do is improve three horse resources, but if you don't spawn near enough of them, just have three siege units and you will unlock Mongolia, where you get the Kashig that heals 15 HP after defeating an enemy unit. It's a ranged unit and it also ignores zone of control as well. You also get unique army commander that gives a 50% flanking bonus to cav units, one of the strongest combat strength bonuses you can add easily.
And you get a unique building that restores movement. So if you're playing a war near your own land, you're definitely going to get to just attack over and over and over. You also gain one extra military point for the explosion age for every conquered settlement you have on the homelands, which is exactly what you're going to be doing anyway as Charlemagne.
So it works perfectly. into his combination you also unlock normans automatically at charlemagne if you if you prefer exploring distant lands that's your kind of play style and they do have a unique cav unit that gives free combat strength against slower units and they do have a happiness building but i do think overall they probably don't play as well into the military play style of charlemagne so mongolia would be my recommendation and finally the late game combo with all of these celebrations has to be dojo onsen Spiffing Brit actually found out about this. He actually has multi-page documents on every page. Every single modifier in the game, of course he does There's actually a requirement bug with this modifier So it's not detecting properly to only put it in the one city instead it applies to all cities What what that means for you is whatever you have a celebration. This doesn't give one population in one city as it's supposed to.
It currently gives one population in every city whenever you have a celebration. So you're going to be able to get like, well, like 10 population and like 30 or 40 turns in every single city. This is, this is ridiculous. And for me, that's what.
what brings us overall to one of the best in the game. I thought long and hard about this but number two has to be Confucius especially for multiplayer where I feel like attacking your friends is a lot harder and the rewards are a lot lower for that military victory. 25% growth rate on cities is so powerful because population and food is one of the main things that you're going to keep era to era. So if you have some massive cities that's gonna be retained or they might be converted to towns But they're still retained for the next era Now it's a no-brainer to combine this with Goose societies because not only does this give you a ton of food But that adjacency bonus 50% of it is converted into specialist yield when you go to add the plus two science Specialists you get from Confucius very quickly so a ton of food and a ton of yields As Confucius you really want to focus on as much adjacency use for buildings as possible So make sure to build those wonders because almost all buildings have an OP wonder adjacency. So build lots of wonders as well.
As the Mississippians, you also have the super strong Burning Arrow unit. Setting tiles on fire and providing insane defensive abilities, especially in multiplayer. The Pot Cop will also give you a mountain of extra food which you can then combine with your growth bonus. For the exploration era, I would consider either picking the Incans or the Shawnee depending on your spawn location.
Full momentum as you- absolutely have to pick brush and scroll this is ridiculous i mean you can very quickly get like two specialists giving you an extra 10% growth rate on top of the base at 25% and all of the other food bonuses that you've accumulated. And for the second memento, it would actually go for the expansionist attribute because the first bonus 25% production towards settlers is already really good. And if you can get to the second or third, that's when the Confucius snowball really gets going.
And my final tip, this is actually valid for all sibs, but even more important here. If you do not get the economic golden age, so you see you finish the economic victory in antiquity by getting 20 resources. You don't keep all your cities. In fact, they all get converted to towns other than your capital.
You have to make sure that you choose the free. switch capitals ability because that means you actually get to keep two cities rather than one as confucius this is op because the growth rate only gets applied to cities not towns but good to know for any leader of course number one we have lafayette plus rome now this simple but broken combo gives you absurd combat strength the basis of this combo is that lafayette gets plus one combat strength for every tradition in the government and legions get two combat strength for every tradition in the government so that stacks to plus three giving you a total of plus 12 combat strength against anything super easily on your legions to put that into context going from here bronze working to here iron working which takes like the entire antiquity age in fact if you have bad science you probably won't even ever get iron working going from here to here tier one legion or tier two legion to tier three that's only a five combat strength increase This is 12 combat strength already without any other stacking bonuses. Not only that, you can spam the reform endeavor to get sometimes more policy slots than you actually have policies available. Rome also has some very nice traditions. Not only that, but his bonuses get stronger into the next age.
Although you lose the Rome ability, the amount of tradition that you have keeps increasing and the effects of culture and happiness on every single settlement are doubled when they're in distant lands retaining that op bonus into the next exploration era and then for mementos you're going to really want to stack that combat strength as much as possible war club op one combat strength for every suzerain it's actually pretty easy to get suzerain and the ai does not get yield scaling at all on deity for influence so you can really just every single neutral or friendly city state, well I say city state, they're called independent people, you meet, you can start that progress of turning them into a city state, it takes about 15-20 turns, and you can actually convert quite a few, and as of patch 101, patch 2, city states now remain into the next era, so this is even more OP. You can stack that with another combat strength related bonus, like Rowani, or Kron von Friedrich, the first, and the crazy thing about this is, by this point, we're starting to stack. Super high combat strength and you're getting to the point where it's exponential the more combat strength You're going over the more likely you are to get into one-shot territory and because of the city cap Military, especially in single player with the AI, is probably already the best strategy by far.
You can only have what set them up cities, maybe say seven cities in the Antiquity Age, depending on the text and civics you've researched, right? So if you use this OP stacking combat strength from traditions and mementos, you can take like 15 pop cities from the AI. So the cities that you have within your cap are a lot stronger than just the one population city that you'd settle yourself and probably have a lot more resources of really OP mechanics.
mechanic in Civ 7, helping you get the economic resource victory and the military victory very easily. Anyway, that's all I have time for today, but if you're still watching, if you watch the entire thing, you're a legend. Don't forget to subscribe, and I will see you in the next one.
Thank you so much.