In Deity(500%), an average villager costs something like 80-100 food per year and ~10 herbs and ~2 stone tools. This means a villager will have to produce something worth ~1500 coins to cover the cost of himself and anything beyond this will be your net economic growth. As you can see at least 80% of the cost of living is food, even for Aztec with 10% reduction. So the greatest challenge in deity is maintaining food supply since you will not be able to fulfill it by any sort of trading.

Based on previous calculation, your early game focus should be how to tech into middle age and access either one of the most efficient food sources in this game, the advanced bread bakery or deepsea fishing. Japanese does not have an option because Sushi is garbage in this game. Meanwhile, the Company Act card allows you to get 20% tariff reduction in middle age, which means you can trade for all the necessary flour and construction material like bricks or iron bars.

For the version I am writing about you have 5 civs available, Duchy, Emirate, Norse, Japan and Aztec. For a simple tier list: T0 Norse, T1 Emirate, T2 Duchy&Aztec, T3 Japan.

Cold resist means you can survive in forest&grassland or anywhere hotter without using any fuel. Wood yield is also good free bonus. Norseman has the most efficient bread bakery in this game.

-20% trading fee is the best perk in this game, you will be super rich just by selling leather in the early game and your transition to trading company will be smooth in middle age. -50% wood cutting yield is fine cause you can get all necessary wood using the buying wood card from your level2 town center, just remember to buy extra clay when you start the game.

Basically blank template, potato could be useful but the Duchy bread maker is complete garbage, basically 2 advanced Duchy bread bakeryt= 1 advanced Norse bread bakery due to some stupid villager AI and building model issues.

-10% food cost sounds great, but corn is stupid cause it yields less than wheat and you have to make flour with it because you cant afford 5x price trading building.

Rice is a good crop in early game and luxury for Japan is really easy. However, Japan does not have bread bakery and sushi shop is completely useless, its mid game food supply relies solely on deepsea fishing until you get Ramen, which is also not great.

To summarize, if you want to have a taste of deity I recommend you choose Norse, if you really love trading and have an idea of how Emirate works you can also try it.

If you are not doing some sort of challenge, Forest or Grassland&Savanna will be your ideal choice.

Your starting location should have access(within 1~3 province distance) to all following resources:
1.A mountain for stone mining
2.Either cannabis or tulip, ideally both
3.A river

Optional
1.Fertile farmland
2.Access to the sea(A river connected with the ocean also counts)
3.As few mountains as possible, you only want 1 mountain for stone mining
4.As many Boar Burrows and Tribes as possible

Starting in forest means you want to use farming as major food source, so fertile land (Province with cannabis or tulip is usually fertile as well) is preferred and you should place your TC in adjacent province so your TC and houses will not occupy the best farmland.
Starting in grassland means hunting is your major food sources. Choose hunting lodge efficiency and grassland roamer as your biome bonus. Ranching is too costly for early game, even with 85% bonus. Upgrade your TC to get grassland roamer immediately after starting the game, then buy as many cheap provinces to boost your income. Place your TC close to forest and farmland because you need the wood and farmland for herbs, do not start in the middle of a giant steppe. Then place your hunting lodge to the grassland side and farmland to the forest side, houses in between them.

Buy extra food(120->150~200) to make sure you survive until the Early Autumn, you can slightly reduce tool counts or medicine to get extra money to buy expensive lands. You can buy additional wood or clay if you start with civ that needs a breeder to start farming (Duchy has wheat seed as starting option, if you want trading post then also you also need a breeder).

Always buy extra 100-200 wood/clay, tool can be reduced to 150~180 but do not reduce medicine (grassland somehow costs more medicine than forest, IDK why). You dont need extra food if you place hunting lodges right away. Get as many coins as possible so you can buy empty province and get +20 income from grassland roamer.

You start the game with 15 villagers, which means you need at least~1200 food production per year to survive. I recommend only using farm and hunting lodge as food sources. Fishing is acceptable if you start in Boreal&Tundra with winter fishing, otherwise no. Mushroom farm is complete useless and fruit gatherer is only needed to provide bonus to hunting lodge (Just place it next to hunting lodge you will get the +30% buff, you dont even need to build it).

Seeding starts in Early Spring and stop in Late Summer, which means 2 seasons for seeding and 1 season for harvesting. As a result, you only need a single farmer for ~120 tiles of farmland (2 farmers in default). This formula also applies to larger farm, you only need half of default farmer to achieve full efficiency.

Before you finish herb farming research, you can build any type of breeder(tulip, cannabis, grape etc) to unlock farmland and get a crop seed. Generally, if you farm in fertile land 1 farmer will be able to feed 2.5 people (120 tile wheat farm yields something like 180~200 wheat). This means you should aim to farm 400-600 tiles in Year 0 if you start in Forest. So build smaller farms and farms before houses to make sure you finish building and seeding in Year 0. Then, expand your farm every winter to keep up with population growth and assign tasks for farmers in winter.

Hunting is the fastest food income but unstable. The way work modes for hunting lodge work are that they add 50% efficiency(sustainable) or reduce 50% efficiency(poison), for a full upgraded hunting lodge you have 145% efficiency in normal mode, so poison arrow only reduce meat drop by 1/3 instead of 1/2. Further, if you have the grassland bonus you only lose 1/4 of the drop in poison arrow. In extreme case I had 2 hunting lodges produces 4000 meat per year in grassland, which means 1 hunter can feed 10 people!. Generally for grassland opener 2~3 hunting lodges should be enough for 25 people, but remember hunting yield will decrease every year, so make sure you transit into semi-farming at 40~50 population. On the other hand, forest opener can also build 1-2 hunting lodge for additional food and leather.

Do not use medicine gatherer, complete garbage.

I recommend research herb farming as your first technology, this way you will finish research before the Spring of Year 1 and you can start planting herbs. Remember you need 10 herbs per person and 1 herb farmer yields ~120 herbs. So 1 herb farmer per 10 people if you don't want to see them crawling on the road for being sick.

Always remember to tick off the wood after you build your first house !

Do not use coal mine anytime in the game, useless compare to charcoal burner.

You can build a charcoal burner if you do not want people to die in winter, but only turn it on when temperature in <0 °C. This is not necessary unless you start in Boreal or Tundra, a few people may die but I call it natural selection.


One tool workshop can supply 30~40 people without any upgrade. It is the major cost of stone in early game so I suggest you insert 2 sustainable card to reduce the cost. You can get stone by mining the stone deposit on the ground, quarry is expensive and inefficient if you don't fully upgrade it and insert all card slot. You can also try to buy bricks and iron ores by trading to upgrade it or make crude iron tools in Dark Age.


Selling leather is your major source of income. Leather is useless before you have tailor and you can get plenty from hunting. If you have access to the sea, you can consider choosing investment card instead of trading post because you want trading port (Trading Port have 300 capacity compare to the 180 capacity for Trading Post for the same upkeep). Things like fishing or mining will make you really poor.

Middle age: 10 level2 houses = ~40 pops + 1 type of tier 1 luxury

Enlightment: 30 level4 houses = ~150 pops + 3 types of tier 1 luxury

Industrial: 50 level6 houses = ~300 pops + 3 types of tier1 + 3 types of tier 2 luxury

You should prepare the luxury before you have enough population to age up and save science point for it. Any luxury you get from farming should be planted 1 year in advance obviously. So you should start planting tulip or cannabis once you have 25~30 pops, a single 120tile farmland will be enough for you to advance to middle age. This is your first priority because granary+windmill+building combo will give you 65% bonus in farming. You should aim for middle age before Year 3 (Because I got into middle age in Year 3 even when starting in Tundra).

Speed running: I suggest you start in grassland with a close tulip&cannabis. I usually age up in Year 1 winter after I harvested the tulip. Any luxury made in industry will slow your tech because worker will take 1 complete batch to a single house instead of distributing them. So a furniture workshop will have to produce 10 batches before you can age up.

Once you get into the middle age, you need to start planning your industry, agriculture and residence area. You no longer have the risk of game over. However, you need to be careful about population traps. A rapid growth in population or child/adult ratio could kill half of your population by starving, even when you have perfectly healthy food sources. This is because a lack of tools or herbs will make your worker very inefficient and trigger stupid AI behavior, resulting your farmer stop planting or harvesting anything and roam around the street. You should always maintain the supply of necessities for efficient worker.

You now have 2 primary goals, building a profitable trade network and industry. All you need to do now is to get baking or deepsea fishing technology. For bakery, you should buy all the flour instead of grinding them. The only purpose of windmill is to provide 10% bonus to nearby farms, do not use it unless you are playing Aztec. This also mean you need trading companies and as low trading fee as possible. The maximum reduction in trading fee for middle age is 26%(20% company act + 6% upgrade), which means 0% trading fee for Emirate and 13% for every other civs. This means you can buying all the construction materials like bricks and raw materials so your villager only works on the most profitable industry. Remember to place a market inside your industrial area so stupid AI won't go all the way back home for food and then come back to business.

For research point, get as many types of luxury as possible and make sure you use the home brew card.

I hope you find this guide useful for the thousands of villagers starved to death when I tried different ways to play Deity. So far I have also tried Fishing opening in Tundra and Ranching opening in grassland, both can work but your life will be rough. The biome bonus in Jungle or Desert seemed to be complete useless from what I have found If there is any other opening or suggestion to me please put it in the comment.

1.The herb cost seemed to be reduced for Tlatoa for the same 10% as food.

2.The wood price has been increased from 6/w to 9/w. But there is a problem, the wood you get from 'buy wood' card is still 6/w, so there is a 50% profit you can make out of 30% or less tariff.

3.The dev presented you a new solution to systematically eradicate children who do nothing except eating. All you have to do is to switch off any fuel during the winter, as children are now much more susceptible to cold than adult, they will die much faster. Thus, you can purge excess children population every winter while keeping the adults from immigrants.

4.Emirate got nerfed from -50% wood to -70%, remember to upgrade to lv2 TC and use the 'buy wood' card.

5. Tier list rework: T0 Norse & Emirate, T1 Duchy, T2 Aztec, T3 Japan. The company act card have been nerfed with a 10% cap, making Emirate the only civ capable of running 0% tariff trade in the middle age. The grassland opener has also been nerfed because the province price of barren grassland and desert have been increased, making it harder to snowball the territory income.