Civ 5 Austria Guide: Strategy, Tips and Recommendations

Austria (Maria Theresa)

Unique Ability: Diplomatic Marriage

Can spend gold to annex or puppet a city state that has been your ally for at least 5 turns.

Unique Unit: Hussar

Cost: 225 Production
Melee Unit
Combat Strength: 34
Movement: 5
Replaces: Cavalry

Unique Building: Coffee House

Cost: 250 Production
Maintenance: 2
Production: +2, +5%
Specialists: 1 Engineer
Bonus: +25% generation of great people in this city.

Through a collaborative effort from Slutimko and Theguybehindu94, we’re excited to bring you our civ of the week thread. This will be the 2nd of many weekly themed threads to come, each revolving around a certain civilization from within the game. The idea behind each thread is to condense information into one rich resource for all viewers, which will be achieved by posting similar material pertaining to the weekly civillization. Have an idea for future threads? Share all input, advice, and criticisms below, so we can sculpt a utopia of knowledge!

Feel free to share any and all strategies, tactics, stories, hints, tricks and tips related to Austria!

Tips:

Something interesting you can do with this unique ability is donate units to a CS near a civ you hate, wait for them to arrive, buy up that CS, then do a backdoor invasion. However, there seems to be a limit on the number of units that will arrive at a CS.
The Hussar is one of the more interesting units in Civ V. Its extra movement point makes it well-suited for its unique upgrade: extra damage when flanking. Although, my strategy with mounted units is not usually to flank, but to go behind enemy lines and take out their archers and siege. Still, ridiculously fast cavalry isn’t a bad thing.
Coffee houses aren’t STRICTLY an upgrade to windmills. On the one hand, their production applies to everything, not just buildings. On the other hand, if you play like I do, you like to build tons of buildings and let military city states give you a military for you, and the 5% hit to building construction can hurt. It should be worth noting that this CAN be built on a city with a hill, so with Austria, there is no reason you shouldn’t build your capital on a hill.

I’ve only played them once (on Immortal), but I still have some recommendations:

I’d try to wait until getting your National College & Treasury to Marry, so as not to delay them.
When planning the timing of multiple Marriages, know that your GPT won’t go up much (if at all) after Marriages due to all the building/unit maintenance (the unit maintenance is what got me) you’ll be taking on. I actually found it harder to Marry each successive CS.
If possible settle your initial cities near multiple sources of a single luxury resource, rather than several unique sources, as you’ll need the extra gold to finance your CS shenanigans. This also means you may have to prioritize scouting the other civs in order to have enough trading partners. The happiness lost from this can hopefully be made up by trading for other luxuries if necessary, or even better allying with mercantile CS.
I moved my starting settler a bit and ended up with 5 sources of wine in my Capital, which actually may have been a bit much as far as trading is concerned. However I got a shrine out as quickly as possible and was able to get the Goddess of Festivals Pantheon (+1 Culture and +1 Faith for each Wine and Incense), and this helped immensely. I ended up taking a Great Prophet from the Liberty finisher and building up my religion, which I hadn’t at all initially planned on. Unless you get something special like this I’d probably focus your faith on Gold and Happiness, if you invest much in it at all.
None of the CS I married had a monument built in them – I’m not sure if they just never built them or if this is the only building that doesn’t stick around, but it seemed strange. Fortunately by the time I was Marrying their production was enough to build them in 1 or 2 turns.
Unless it has some incredible strategic benefit, I’d stick to allying cultural CS rather than Marrying, so as to defray the increased policy cost brought on by other acquisitions. Similar things could be said of religious and militaristic CS. Though this was largely do to geography, the CS I ended up Marrying were all maritime and mercantile and this worked out pretty well. I went for the maritimes first, so as to keep the happiness benefits from the mercantiles while taking on so much extra unhappiness.
Science is ultimately rooted in population, and after all my Marriages I had just about doubled my pop from the cities I founded (I founded five and married four), if not more, which shot my beakers per turn way up. My plan at the outset was to go for a tech victory and it ended up working; eventually I built the military buildings in the former CS I had Married, and used them to train the units necessary to fend off invaders while my original (high production) cities built the spaceship factories and parts.
I didn’t have much access to horses so Hussars didn’t show themselves much, but on paper at least they sound like a pretty good unit.
The Coffee House mostly helped in the production of extra Great Scientists through it’s 25% bonus to producing great people. (I also just think this is a creative UB). I’m not sure what happens if a CS you marry already has a windmill built.

I tend to gravitate towards CS anyway, and all in all I quite enjoyed my time with Austria. My favorite victory is Cultural, but I like Tech as it generally gets a bit further into the tech tree and shows off some of the endgame I otherwise miss. Unfortunately Tech games seem to involve at least some conquering in order to secure enough land for all of the cities you’ll need.

I’m not much for conquering, but Austria solves this by allowing for the acquisition of cities and land and pop through less brutal means. After the early game CS seem to have enough units to defend their own city pretty well, so there’s little need to produce a ton of new units to look after all your new territory.

I was able to frustrate early attempts at invasion by The Huns and Russia, but I can’t say this theory of the peaceful Tech victory is a perfect one. I came about as close as one can to not winning, while still winning (…I think that’s right), due to the aforementioned Russia.

Catherine and I both needed just a single spaceship part for victory, and without rushing The Hubble Space Telescope with a Great Engineer I’d produced and saved expressly for that purpose, I never would’ve made it. And if this had been Deity? Ha.

I had a chance to ruin her early on and held back in the name of mercy (and making money getting her people drunk). It worked (in that I did ultimately win) but I ended up at war with her again anyway in the form of a never-changing front of units replaced multiple times, and, wow, those were some tense final turns.

I’m really loving this weekly Civ business by the way, great idea.

Edit: This is nit-picky and not at all an absolute must, but when writing the OP for these it might be helpful to point out exactly how the unique units/buildings differ from the standard varieties.

For example, this week’s Hussar could have read: