Ashoka, World Renouncer Leader Guide For Civ 7

Ashoka, World Renouncer is a growth and happiness power house in Civ 7. Much of the fun of playing this variation of Ashoka (compared to his World Conqueror counterpart) is about stacking rolling celebration bonuses throughout the game, allowing you to make the most of those science, culture, and production boosts available via your Government.

Due to Ashoka, World Renouncer’s fantastic 10 percent extra food during a celebration, you can start to see how this leader might get out of control if handled correctly: massive cities, loads of happiness, constant celebrations. Let’s get into it.

Ashoka, World Renouncer Overview

Ashoka is an interesting leader that focuses on high city growth and lots of happiness. His base bonuses are:

As you can see, Ashoka is geared towards a happy empire with some massive cities and towns. The base adjacency bonus for Happiness is actually a pretty sizable boost to your happiness, particularly early on, and the general strategy you should follow for the World Renouncer is to keep your empire as happy as possible.

It’s a simple bonus, but it can get really, really out of hand.

+1 Food in Cities for every 5 excess Happiness

While this bonus starts out small at the beginning of the game, it all starts to ramp up once you begin to hit some of the most important Happiness buildings in the game, like the Altar and Arena. Start to really stack these bonuses later on with happiness wonders like the Sanchi Stupa and you’ll have plenty of excess happiness by the end of the game.

+10% Food in all settlements during a celebration

10% food is a massive boost to food, and if you start to play around with some other bonuses, you’ll begin to see ways of achieving 30 percent or 40 percent (or more) bonus food. You can get huge cities with Ashoka.

All buildings receive +1 Happiness adjacency for all improvements

Much of this is made possible by the World Renouncer’s excellent adjacency buff for Happiness, and it’s one of the simplest in the game: all improvements provide adjacency.

Ashoka, World Renouncer Strategy In Civ 7

As you begin your new empire as Ashoka, the World Renouncer, there are a few things you can do immediately to set yourself up for a strong Antiquity Age.

Starting Scouts

Like all great civilizations, yours must begin with a scout. Two or three scouts if you’re lucky. Use them to explore nearby lands, grab some Discoveries (we like to prioritise gold on our Discoveries as Ashoka, just to help develop infrastructure faster, but you could also grab any Culture rewards for a boost towards Mysticism) and find some spots to settle future towns.

Early Tech And Civics

We’re going to make a beeline for Mysticism to pick up early Altars. Try to develop Production in your capital if possible, and grab any great early game resources like Cotton or Sheep to boost food and production.

We want to grab the Altar because it provides some excellent Happiness which works with the World Renouncer’s bonuses.

Your choice of Pottery or Animal Husbandry really depends on your starting resources, but we do like to make a push for the Hanging Gardens early as Ashoka to secure its brilliant +10 percent growth rate in all settlements (which stacks with your leader bonus!) You pick up this tech via Pottery – Irrigation.

Pantheon

Ideally, you want to grab Mysticism quickly so you can grab the Fertility Rites Pantheon. This provides another 10 percent growth in cities with an Altar. We are already starting to stack those growth bonuses from turn five or six. We also want to build an Altar before we build a Granary.

Best Civilizations For Ashoka, World Renouncer

Ashoka is quite versatile when it comes to civilization choice, but you should ideally pick civilizations that also provide their own food bonuses, happiness bonuses, or bonuses during celebrations.

Khmer

The Khmer are one of our favorite starting civilizations in the game regardless of leader, although they particularly favor Ashoka’s growth and happiness playstyle.

While these bonuses might seem inconsequential, but rivers often have food – both regular rivers and navigable rivers. You get an instant food bonus with the Khmer here.

The Angkor Wat is a happiness/specialist-focused Wonder that is great to rush on Ashoka, World Renouncer, because your cities are going to be massive and filled with specialists – hopefully.

The unique building, the Baray, provides a base of +3 food and +1 Food on all Floodplains tiles in the settlement. This bonus stacks with multiple Barays. You can start to really scale food very early on with this civ.

However, where things start to get fascinating is in the Khmer Civic Tree.

Chakravarti Civic

This civic is one of the best in the game for Ashoka and one of the best for growth leaders and civilizations.

• +50% growth rate in the Capital. -5 Happiness in every other City.
• +100% Food and Happiness towards maintaining Specialists.

Let’s explain these bonuses. You can get a massive 50 percent extra growth in your capital city that stacks with every other bonus we’ve accrued so far. Worried about happiness in other cities? Here’s the catch. Ashoka is more than capable of playing a fully one-city challenge run where you just have other feeder towns near your capital. No city upgrades required.

The 100% Food and Happiness towards maintaining Specialists is a little misleading in its phrasing. This doesn’t mean you get the Specialists for free, but rather you get an extra Specialist for free for the same cost as the other Specialists. I.e, if a Specialist costs x Food you will get 10 rather than 9 Specialists for x.

Basically, with this civic, you can create a truly mammoth capital city, pumped full of Specialists generating culture, science, gold, production, however you’ve arranged your adjacencies.