Hatshepsut is a powerful but fairly niche leader in Civilization 7. She relies heavily on starting with navigable rivers in the capital, otherwise half her leader bonuses are defunct. If you do get a good spawn with her, though, you’ll get a significant boost to wonder construction and building production in your capital. She doesn’t excel at a military game, and is rather better at trading, peaceful relationships, and empire-building.
This guide covers the best strategies for Hatshepsut, covering her best Mementos, civilization choices, and her complete unlock tree.
This guide is based on singleplayer games, not multiplayer.
Hatshepsut Overview
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+1 Culture for every imported Resource. |
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+15% Production towards constructing Buildings and Wonders in Cities adjacent to Navigable Rivers. |
Hatshepsut is the queen of Wonders in Civ 7. She heavily focuses on trade, production, and stacking Wonder adjacency in her cities. Wonders are excellent for improving the yields of tiles as they provide the most adjacency bonuses to tiles out of any other building or terrain in the game.
Hatshepsut is unfortunately quite reliable on getting a favorable spawn. Your game can be made or broken within the first few turns, which is entirely dependent on whether you get Navigable River tiles in your capital. It’s perfectly fine to restart your game if you don’t think the spawn location is going to be fun to play.
Culture From Trade
Hatshepsut gets a flat +1 Culture from every resource you import into the empire. Early on, this is quite a negligible bonus as it can take a while to get your trade network up and running correctly, but by the time you reach the Exploration Age you could be earning a significant amount of Culture just from trade.
The Culture from trade complements the Culture you should be earning from the multiple Wonders you build with Hatshepsut.
As a result, Hatshepsut favors a more peaceful game. You should make an effort to keep the AI on your side, otherwise your trading options become very limited. You are able to trade with Independent Powers, but this is a lot less reliable in terms of the number of resources available.
This is easier said than done on harder difficulties. The Deity AI are generally very aggressive. The best way to avoid conflict is to build a strong military, establish plenty of trade routes, and use your Endeavors smartly to keep direct neighbors happy.
Production On Navigable Rivers
Hatshepsut really relies on getting a good Navigable River start for her capital. The 15 percent production bonus is fantastic, but if you can’t utilize it, then she becomes quite useless as a leader.
However, if you do manage to get a good start, Hatshepsut can use that production to quickly establish districts and quarters, and then turn her attention fully to building Wonders.
Hatshepsut has starting bias for Navigable Rivers, but this still doesn’t guarantee it.
Victory Conditions
Hapshepsut is fantastic at completing a Cultural Victory in the Antiquity Age, although you should also be able to pick up Economic on the way there by trading and stacking resources.
She is a fairly flexible leader when it comes to later-game strategies, and it’s quite easy to transform her empire into a gold-producing menace in the Exploration Age and Modern Age.
Best Antiquity Age Strategy For Hatshepsut In Civ 7
Hatshepsut can quickly turn into a cultural powerhouse, as long as you play your cards right.
Early Scouting And Discoveries
As a base rule, we like to build at least two Scouts, although depending on map size and game speed, we’d even push for three Scouts. This is to pick up as many Discoveries as possible, as the early boosts are fantastic.
As Hatshepsut, we love to rush some early Culture to grab important early civics, like Mysticism. If you manage to get the Wonder-building Pantheon (Monument To The Gods) you can increase your overall Wonder production to something like 25 percent (as long as you’re on a Navigable River.)
In terms of priority, this is what you should grab from Discoveries in order:
- Culture
- Science
- Gold
- Food, Production, etc
Tech And Civics
Hatshepsut, if you spawn on a Navigable River, should grab Sailing first. This is because the boost to fishing boats works well with your production focus.
Alternatively, you should go for Animal Husbandry or Pottery to boost your production early.
Animal Husbandry is great for heavily vegetated capital cities, as all the woodcutters will provide massive production.
Pottery is best for clay pits, mines, and quarries. You should grab both of these right at the start of the game.
We really like to go for Masonry and Masonry II next to unlock the Monument and the extra production on production buildings.
In terms of Civics, you want to grab Mysticism and then into Code of Laws as a focus, to start your Merchant production and trade.
Hatshepsut is great at building Wonders, so pick some wonders in the civic tree that appeal to you and make a beeline for them.
In terms of Pantheon, you either want the Wonder production Monument or Stone Circles, which grants more production on mines, quarries, and pits in cities and towns that you’ve built an Altar in.
Government
Hatshepsut has two great choices for Government – either Classical Republic for that extra 15 percent boost to Wonder construction or Democracy for the 20 percent bonus food. Both are reasonable choices. Government bonuses are activated when you enter a Celebration, which means Happiness is also a big focus. More Happiness, more Celebrations.
There is an argument that the extra Wonder production and extra culture from Classical Republic are a bit overkill for Hatshepsut.
What Wonders Should You Build As Hatshepsut?
All of them. That’s not an exaggeration. Hatshepsut should be focusing on grabbing pretty much as many wonders as she can. Their bonuses are Ageless and Wonders you build in Antiquity will still be useful hundreds of turns later in the Modern Age.
Definitely focus on the Pyramids though, as they complement your Navigable River bonuses by providing extra Production and Gold on Navigable River tiles.
Settling And Expansion
The number one focus for settlements on Hatshepsut is to grab as many spots on navigable rivers as possible. Even towns with just one or two tiles of river can be massively important.
You can be fairly aggressive with your settlements because, in theory, you should have good production to create military units if necessary.
As a primarily wonder-focused leader, you want to be on the lookout for Ivory and Marble as both these resources provide production boosts to wonders on different tile types. These bonuses stack, and they’re empire-wide resources, too, which means you won’t need slots in your towns or cities to make use of them.
It’s likely you will run out of space in your capital for Wonders if you’ve built a bunch of them. Certain wonders can only be built on certain terrain tiles. Converting a town to a city will open up new slots for possible wonder construction.
As a result, building planning is very important. You should always check which wonders are built on which tiles, otherwise you might accidentally shut yourself out of a specific wonder.
You can read more about town planning and expansion here.
Trade
Trade is an important part of Civ 7, and there are multiple ways to get the most out of importing resources from other civilizations.
To actually make use of Bonus and City resources, you’ll need slots in your cities and towns, otherwise you’ll have resources sitting around doing nothing.
Slots can be gained via tech – like the Navigation tech which allows you to build a Lighthouse. This provides an extra three resource slots in a city. As Hatshepsut, you’ll likely get the resource slots from wonders like Monk’s Mound.
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Best Civilizations For Hatshepsut
Without a doubt, the best and most realistic choice for Hatshepsut is Egypt.
Egypt
Egypt is the logical choice for Hatshepsut because of their bonus production on Navigable Rivers and excellent Unique Quarter which provides Tjaty, who have bonuses for Wonders.
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+1 Production on Navigable Rivers. |
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+30 percent Production towards constructing the Pyramids. |
Everything about Egypt is built for Hatshepsut. You get extra production on Navigable Rivers which stacks with Hatshepsut’s leader bonuses, first of all.
You also get a nice production bonus towards the Pyramids, an excellent early wonder for her.
This is combined with the Necropolis, the Egyptian Unique Quarter. It grants 100 Gold every time you build a Wonder in the city. The unique buildings in the quarter, the Mastaba and Mortuary Temple, provide Culture and Gold respectively.
Egypt also has a unique great person, the Tjaty, which can be trained once you’ve constructed a Necropolis.
The Tjaty can be activated on Wonders for extra Culture and Gold, on Navigable Rivers for extra Influence per tile, as well as to generate strong Medjay units to protect your empire or take out some nearby Independent Powers.
Finally, Egypt also has some fantastic civics.
- Scales Of Anubis – This provides a social policy that increases your Wonder production by a further 15 percent. With the 15 percent from Navigable Rivers, the 10 percent from the Wonder Pantheon, and the bonus from Scales of Anubis, you can start to see how quickly Hatshepsut can produce wonders.
- You can also get two Social Policies that increase Food and Culture on Navigable Rivers.
Other Civilization Picks
The best way to learn the game and the leader is try out various civilization combos.
We quite like Greece for a Hapshepsut run as you get some nice Influence bonuses (which will help you stay friendly with the AI), as well as the Acropolis Unique Quarter which produces Logios Great People. These can be used to quickly build wonders, but also boost existing tiles with extra yields.
Alternatively, you could try for a run with the Maya – these are an excellent Scientific civilization that have some awesome bonuses for science and great adjacency bonuses for the Altar.
Best Mementos For Hapshepsut
Hapshepsut has some great Mementos on her unlock tree, but she also benefits a lot from the basic Mementos – this makes her quite a beginner-friendly leader.
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Shakokidogu – +1 Cultural Attribute Point.
- This basic Memento provides an extra point you can spend on the Culture tree. This is great because it means you can pick up the Wonder production bonus with your second culture point. Just select the quest that asks you to build monuments (if you’ve selected Egypt as your civilization) and you’ll get another point when you construct two Monuments.
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Uraeus – +10% Culture if you have the most Wonders. 10% production towards constructing wonders if you do not.
- This is Hapshepsut’s level 9 memento, which means you will need to play quite a bit before unlocking it. However, it’s incredibly powerful – you can easily get ahead of wonder construction with Hapshepsut, even on Deity difficulty. If, for whatever reason, you are behind, you can get a fantastic 10 percent boost to production. A great Memento!
- The Imago Mundi and Marco Polo Memento combo – These two Mementos are our favorite Antiquity Age Mementos for any leader in the game. The Imago Mundi provides 50 gold per every 100 tiles explored, while Marco Polo increases the Scout’s sight range significantly. You will be able to quickly scout the entire map, collecting Discoveries, finding your neighbors, and most importantly on Hatshepsut, find those Navigable River city spots.
You can change Mementos during the game when the Age transitions. This is important, as early game Mementos will drop off in important the further you go into the game.
Hatshepsut In The Exploration Age and Modern Age
Hatshepsut definitely doesn’t feel as good in the Exploration Age and Modern Age as some other leaders, as her bonuses on Navigable Rivers become less important, and there are fewer available wonders – particularly against harder difficulty AIs.
That being said, hopefully your early game advantages from all the wonders you’ve built give you some direction for a Legacy Path in the Exploration Age. Economic makes the most sense in terms of the trading you might’ve established in the previous Age.
If the bonuses Hatshepsut get drop off in the Exploration Age, they really drop off in the Modern Age. Civilization choice can make an impact here, but this is largely subjective game to game.
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