Jose Rizal Leader Guide For Civ 7

Jose Rizal is a fantastic leader in Civ 7 as he makes the most of the new Celebrations mechanic added to the game. Celebrations allow you to choose from the bonus of your Government choice and open up a new social policy slot. Both of these are very powerful, especially during the Antiquity Age when you first establish your empire.

Rizal is able to generate plenty of Happiness and then maintain it throughout the game. He can quickly snowball, if you play the right strategy.

This guide is based on singleplayer against higher difficulty AIs, not multiplayer.

Jose Rizal Overview

Jose Rizal is the king of Happiness in Civilization 7. The snowball power of the celebrations means that Rizal will often have unbeatable boosts throughout the entire game, scaling from the Antiquity Age celebrations into almost-constant celebrations by the Modern Age. If used correctly, these can put you at a massive advantage over the AI in the game.

Narrative Events

Narrative Events are the options and choices that appear while you complete the various Legacy Path quests – that is, the quests for each victory condition.

Rizal succeeds when you are essentially tackling all the Legacy Paths to maximize your Narrative Event potential.

You should be thinking about the Antiquity Age holistically. You will want to build Wonders, construct scientific buildings, make friends with city-states, and attack and claim a few cities. The more you can do in the Antiquity Age, the quicker Rizal snowballs out of control.

Celebrations

Celebrations play two major roles in Civ 7: they provide your entire empire with a powerful buff for a set duration of turns, and they allow you to slot another policy.

Both Celebrations and extra policy slots are extremely powerful. Depending on which Government you pick with Rizal, you could be getting +20 percent Culture, Science, or Food almost constantly if everything goes to plan during the Antiquity Age.

The best aspect of Celebrations is that they’re also very flexible from Age to Age. Of course, once you choose one, you can’t modify it later in the Age, but you do get to make a choice at the beginning about how you’d like to play.

Will you opt for military production and send out waves of soldiers to conquer your enemies, or would you like to peacefully grow your cities with immense food bonuses?

Overall, we’ve found Rizal to be one of the stronger leaders in Civ 7, and certainly one of the best at achieving multiple Legacy Paths during the Antiquity Age.

Jose Rizal Strategy For The Antiquity Age

Much of your strategy will revolve around the civilization you choose – we’ll cover this below – but generally you want to focus Happiness as much as possible with Rizal, grabbing happiness wonders, buildings, and resources to maximize your celebration potential.

Rizal is excellent at aggressively settling lots of towns, often exceeding the Happiness limit to get an early advantage. With Rizal you might want to go over your Settlement limit by two or three cities, depending on your excess happiness available.

Ideally, you want to settle at least four settlements in total by around turn 50 on Standard Speed. On higher difficulties, the AI are very aggressive with their settling, so you need to be fast to grab the locations that you want to settle.

Scouting And Discoveries

You should produce two or three Scouts at the start of the game and start scouting immediately.

Scouting is so important in Civ 7, more so than in any other game in the series. The Scout’s new Sight system allows you to cover large areas of the map quickly, finding Independent Powers, Discoveries, and your AI opponents.

You’re on the hunt for Science primarily, to get your Pottery and Animal Husbandry up as soon as possible. Culture is also good for the early Mysticism rush into Pantheons. Lastly, you should grab Gold to help you buy buildings or units, if they’re needed in a pinch.

Early Tech And Civics

You should grab either Pottery or Animal Husbandry first, depending on the tiles in your capital. Animal Husbandry for woodcutters and camps, Pottery for clay pits and plantations. A general tech order might look like this:

• Animal Husbandry
• Pottery
• Masonry
• Masonry II
• Irrigation
• Writing

This will give you a big production boost at the start of the game and then transition into getting your science output up.

You can use the Urban Center town specialization in your first expansion to generate some science and culture that you might lose by not building the Monument or Library early in your settlement.

You want to rush Mysticism to get an early Pantheon. There are some great Altar Happiness adjacency Pantheons that you can get, or some extra Production on mines (Stone Circles) that are also very useful.

Our general strategy has been to focus on Production early. The quicker you can get your key buildings online, the better.

It might look something like this builld order:

As the Antiquity Age progress, you may want to head down the military side of the tech tree to pick up The Wheel and Military Training even if you’re not going for a military victory. This is because they unlock some good Happiness buildings.

• Villa – +3 Happiness and +2 Influence, with adjacency bonuses for Mountains, Natural Wonders, and Wonders.
• Arena – +4 Happiness with adjacency for Mountains, Natural Wonders, and Wonders.

Navigation is another great pick-up because of the Lighthouse, which provides a bonus three slots for resources – enough to stack up some Happiness resources.

Government Choice

This is very important for Rizal, as these are the bonuses that you will be able to repeat constantly with your Celebrations.

We often take Democracy for that extra 20 percent food bonus, although both Oligarchy and Classical Republic offer excellent science and Culture boosts respectively.

We like to take the food bonus because it means we can focus solely on production in our capital. This will allow you to build Wonders and complete any essential buildings quickly.

Play around with the different Government choices and see which one reflects your style of play the most. That’s one of the reasons Rizal is such a fun leader: he’s totally versatile when it comes to how you want to play.

Settlement Expansion

Jose Rizal is able to exceed his settlement limit, as long as you are somewhat careful with your city placements.

In this image, the Fresh Water tiles are marked in light blue. This is a tricky spot, but we’d favor settling on the Silver and Wine rather than the Incense on this occasion.

Make sure to place settlements on Fresh Water where possible, as this will grant +5 Happiness to the settlement, essentially overwriting the -5 Happiness penalty you get for settling over your limit.

However, this penalty does increase per city. If you encounter the Happiness Crisis at the end of the Age, things can quickly turn bad, with your settlements revolting to enemy players.

You can further increase your settling capacity by grabbing some good Happiness Buildings – like the Altar, the Villa (which can be built in towns), and the Arena (which can only be built in cities).

In general, you should be looking for these resources when settling:

• Dates – +2 Food and +2 Happiness
• Dyes – +3 Happiness
• Pearls – +2 Happiness to capital, +4 to any other city
• Wine – +2 Happiness in the capital, +10% Culture when in a celebration

Wine is the best resource in the game for Jose Rizal and if you see any, you should settle it as soon as possible. Not only is it an empire-wide resource (doesn’t require a slot in a town or city), it also provides a massive 10 percent culture buff while in a celebration.

Best Wonders

If you can manage it, you want to grab the best Happiness Wonders on Rizal, like the Colosseum, Sanchi Stupa, and the Angkor Wat.

• Sanchi Stupia – +2 Happiness and +1 Culture for every 5 excess Happiness in the Settlement.
• Colosseum – +3 Culture and +2 Happiness on all Quarters in the Settlement.
• Angkor Wat – +3 Happiness and an extra +1 Specialist limit in this Settlement.
• Mundo Perdido – Provides +1 Happiness and +1 Science on Tropical tiles in the Settlement.

The Mundo Perdido is unique in that you won’t want to build it unless you have multiple tropical tiles in your city.

Wonders can only be built in cities. In some cases, it’s worth upgrading a town to a city to open up more slots to build Wonders, as viable terrain can be used up quickly by other buildings.

Wonder construction, like everything else in Civ 7, takes careful planning. You can read more about how adjacency works here.

Wonders are hugely important in Civ 7 as their bonuses are consistent across all three Ages.

While some buildings become redundant and require you to build over them in following Ages, Wonders keep their adjacency bonus and powerful boosts throughout the game. They should be a priority where possible.

Trade And Warfare

Rizal likes to build a robust trading empire because of the Happiness boosts you can get from Imported Resources. Resources like Wine can be great to get some extra happy points.

In terms of warfare, Rizal’s overall Happiness focus means that you will be able to claim more of your opponent’s cities. This will impact how quickly you can start celebrations, however, which means you might be missing out on some of the leader’s key bonuses.

Best Civilizations For Jose Rizal

Much like Rizal’s versatility with play style, this is represented by his wide choice of viable civilizations in the Antiquity Age.

Maurya

The Maurya are excellent for Jose Rizal, as they really go hard on the Happiness.

The Nagarika provides a flat boost of +2 Happiness to all new settlements you found, and the unique districts and quarters provide extra Happiness and a flat percentage increase of Happiness.

In terms of unique civics, the Maurya also provide plenty for Rizal:

• First up is the Charvaka policy unlocked immediately via Acharya. This provides +3 Happiness on Science buildings, which makes those early Libraries even more powerful.
• Under Ayurveda we get the Shreni policy, which offers +1 Gold for every 5 Surplus Happiness in cities. This stacks up quickly, especially when your city has 40-50 happiness.
• The Vyuham civic gives us the Kshatriya policy which provides an extra +4 Happiness on military buildings. Get those Barracks up for Production and Happiness.
• Lastly, the Mantriparishad civic provides both early access to the Sanchi Stupa building and the Arthashastra policy, which grants an extra +1 Science for every 5 surplus Happiness in Cities. Again, this bonus starts to stack a lot with Rizal as your main focus is happiness.

The Sanchi Stupa is one of the best Happiness Wonders in the game. It offers +2 Happiness as a flat boost and +1 Culture for every 5 excess Happiness.

Maya

The Maya are an interesting choice for Rizal: they don’t quite have the same bonuses to Happiness as the Maurya, but they more than make up for it in their excellent Science generation in the Antiquity Age.

The Maya excel at generating fantastic adjacency from their Altar and from vegetated terrain. The Jalaw unique building also provides some base happiness.

Where the Maya really excel, however, is their Unique District – the Uwaybil K’uh. This provides an awesome boost: every time you finish a technology, you get production equal to 15 percent of its cost. This means that you can essentially turn Science into buildings – a great way to get ahead early on as Rizal, especially if you can manage to get two or three cities online in the Antiquity Age.

Best Mementos For Jose Rizal

Jose Rizal has some brilliant Mementos unlocked down his own leader path.

• The Ophthalmoscope, Rizal’s level 5 Memento, grants an additional 25% Celebration length. This helps you to really make use of these Government bonuses.
• The Diamond Throne, which is Ashoka, The World Renouncer’s level 9 Memento, offers +1 Happiness per Quarter per Age while in a Celebration. This is a great Memento that helps you avoid some crisis-era happiness chaos throughout the entire game.

Your choice of Memento is largely subjective as you play. You might have a favorite combination already locked in (we love the Imago Mundi and Marco Polo combo to get powerful scouting and gold early, for example.)

Remember: you can change your Mementos during the Age transition. This is really important as some of the early game Mementos start to drop off the further you progress in the game.

Jose Rizal In The Exploration Age And Modern Age

Jose Rizal is a great leader to carry you into the next Ages. During the Exploration Age you want to focus on generating a lot of gold, fully establishing yourself on your home continent, and make plans to head over into the Distant Lands.

There is no best way to play these Ages – and, in the grand scheme of things, we think these two Ages are a little underbaked compared to the Antiquity Age. If you had a strong start in Antiquity you should be fine as Rizal to carry the game in the next Ages, largely down to your excellent Celebration boosts.