Well, my placement on the Chieftain level bolstered my confidence, and I think I can successfully avoid several incredible mistakes in that game, so I'm going to jump up a few levels.

Mistakes that I made in that game (despite placing #4) included (but were not limited to) building too many defensive units, packing my cities in too tight, bad city placement and improper build priorities during the milk phase.

I can't wait for Conquests to play again, so I'm going to go for a run at the Monarch level. While it may not be the best thing score wise, I'm in the mood to go 'retro' before Conquests and bypass PTW in favor of Vanilla 1.29.

I'll post my starting location and specs as soon as I settle on a map.

I went with the usual settings of warm/wet/pangaea/5bill. I have 8ai with sedentary barbs. My domination limit is 3946 and here's my starting location!:

By 130bc, neither my city number nor military might is of impressive strength. However, I did build the Pyramids and the Great Library. As soon as my preRepublic anarchy subsides, I anticipate a settler rush and generation of some serious cash which I will use to upgrade Horsemen to Riders, once the Library is generous enough to get me there.

One thing I am quite proud of and don't usually accomplish this early:

I'm jealous of your start superslug! And those luxuries you managed to secure. Good luck!

All that food at the starting spot, five luxuries, a high tile count. The map is awesome. It almost makes up for the headache of not having the PTW unit buttons and espionage screen...

Why didn't you use PTW for this game. The scientific civs get more random techs at the beginning of the new eras with patch 1.27f, which leads to a faster tech pace. (I've got 3 scientific civs in my game: Me (Ottomans), Germans and Russians, and some nifty trading netted me monotheism, engineering and feudalism in one turn... :D )

The free tech doesn't apply to the first age, and my possession of the Great Library gives me all the second age entry techs for free. If all goes as planned, few to none of the AI will make it to the industrial age...

As for the vanilla vs ptw, playing the vanilla version of a game is something I like to do whenever an XP is coming out. I can't really explain it anymore than I could explain why I still have a copy of Doom.

Yeah, I guess that's what's different in our games. You have the Great Library. I don't. I could have had it but I preferred to go for Leo's instead. Now I can keep building horseman for my upgrade to Sipahi's, otherwise I would have gotten chivalry through the GL and I would have had to build knights (which cost far more shields). I know I could try to disconnect my iron source but that is not possible because my only iron source popped up under one of my early cities after I discovered IW....

@Darkness: Would it be too expensive to abandon the city?

Originally posted by superslug
@Darkness: Would it be too expensive to abandon the city?

I abandoned the game... :blush: ...

Originally posted by Darkness
I abandoned the game... :blush: ...

I've done that a thousand million times. Consider it an investment in saving yourself time.

Fortunatly, I don't think my current game is going anywhere but completion. Once the GL gave me Feudalism and Monotheism, I researched Chivalry in six turns and started upgrading Horsemen to Riders, attacking Russia and triggering my Golden Age.

The funny thing is that I'm having to be careful where I build my Riders during the GA. I'm momentarily out of room and have dozens of Settlers cooling their heels, but I continue building them to keep all my river towns 6 or under since I'm preparing for a Palace Jump. I sent a Settler to the other side of the world many moons ago with a dozen or so workers and defensive units, and they finally arrived.

I'll have settler space soon enough, as my Riders are rubblizing Russia.

My long wandering Settler (with warriors and workers) finally arrived at the far end of my pangaea, the bottom right corner indicated by the white box on the minimap. I jumped my Palace down there (the rest of my Chinese empire is the pink in the northwest). As you can see by the before and after stat boxes, corruption was significantly reduced.

In general news, the Aztecs are impossible to see on the map as they only have two towns left. I've also deprived the Romans (red) of a good chunk of their territory. I hope to have the two of them finished off soon so the Riders in those areas can join my main force fighting the Russians (brown).

The score is 1675 in 800ad, so I know this game will make the HOF, but as yet, I have no idea where...

............with such a HIGH Domination Limit! :goodjob:

Wish you MORE luck during your Monarch level attempt. I just finished a Monarch game (took 6 months.....hope there's no time-limit!)........and had MY luck in 2800BC......but the Dom Limit was only 3609! (Game posted for Oct 27 update.)

Your start position/Dom Limit really makes one think about spending some time BEFORE you even make the FIRST move! ;)

How long did it take you to get the start position?

Originally posted by EMan
How long did it take you to get the start position?

Several hours, at least. I suspect that my using Vanilla 1.29 has something to do with it, but I can assure you, I'll probably never go back to 1.29 again, considering how much I miss the espionage screen, the command buttons, the-well, you get the picture. Although I assure you I will be carrying this game to the bitter end...

Originally posted by superslug
Although I assure you I will be carrying this game to the bitter end...
That's a very admirable attitude.............you will learn something new, probably several things, on a Milk Run.

GOOD LUCK :goodjob:

This game has resulted in much more massive amounts of warfare than I was anticipating. However, the steady 'trickle' of GL's has come in handy. I used the first to rush Smith's, which doesn't help me much until the milk phase, but I consider a must have.

The second leader I used to rush Leonardo's. While my precious Riders are serving me well, I'm less than ten turns away from railroads, at which point I'll double back and take Military Tradition. I had laid wasted to over half of America and most of Germany but was getting spread thin on the double front, so I declared peace with Lincoln and lunged into the heart of Germany for Leipzig, which has Sun Tzu. In the process of taking it over, I generated another GL, which I immediately popped in Leipzig for Bach's.

I then declared peace with Bismarck. During the 20 turn double-peace, I'm going to get Steam Power and Military Tradition then upgrade all my Riders to Cavalry and finish the AI off for good.

EDIT: Forgot to mention this: while I'm at peace with Germany and America for 20 turns, the two of them are oddly enough at war with each other. I wonder how that happened...:lol: :lol: :lol:

I finally worked up the nerve to run two consecutive turns of score through the calculator. I'm currently projected at 13389. This estimate is seriously conservative however, as I have yet to build a single aqueduct, and as I am still over 1000 tiles short of the limit.

With all due respect to SirPlebs score-calculating utility, but I found it's basically useless for projections before everything's maxed out. If not everything is maxed out, all it will do is give significantly lower projection....

Oh, trust me I know what you mean! That's why I'm so ecstatic over the estimate! I should theoretically place pretty high...I've come to seriously rely on the calculator, it's just the first time this game I've used it.

My updates will likely be spaced out by several days apart now. My turns are taking upwards of 20 minutes a piece to complete. The reason for this post is that I've reached the milestone of having cleared the AI from my pangaea.

Obviously, the remaining civs have a 'stronghold' on the eastern island, but that's about to be invaded by several hundred cavalry. After that, I'll likely have to clear out a few cities on the dozens of islands around as I keep seeing boats with settlers floating out.

My intention is to go ahead and hit the domination limit on my pangaea, but continue to establish cities as I abandon ones in not so good terrain. Once I eliminate the AI (save the one token town), I'll settle the islands and abandon a second round of cities.

Looking good! :goodjob:

A picture is worth a thousand words!:

-but I'll add a few words anyway here in a different post so some of you don't have to scroll left and right to read it because of the screenshot. (Aren't I nice? Cleopatra thinks not!)

The Bad News:
Anyhow, even though yesterday was Halloween, today was my moment of horror. Yes, the killer Spearmen struck again! From the shot, you can see that I gave Egypt a city in rather remote location and Cavalry for suicide watch duty. After that exchange, I redeclared war. Ignoring her constant pleas for peace, I plowed through her cities turn by turn, until I got to the 'last' one.
One spearman got lucky and picked off one of the Cavalry. I had to wait another turn before razing the last of the free AI. Unfortunatly, it was long enough for my gamble with Democracy/War Weariness to fail and my government collapsed.:cry:

Yes, due to one lucky dude with a pointed stick, I have to suffer through eight more turns of anarchist crap. :eek: (I realize it's probably my fault, but it's easier to blame someone dead!:rolleyes: )

The good news:
By the time my anarchy passes, a certain galleon carrying a settler, a cavalry unit, a worker and some guy I met on the battlefield named Jin Qiu will have gotten to the northeasternmost island where Jin claims he can build a Palace in one turn. He somehow thinks that'll reduce my corruption again. I hope he's right!:p

Anyhow, I'll still have something like 260+ turns for pure milking, which is IIRC a personal best. Disbanding the Cavalry alone will net me dozens of aqueducts.

Very tough break with the spearman. Good luck with your milking run! :)

The date is now 1470ad. I've completed my last Palace jump to a remote island and it boosted my income to 3800gpt. My score is 10000+ so there's no doubt the game will place.

EDIT: My score would be 10000+ if I knocked off Egypt's last town...

Does anyone know the specific breakdown on score? I mean, how many points does one citizen generate per turn? I could swear I read one of Bamspeedy's posts saying that one citizen accumulated 1/10 of a point or something, but with search disabled I can't find that post.

If you know anything, please contribute to my GD thread on this (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=68259).

You can find the scoring formula for population, territory, and finish date in SirPleb's strategy article, Maximizing Your Score (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18729).

That's a great article by SirPleb and I've read it a thousand times. The specific information I was looking for isn't in it, but is in the thread linked about the date/score calc. I hadn't read that thread before (since I knew how to use it) but your posting the link made me think I should, so I found what I was looking for:
SirPleb:
On each turn the game adds up your territory (1 point per tile), your happy citizens (2 points each), and your content+specialist citizens (1 point each.)

A weird path, but thanks nonetheless for starting it, Aeson!:lol: :goodjob:

If you have a SEA tile within your city's border (zone of control), it:

1. Does NOT count towards the Domination Limit :)
2. Does NOT give you 1 point towards territory total :(
3. DOES give you 2 "happy citizen" points if you have a HAPPY laborer associated with that tile. (Conversely, if you are NOT "working" the sea tile, it is worth ZERO score.) :)

So, for example, if your city has 3 coastal tiles and 3 sea tiles within its border AND you have a Harbor AND each tile has a Happy laborer within it on the City screen, you would earn a total of 15 points per turn towards your Firaxis (viz. the Game's) Score, for those 6 tiles?

(viz. 5 points per "countable" tile [3 tiles, since sea tiles don't count towards the Domination Limit].)

Superslug,

That info is at the very top of the first post. ;)

----------------------

Sounds right Eman.

Originally posted by Aeson
Superslug,

That info is at the very top of the first post. ;)

I have been such an idiot. I've read that formula a million times and never realized it was the per turn formula. I have got to learn to read slower...
:( :eek: :rolleyes: :cry: :mad: :wallbash: :cringe:

Thanks for the insight, Eman. I think I do have a few cities on my current coastline where some cultural border expansion wouldn't hit any new coastal tiles, hence giving me freebies.

:band: FINAL SCORE! And not at all a bad one for automated workers!:lol: :crazyeye: :D

Congratulations, Superslug! :goodjob:

Thanks, Bremp! Oh, just so no one has to look it up, this would put me at number two on Monarch if there were no higher submissions before the update.

good job:goodjob:

Wow! That was fast! Congratulations, Superslug!:goodjob:

Automated workers??? :vomit:

No, just kidding! Congratulations!

I appreciate all of your congratulations. However, I've requested Aeson to disregard the submission. After I completed the game, I realized I had inadverdantly changed from my III CD (with which I started the game) over to my PTW disk (probably to look at a .sav). Even if by accident, I consider this an unacceptable act on my own part, and asked him to ignore the game.

Re: Automated workers:
I understand your reaction perfectly, Darkness. I know full well that automation holds me back score/gamewise, and it is not something I endorse. As a matter of fact, I plan on giving the habit up.

The automation I did do in my game was more elaborate than just hitting the A key and letting them fly. I did micromanage until I was out of Despotism (so nothing got wastefully irrigated). Then, for the most part I put them on Ctrl-N for roadbuilding. When I started razing cities, I put all my slaves on Shift-A so that the tiles I did do on my own weren't negated. Once all the tiles were railroaded and all tiles improved, I deautomated all of them (over the course of three hours) and manually irrigated whatever wasn't. I kept a few on shift-a for pollution duty and took it from there...

Now that I have an idea how well I can do on Monarch, I'm going to go at Monarch again. This time I'll be micromanaging my guys, that and using PTW from the start. I'm so embarassed...

........If I understand you correctly, I have done exactly the same thing (today, actually!)...........started an HOF game on Civ 1.29 and then read the saved file into PTW 1.27 ('Cos I couldn't be bothered to go find the vanilla Civ cd!!)

Can't see any unfair advantage from doing this........the game could be classified as a PTW game.......Let's face it, it IS a BIG game!

Why not let Aeson be the "TERMINATOR", if absolutely necessary?! ;)

BTW, Congratulations on a fine game!! :goodjob: :goodjob:

Originally posted by EMan
Why not let Aeson be the "TERMINATOR", if absolutely necessary?! ;)
Why not let Aeson be the Terminator? It's not a matter of letting, he is the moderator. Anyway, it didn't even dawn on me this might be legal. If he decides that it is, then heck yeah, I'd love the game to get posted. As it is, I haven't heard back from him yet, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Even if it doesn't get posted officially, I am proud of the score and mark in my development it represents, and I am going to play this level again. Two consecutive games now have I failed to catch your score and it's starting to sting!:lol:

BTW: Is your subscription working?

I'm going to allow such submissions as long as they load properly, for milked games at least.

Originally posted by Aeson
I'm going to allow such submissions as long as they load properly, for milked games at least.
Thanks, Aeson! Forgive me if I was being presumptuous!