G-Minor 188

[img=right]http://www.civfanatics.net/methos/hof/staff/gauntlet.gif[/img]While the general Hall of Fame is an ongoing competition, we like to run time-definite competitions between updates that we call Gauntlets. Standard Hall of Fame rules (*) still apply, but any games meeting the settings will be counted towards the Gauntlet.


Settings:

• Victory Condition: Cultural (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Noble
• Starting Era: Ancient
• Map Size: Standard
• Speed: Normal
• Map Type: Fractal
• Required: No Tribal Villages
• Must Not Be Checked: No Barbarians
• Civ: France (De Gaulle)
• Opponents: Must include Carthage (Hannibal), Egypt (Hatshepsut), Ethiopia (Zara Yaqob), India (Gandhi), Russia (Stalin), Zulu (Shaka)
• Version: 3.19.003
• Date: 11th June to 10th July 2014

Must not play as Inca.
The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker.

Can we include additional civs to qualify for the gauntlet?

TalladegaKnight said:

Can we include additional civs to qualify for the gauntlet?

Click to expand...

I can't see why not, so long as you don't exceed the maximum for standard size (10 opponents).

TalladegaKnight said:

Can we include additional civs to qualify for the gauntlet?

Click to expand...

Like mattie said, you can add up to four.

1570 AD victory

Set my mapfinder to find a double gem site. Added 4 AI's to get their caps as my legendary cities

Early goals were early Oracle of Civil Service and horse archer rush to get the AI caps. I am realizing that was a mistake as axes would have done the job just fine and come much earlier.

1st attempt, I was right next to Shaka. He just produces too many units and was rexing very well for a noble AI by the time I had the Oracle. So I abandoned that game.

This attempt I was on a continent with Isabella, Stalin, Hatsepshut, and Washington. Isabella was beat to Hinduism and Buddhism. She really needed to pick up a religion for me. Thankfully she got Judaism before falling to horses. Stalin built the Great Wall before falling to horses. Hatshepsut and Washington were picked off by a few axes as both had not made it to archery yet.

Built Stonehenge in 1200 BC (was meaning to fail gold it), tried to get an academy but got a Great Prophet instead (he built the Confucian shrine). 750 BC Oracle of Civil Service was late. Had everyone on my continent dead at 25 AD. This let me focus on the victory without the AI harassing me.

For the legendary cities. 1st was my cap (with cottages), 2nd was Hatshepsuts cap (with cottages and hermitage). The third was where I ran into a snag. No other caps were great cottage sites or great people farms. I used Isabella's 2nd city because of cottages. However I am thinking I should have used Stalins cap. It got all the artist wonders (Parthenon, MoM, SoZ, Sistine, both Epics and the Taj) and had decent food to run 5-6 artists. I may replay to see if I could better my time picking the wonder city over the cottaged city as the 3rd.

Got fairly lucky with Great People. 17 Great Artists for culture bombs, 1 Great Prophet for shrine, 1 Great Spy (golden age), and 1 Great Merchant (from economics, settled).

Are espionage victories allowed for this gauntlet?

Results:

G-Minor 188 - Cultural, Noble, Ancient, Standard, Normal, Fractal, (check options)
1^st Sumorex 1525 AD
2^nd TalladegaKnight 1570 AD
3^rd WithTea 1740 AD

Congratulations!

Congrats on the win and #1 HOF slot Sumorex

Thanks. I wanted to type this up the last few days but... life. I've really enjoyed starting to play Civ again. These gauntlets have given me a reason to play victory conditions I would never play.

I haven't done many cultural victories, so this was a learning experience. Looking at the charts, it should be pretty easy to demolish this time with a better leader (and more experience for me).

I axe rushed 3 neighbors (Hatty, Lincoln, Willem) so I could use 2 for culture and 1 for a GP farm. Stalin was left on my continent. Hannibal and Mansa were within sight across a narrow coastal sea along with Zara, Ghandi and Isabella. I traded techs like crazy with Mansa. Shaka was isolated. No one ever really liked me much. I kept them all just happy enough to leave me alone (540AD Nationalism and 880AD gunpowder meant I wasn't too worried)

Religions sucked. The first 3 went to people not on my continent and never spread to me.


Few things I was really unsure about:

I opted to build the Pyramids for Representation since I planned on using Caste System to keep my slider as close to 100% as I could... not sure if it ultimately matters or not.

When to switch to Caste system? I just did it upon completing the Oracle CS slingshot, but the whip sure is nice for getting out temples.

Things I did wrong:
I was sloppy with civic changes and tech paths. Pretty sure I could have done Caste+Bureaucracy then 5 turns later done Representation+Organized Religion if I'd planned more carefully.

I razed the American's and the Dutch's second city then ended up building in almost the same spots. All I had to do was wait for them to hit pop 2.

I shut down my war machine too early. I barely won the Dutch capital and had nothing left to realistically take Russia. The whole game would have been scrapped if I had been just a little more unlucky.

I apparently can't count to 9. I was super slow to get 9 of each temple up and running.

My GPs were muddled. I only did 9 cities, which meant trimming down on GPs in my GP Farm to build 3 temples. Going with 10 cities or more might have made things better. I only got 9 Artists total. Others were 4 Scientists, 3 prophets, and 1 merchant (not from Econ). I used 2 prophets and 1 merchant for a total of 2 Golden Ages.

I built my non-culture cities too far apart. I've always like playing long games with giant cities. The idea of building cities solely to work cottages for later use by the main cities hasn't sunk in yet. Widespread cities did let me do some extreme chopping for two cities.