Challenge #5: Million Dollar Monty

lilnev said:
It seems like this would play out like a cultural win, except instead of turning up the culture slider you turn up the gold.
Click to expand...

That's pretty much what I'm planning. I'm hoping to get as far as Corporation for Wall Street in a bureaucratic capital with 3 shrines (Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish), but we'll see how that goes. (Yes, I know Bureaucracy doesn't multiply shrine income, but Wall Street does.)

Going aggressively for those 3 religions is going to stunt early development, since there won't be anything for a worker to do, but that means I can build a settler almost immediately (probably after a 2nd scout), since I don't need a worker and with no barbarians I don't need a military right off the bat either.

I'm also contemplating building The Pyramids if stone is available in order to facilitate a specialist economy for research, which will allow better accumulation of gold before throwing the big switch. I'm not sure though. It might be better to go with a cottage economy in order to better develop your wealth cities. That's going to depend on a variety of geographic factors including whether we have stone but also whether the terrain looks better for cottages or specialists.

I'm considering trying a 3 city challenge approach. Wealth in the capital, a great person factory to make the merchants and prophets we need, and a Heroic Epic production city to build military. The key question there is whether one really good wealth city is enough.

Edit: I just realized that I guess it will need to be a 6 city challenge, since 3 cities isn't enough to enable Wall Street.
 
Raiser said:
Economical with his time, that is. 1h 20mins. Wow! :eek: Sometimes it takes me that long to decide where I'm going to place a city. :lol:
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Me too, if you change "sometimes" to "almost always."

I've started this game now. A few turns into it, I'm finding the lack of barbarians and Normal speed very strange. Out of habit, I still keep trying to end my scouts' turns in forests or on hills to protect them from being eaten by animals. I usually play at Epic, so everything seems too cheap. I keep double checking my city to see how I'm generating so many hammers and so much food that I can build and grow in so few turns.
 
Ok, let's share a couple of notes :)

I had no idea of what to do, so I scouted the land. Horrible huts: map, map, 32g :mad:

The good city location in a reasonable range are three: one is designed for great lighthouse, colossus and then GM farm. Here I've build stonhenge also, for fast expanding, only with chopping. In the capital the oracle and HG, and nothing else. Maybe it's better skip the GS?? Dunno. I had 8 GM, 3 GP, 1 GE (used to build the bank in the GM farm, lol, never happened before...it had ONE hammer production and 8 specialist).
Third good city near gems, copper and gold, for military production.
Last good place: iron fish rice, caravels builder for cruisin the GMs.
Civics: always hereditary rule,caste system,free market and pacifism(in the last dozen of turns free religion).
I've took out Izzy too much late, so I suffered a lot for a very slow growing.
No cottage at all, exept the FP city and 3 cottages in the capital. I don't consider the spanish cities, all heavy cottaged but low sized.
My tech path was very strange: meditation, so beelined to CS slingshot. Then alpha (traded many techs). So I beelined for maces and cats, and finally for optics. Last of all liberalism, and then banking and ecomomics. Research stopped, traded printing press for economics. Three centuries of 0% science. GPT from less than 200 in 1500 to 950 in 1800 (non optimized about 880).
Three shrines.
Last note Saladin took out Napo, and till 1300 all my buddies were confuscianist, like me and my bigger shrine.
I had no academy, so I think that if I can reach economics in 1400....prolly the right score could hit 75k.
 
Here's the post about screenshots, saves & links:

remconius said:
Tips on forum basics for an IT noob ;)

Screenshots:
1. Get a free account at a place like http://www.photobucket.com. There you can easily upload your images.
2. In the game press the Print scrn button to take a screenshot.
3. In photobucket select the screenshot and upload.
4. Below the uploaded image in photobucket there is a tag, copy this tag.
5. Paste the [img] tag into your post. :cooool:

[B]Savegame[/B]
The save game can be attached to your post with the normal forum features. 1. Press attachments icon.
2. Browse for the savegame and upload.
3. In the post press the attachments icon again and select the savegame.
4. It will be attached to your post. :scan:

[B]Links[/B]
1. To add a link, got to the post you want to link.
2. Select and Copy the Address from the explorer address bar: e.g [url]http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=4545410[/url]
3. Go to the post where you want to add a link. Select the text you want the link under. E.g. [U]Link to the save[/U]
4. Press the hyperlink icon (looks like a globe).
5. Paste the copied address and presto! :cool:[/QUOTE]

Adding info about "Spoiler" tags: instead of posting a "Quick Reply", click on "Go Advanced". You'll have more options there, one of which is the spoiler button. It's the one with the "SPOIL" caption, second from the top right hand corner of the text frame. Its effect is to hide whatever you say, and the others have to click on the button to see the text. Example below:

[SPOILER]Hidden text[/SPOILER]

Here we mainly use it to hide things like map info or strategies so that those who want to try the challenge without any knowledge of the above can do it without having to skip posts. Not a big problem, Tauro, but you might want to put your notes in one of those spoiler tags. Thanks.
Click to expand...
 
ok my last 5 restarts have been worse and worse every time :D

why oh why did you let isabel into this :devil:

there is no pleasing her! i tried to get (and succeeded) all religions (wanted to spread buddhism only throughout the continent so we´d all be happy campers. close borders and open borders only to let in some buddhist missionaries then closing them again as fast as possible to avoid the *heathen* religions from spreading in the beginning. that even worked), managed to build up some rather mediocre defenses... yeah, she REALLY cares about her brothers and sisters of the faith :rolleyes:

gawd she makes me so angry! if my early warmongering didn´t stink so badly i´d take her out. but if i put more emphasis on military i loose some religions and that can´t be good (to paraphrase buffy summers)

i will now proceed to snipe people mercilessly in battlefield 2 to calm my nerves and give this another go tomorrow :)

*insert multiple *mad* emoticons*

PS note to self, try to convince everybody that i´ve always been in favor of peace only...
 
I was going to try this but realized its nilla. I havent played a nilla game since I got warlords. *Sigh*
 
Neo Guderian: Try it. I'm finding vanilla a breath of fresh air after all of warlords little idiosyncrasies. You might be pleasantly surprised.


---


Off topic

scherbchen said:
if i put more emphasis on military i loose some religions and that can´t be good (to paraphrase buffy summers)
Click to expand...


Is it Season 6? Episode 19? 'Seeing Red'? Yes? Yes? HeHe. Yes? :hammer2:

"INT. TRIO'S SECRET LAIR - DAYTIME
Buffy starts poking around, seeing what they've been up to.
She ends up by the 'evil-scheme white board' which is tilted
at an angle on its pivots.

BUFFY
I mean, hello. Slayer here, guys. Did
you really think I wouldn't find you?

She absently tilts the white board down. Two words are written on it:
'TOO LATE.'
Buffy's brow furrows.

BUFFY (cont'd)
Well that can't be good.

BUZZZ! A huge buzz saw pops out of the wall, slicing the white board in half.
Buffy dives, barely avoiding the whirling blade."


Well? Did I win? Did I? Did I? There were soooooo many to choose from! :bounce:



Is it sad that I do this every time I see a buffy quote? :twitch:



---
 
oh you won it allright, glad that there is somebody else besides me who gets a tingly feeling everytime that sentence is uttered :>

butz there are oh so many episodes where that phrase was used... i am tempted but i will NOT watch them all again and quote them all! well, maybe tomorrow!

ps: dawn´s in trouble, must be tuesday

pps: sorry for the off-topic :blush:

ppps: "seeing red" was one of the best ones :D
 
Raiser said:
Thanks, Tauro. Food for thought.

So you did most of your fighting with Macemen?



---
Click to expand...
Yes.
I attacked Izzy (six cities I've cutted off her from the good land) with five cats, six maces and two crossbow.
In the last turns I added four knights, a couple of cats, two longbows, two spearmen and two crossbow. In the last three cities I had to fight against longbows, versus my triple cityrider maces. No story.
Maybe I made the right thing to attack her in the right time, before any trouble. Anyway I think that was better take only three cities: banana, dumbo and the nothern.

In the late game I was very scared of Saladin, he was annoyed with me couse he switched religion to islamism, and was ahead in tech (rifle and cavarly against a couple of longbows, four knights and a couple of cats :) )

Free religion and many gift (to all the civs) save me my butt at the end.

Tomorrow I'll try a different approach. I want to colonize the western portion of the land and work the hills over the fish and pigs, plus a small portion on the north of the capital. I'll try to make a very short war with Izzy. The real problem is cut off saladin expansion while building the GL... we'll see
 
Second attemp: a total disaster :)
I missed meditation for one turn couse I setted 1 east.
This choice was for a good hut popping (about 150 gold and mining) and better cities placement.
The result: GL completed, GLH missed for MANY turns, a load of GE and GP, two GS, and a few GM....
Confucianism didn't spead as in the first try, so napo and caesar attacked me.... I quitted in '700 with a ridicolous 18K.

So we have to:
Skip GL
Take out Izzy asap razing her low sized cities
Skip early techs like AH, wheel, pottery, and so on
Delay banking? Maybe :)
 
ok i´m going to up my ante up to 47854

but i think that is about the max for me. unless i get less set in my ways, if there is a war i crash and burn so the only decent results i had was when i managed to maintain peace up until 1800 AD. i stink at warmongering, what can i say :|

tauros city-placement tips really helped me on this one, in these challenges i usually am going for the same sites as i did in my 2nd, if not 1st, game. so that helped spice things up a bit.

Spoiler :

got stonehenge, oracle (col) and great library in capital. as tauro suggested i made great lighthouse and colossus in the 3rd city (with the addition of national epic, was really happy about that 3% chance great artist that i got i have to tell ya ^^) and tried to have 3 cities popping great persons, failed at that and had only 2. not sure if 1 or 2 cities pumping away at that is better. even i the second city is churning out only 3-4 over the whole game it still contributes the money from the specialists... i really don´t know...

basically got all the worker and sea improvement techs myself before heading towards alphabet (founding only buddhism and confuscianism early on, later taoism via GP. that probably was not a good move by itself because the GP for the taoist shrine came along in the 1600´s. settling him would probably have been better but thats just chump change). also used the first GP towards civil service (plus researching for 3 turns)

was first to liberalism (gifting printing press) and then went back and got economics first, basically stopped researching then and there. i only had 4 cities so wall street was not going to happen anyways but i wanted that extra trade route and the free great merchant (i settled all but the last of them btw, somebody really doing the math on these is probably spewing his dr pepper all over his keyboard right now, sorry about that :) ). by then everybody loved me, because i allways gave them my lunchmoney and offered to carry their heavy books so all production went into missionairies (boy, buddhism had a tough crowd i can tell you) and grocers/banks/harbors where those were missing.

had to opt out of a state religion as soon as judaism (the place to be for my continent, but not for izzy who founded christianity and islam. of course she did not fight any of the "heathens". she reserves that special favour for me. waiting for the second i have a different state religion than she does) became the choice for more than 1 civ.

oh one more thing: i think in order to acchieve maximum gold one is pretty much forced to wage war. spreading the religions of my shrines was hampered way too much by other civs adopting theocracy and thus preventing me from spreading anything but their state religion. saladin gets it as soon as he can, at least one other civ will follow suite. unless you get to mass-produce missionairies of your one or two favoured religions early on (yet manage to stay alive) the only thing you can really rely on is your own empire.



i never really disliked izzy, but after giving this challenge a few tries she will from now on be hunted down mercilessly in every regular civ game i will ever play from now on. where i would usually restart when i see that i have no chance of winning a game, i will make it my holy mission to destroy izzy before i quit!

reyes católicos mi culo!
 
Congrats Sherbchen :)

You put a good question about settling or not GM.
If you settle a GM you receive 1F6G? Right?
The average of a GM trip is 1300/1900/2100, depending by the city cultural level, and NOT by the score in the top five. I mean that the third city in score can give you (in the same age) 1330 or 2100 depending of his cultural level. This fact makes unpredictable the calculation.
Anyway if you settle the GM in your GP farm you gain more Gp points and also you can add na extra merchant specialist with the extra food. So if you have market and grocery you gain 6g from GM, 3g from the specialist x 1,5(bankings comes too late for the last merchants). So you have 13,5 g. How many turs each have the XIV, XV and XVI centuries?

I think that maybe it's better settling 150 turns before the end.
 
New step: 60348

Sherbchen your GL works well :)
I've deserved all the GP (except merchant and two priest for the shrines) for the golden ages, three with taj mahal.
I had seven merchants (two settled in the early ages), four priests, one GE, one GS and one GA (and another that I don't remember, couse I reached 1950/2000)

Same religion strategy all buddist except Izzy = good time.
The science path was totally different, and the wonder location varied with the stonehenge in tenoctitlan.

I warred very early , in three times.

I'm very tired, see you tomorrow :)
 
nice job on breaking 60k !

i´m going to take lessons from you on warmongering ;)
 
Well done. Deservedly the top two slots....at the mo'.

I'm finding it hard going. I've abandoned my first attempt and I'm taking it real slow with my second, because I know that I'm capable of getting more than 60k from this good start. We'll see. Could be hollow words. I'll post it mid-week....probably. :dubious:

Thanks for the right ups.


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scherbchen said:
reyes católicos mi culo!
Click to expand...
'king catholic me anus'??? :shifty:


---
 
We can do better.
My shrines didn't work well, I had only a few cities with confucianism and islamism. And I had FIVE holy cities...But I preferred spending the GPs in golden ages. We have to make some calculation in this case. Is it better to invest hammers in wealth or in missionaries? I've built only 7/8 missionaries in the whole game, and only to build temples and monastiers, couse I've had the spiral minareth in the last golden age.
I didn't keep three spanish cities so with a specialists economy I was able to run 100% science from paper (then edu (8 turns), liberalism(8t), printing press8(free), optic(2t) ,nationalism (6t)
Traded gunpowder and divine right just before the second golden age.

Researching nationalism is very good, you gain about + 180 gold x 8 turns and you can trade it for gold or divine right (1440 gold plus the tech plus rushing your buildings).

Final notes

I tested free speech: useless at all! Better farms, merchants and burocracy.
I refused astronomy from tradings, it makes the colossus obsolete.
GPT in final stages 1060 ultra optimized (1250 in the last golden age)
 
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