*SKRen facepalms with fury of a thousand misclicks*
It wasn't a winner and it crashed but despite going though the whole game, I stupidly clicked Return to menu instead of 'One more turn'... And just to note, ICS Egypt is way scarier than ICS Gandhi could ever be 20ish cities at 7+ and still had over 60 Burial Tombs are sooo overpowered or it could be that I was playing on Chieftain . Also has anyone noticed that Meritocracy+Forbidden Palace+Aristocracy is essentially a -25% to unhappy across you total population? That's a 33% increase in population support
All right, Ill kick this off with a T209 Finish. Settings were Oval(High Sea Level iirc, And despite picking 5Billion years, I landed in the super hilly zone which worked out in my favor at the end.) and Leader was Ramkhamhaeng.
I gotta say I took a lot of pointers from The_Pilgrims Sub 200 Science Deity game. I expanded fast to four cities. I started nestled around a mountain cluster but had several choice spots around to place cities and got my second city out on T21 and my 4th out on T40. From there I took all but BW of the Ancient techs and primed Theology, Civil Service and Compass. From there I was able to set up a full wave of RAs starting on T75 and the final one a bit delayed at T82.
The second wave was less glorious. At first Gandhi and Hiawatha were guarded towards me for being a possible threat, so with Hiawatha being the warmonger and Gandhi the peaceful one, I signed Hiawatha first and Gandhi last (Mostly cause he was broke). While waiting for the RAs to mature however I found a way to fix Gandhi's attitude. See I had built a trireme and scouted clockwise only to spy a barb camp with a settler. Well there was only one person it could belong to so I quickly freed him and 2 turns later Gandhi was grateful. Gandhi was everyone friend as well so I befriended him too. So now Hiawatha is my friend, Gandhi is my friend as are Washington, Wu Zeitan and Genghis Khan. Elizabeth WAS my friend until she decided she wanted to build one of the wonders I built a century ago and denounces me. Germany has always been on guard but suddenly hes on my case too. And thats where it stayed till the end of the game. So my second wave of RAs ended up being only 5 total and spread out over T113-T130.
My 3rd wave consisted of 3 RAs but really that was all I needed, actually two is all I needed. Made the two that mattered on T158 & T159
I ended up allying a Maritime CS pretty early and nabbed a Cultural and another Maritime mid game. Those helped a ton.
Finally I have come away from this with some big pieces of advice:
- Build the National Monument, in your Capital fairly early. Also be sure to take the Freedom opener after you get Rationalism. It can wait if you get Patronage after.
- Make sure your first 7 Great People are Scientists. Assuming you did like me and went for a 4 city start, you should get 4 in you capital and 1 from each of the small ones. IMMEDIATELY after you pop the 4th GS from your Capital, switch over to GE production(Unless you grabbed 2 GEs from HS/Liberty. I went GE/GS so I needed the GE.) Either way the timing is pretty close but doable either way. I suppose double GE is a safer bet though in which case keep on building a 5th GS. You will need and get it in time.
- If you hard Tech Refrigeration, Combustion and Flight(Preferably in that order for the best medians) you can bulb the rest.
And that's it. If I had one thing to regret it was not being aggressive enough in loaning out my GPT to get the last 2 waves of RAs done faster. I know I could have hit sub 200. I definitely would have if Germany and England weren't being such prudes. I'm also bummed I missed the last city-state.
17/18 is not bad
Final shot of my Empire