News: TSG93 Announcement

Welcome to the Ninety-third game in the GOTM V Training Series! There are plenty of features in Civilization 5 Brave New World to explore and the Training Series games will allow new and old GOTM fans to try out these features in a friendly environment. You are all encouraged to post your questions, stories, advice, tricks and failures in the dedicated game threads described below. You can read more about the GOTM and Training Series concept in this thread. Before going into the details of this game, we would like to ask you to abide to our most sacred rule: don’t replay any turns. If you make a mistake, accept it and try to recover. It's better to do the bad moves in the Training Series instead of in the actual GOTM competition, once it starts.

Please note: If you wish to make a video of your game, please do not post any links to it until after the game submission date has passed. This is because of the potential spoilers that are created by posting before the end date. Thank you for your cooperation.

Intentional use of the Science Overflow Bug is banned. Its use will result in your game being disqualified for results.

In this game, the designated VC is Culture. All VCs are enabled but results will be published by fastest Culture victory turn.

In this game you will play as The Celts and lead the Celtic Empire to victory. It's a standard-sized Continents map played at Immortal difficulty and at standard pace. Culture is the designated VC for this game, all victory conditions are enabled. You will have until October 1st to complete the game and submit.

Civ V BNW - TSG93 Game Settings:
Playable Civ: Boudicca - Celts
Number of AI Opponents: 7
Number of City-States: 16
Map type: Continents
Map Size: Standard
Difficulty Level: Immortal
Game pace: Standard
Game options: Quick Combat is disabled. (You may turn it on using the game options menu at any time during gameplay.)
Game Version: This game was created in Civ5 Brave New World version 1.0.3.144. DLC is required for this game. You must have Mongolia, Wonders of the Ancient World and Explorer's Map Pack.. You must also have both Gods and Kings and BNW.

In this game, you will be playing as The Celts, you possess Druidic Lore. You receive +1 Faith per city with an adjacent unimproved Forest. The bonus increases to +2 Faith in Cities with three or more adjacent unimproved Forest tiles.

You can train the Pictish Warrior, it replaces the Spearman. The Pictish Warrior has a combat bonus outside of friendly territory and can pillage enemy improvements at no additional movement cost. It earns 50% of opponents strength as Faith for kills. The Pictish Warrior requires that you discover the technology of Bronze Working and you do not need a resource to build them.

You can also build the Ceilidh Hall, it replaces the Opera House. The Ceilidh Hall increases a city's Culture and Happiness. The Ceilidh Hall requires that you discover the Acoustic technology and you do not need a resource to build them, but you must have an Amphitheater in your city to build them.

This is where you will start:




Information about threads associated with TSG
TSG Announcement thread (this one). This thread is used to announce the game and clarify the settings and rules (don’t be afraid to ask questions). It’s also used to discuss the game before you start, and post problems with opening the save. Please don’t post any information from a game you have started. Instead use the next thread.

Opening Actions thread. This thread is used to discuss the game once it's on the way. There are no reading or posting restrictions as such (apart from normal decency), although we encourage players to use the spoiler tags for screenshots. Here you can post questions related to the game and share your achievements/anger/frustration/victories while you play. During the time the game is active, please do not post any information concerning the game outside of the spoiler threads including screen shots, videos, or recorded/live-cast Let's Plays on other websites.

After Actions thread. In this thread you can post the results of your game. Please state (preferably in the post title) your victory date and score, as recorded in the Hall of Fame, and the most important: your path to glory! We will create a separate thread with the results at the end of the one month submission period (sorted by date and score). Players are encouraged to provide feedback on the game. Some players like to replay the game, and although we will not record the results from a replay, you can still post your new experiences. The game will not be closed as such, but after one month, the results will be compiled, and will not necessarily be updated with reports coming in after the finish date.

File Upload System
We now have a game file upload system you can find here. Please use it to upload your completed first attempt by saving the game on the turn after your victory or defeat. (by using the "lemme play one more turn" feature) Please note, you must submit your game on the turn following Victory. If you continue to play, the game overwrites the data and your submission could be rejected by the submission system.

This game runs for a month and ends Wednesday, 1 October 2014.

The save will be available for download on 1 September 2014, midnight Central Daylight time (UTC -6:00) in the US.
The Save can be found here.

Religion should be easy, which means SS could be viable. Is it worth a turn to move next to the mountain? You would loose some early faith for what is likely to be little gain.

notalent said:

Religion should be easy, which means SS could be viable. Is it worth a turn to move next to the mountain? You would loose some early faith for what is likely to be little gain.

Click to expand...

If you're really gunning for SS wouldn't observatories be moot anyway? I'd settle in place assuming the warrior doesn't find anything after checking out the SW hill.

I believe SS is way too risky strategy on immortal. IN addition it is continents.

notalent said:

Religion should be easy, which means SS could be viable. Is it worth a turn to move next to the mountain? You would loose some early faith for what is likely to be little gain.

Click to expand...

You're already next to a mountain. Moving would put you on a hill next to a mountain, though it probably comes at a cost of enough forests to get +2fpt from the UA.

Plus, if you're going SS, I don't see how the mountain makes a difference.

I didn't look that closely, but upon further inspection you are right. As for SS on continents it's more to speed up the process. I assume that there will be a culture run away, so the observatory will help get to hotels and airports

If we discard SS, best strategy will be some sort of tradition for fastest possible tech.
One probably need Aesthetic. The become question, exploration or rationalism for fastest possible tech. And what the best use of religion? With just a few cities one can not hope for lot of fault/turn, so it will be local religion.

I see lots of Faith when I look at this start.

See a lot of discussion about SS - as someone who hasn't played for almost a year, can anyone explain this strategy and/or point me at a relevant thread please (done a search but couldn't find anything).

Thanks in advance.

- stride

StrideColossus said:

See a lot of discussion about SS - as someone who hasn't played for almost a year, can anyone explain this strategy and/or point me at a relevant thread please (done a search but couldn't find anything).

Thanks in advance.

- stride

Click to expand...

The strategy is get a religion, pick religious buildings, spam cities, pick Sacred Sites reformation belief from Piety Tree. Win fast through tourism. Its widely believed to be almost impossible at Immortal.

It costs 5 policies in Piety which you must acquire before the AI does. At the same time you need to expand and be able to defend. I'm not sure how you would go do it here.

budweiser said:

The strategy is get a religion, pick religious buildings, spam cities, pick Sacred Sites reformation belief from Piety Tree. Win fast through tourism. Its widely believed to be almost impossible at Immortal.

It costs 5 policies in Piety which you must acquire before the AI does. At the same time you need to expand and be able to defend. I'm not sure how you would go do it here.

Click to expand...

Ah I see, cheers for that.

Does indeed sound pretty tough to pull off at this difficulty level, I'll stick to my usual random clicking approach to cultural victory

For it to work here you will need to get your pict warriors up an running quickly to help get the first religion to get at least one of the four buildings. If there is a weaker neighbor his cities will provide you extra cities for faith and faith buildings. SH would seem to be necessary as well. As far as reformation beliefs go it's not usually one of the early ones to go, but you will likely have to rush the piety branch.

I get a HTTP 404 when trying to download the save.

It's not available until the 1st

Welcome to CivFanatics and Game of the Month.

jeremybeier said:

I get a HTTP 404 when trying to download the save.

Click to expand...

Please read the sentence above the link you clicked to download the save.

I could go with my standard liberty/piety approach, but it does mean no middle age wanders, slow initial tech. I usually do get 2 religious buildings (not always). I will finish having 10-12 cities (my and neighbor) at industrial age, which mean 40 tourism with ss. But that will not create win, as pressure will be too late. In addition liberty /piety most effective believe is Jesuit education.

Eventually production and research from that amount of cities will kick in and add a lot of tourism but it will not be early cultural win. It will be probably guaranty cultural win because there always back up of military force. May be best strat is to start with ss and try to do finishing blow with futurism...

I'd say SS is too late on continent to cut it on Immortal. Celts have stronger religion though so maybe it's possible but I think it's very risky.

I would go for a normal CV on this one.

many things will depend on the neigbours and on a good spot for a town on the coast... perhaps it will be a mix of all, religion, military, expansion...

After a lot of re-rolling, I hit on a test game map that looks like a similar start to this one (forest, mountain, river, deer but citrus instead of silk). Got culturally floored and gimped out on a (slow) science victory one part ahead of the run-away. I got religion but lousy FPT. I got beaten to every culturally significant wonder (Inca were building everything that Byzantium forgot after Egypt took what they could). At 450 TPT at the end but even 3 GMs didn't put a dent in Byzantium's cultural lead. A turn 375 grind-out for launch having burned most of my meagre faith on musicians (only one scientist when I saw where the game was headed).

Two questions for the pros:

1. As a rough guide, what sort of science benchmarks do you guys expect/aim for based on Celts/Continents/Immortal?

2. Given the mountains for at least one city (I had three out of four in my test game), where does Astronomy sit in the tech queue? I went Education to Printing Press (for Pisa - which I missed) to Public Schools and then on to Astronomy but think I might have been better off not gambling on Pisa and getting an observatory up somewhere between Education and Public Schools?

many of your questions depends on what opening you chosen? x city tradition or x city liberty and whats second tree you have chosen?