Acken Challenges - #1 Carthage Immortal (6)

Fun game! Thanks for the mod and the map, Acken! I thought my position was so strong at T200, I could easily cruise to victory, but both remaining civs really gave me a run for my money and made me fight for it.

In the end, there were 3 civs left. I had taken out Denmark, Morocco had taken out Celts, and Russia took over their whole continent. Since I had built so many cultural wonders (I think I built or captured all of them) I figured cv would be easiest, but it wasn't as easy as I had hoped for. I think not generating much faith made it tougher as I couldn't buy as many great people. In the end, though, no one could resist my IG-Internet-NVC-powered rock concerts and blue jeans.

Well i lost a lot of time cause i dowed rome, which made poland reallly dominant in the other continent, and they started to get a lot of culture.

This game was a huge battleground, bothharald and moroco wanted the poor boudica's death, harald kept harrasing utique but it even scary, the ranged frigates are just insane when they are ready around T150.
after the first peace treaty with harald i took my fleet to help city states and india to fight the bloodthirsty caesar.
liberated 2 city states, 2 indian cities and destroyed a couple of roman cities, which was a really bad idea, getting 2 more culture city states wastn worth the culture poland got from conquering the whole continent, just because i killed so many roman cities and units.

To get such an early win, i did get guilds going asap, rushed acoustic the printing and took all wonders, then beelined archeology(started with frigates to keep me safe and buff the prod) i did way too many archeologist, like 3 or 4 of them couldnt even get a relic cause all my slot were filled.

so around T 150-160 i had every single culture wonder exept partenon, aesthetic was finished around T 140, got a 45 turns long golden age thanks to chichen itza + 2nd natural GA thanks to insane early happinnes + aesthetic + taj mahal. a bit after the end of this one i bulbed a GArtist for another one when i won world fare(no more art slots so...), used a great writer to speed up the T3 tenet for the +34% culture from broadcast towers aswell.

Another mistake was to pick patronage opener, i should have finished ratio to get hotels faster. i also didnt delay a great musician that could have saved me some turns aswell (poped like 5-10 turns before hotels).

what helped a lot is the fact that i had like +150 gpt at turn 80ish ... bought every single cultural city state to avoid AI getting them, it gave me stupid amount of hapiness.

i had enough gold to buy all my buildings aswell, so all my prod went to archeologist and wonders.

wonders built :great lighthouse, oracle, petra, angor wat, chichen itza, sixtine, globe theater, ltop, forbien palace(super late for 1 more art slot xD), PT, uffizi, taj mahal, louvre, broadway, effeil tower.

Opened with liberty, and tried for a religion even though there are no good faith pantheons. God of the sea was the obvious choice, but all my faith had to come from shrines. I was very lucky to get an encampment quest from Vatican City, and more so when there was a captured worker in it. With that I was able to generate my first prophet, and I enhanced with a free GP from the liberty finisher, managing to grab pagodas and mosques.

I knew I had to take out Bluetooth sooner rather than later because he was too close, so the tech order was to beeline compass to spam out a few galleasses, then education. Shortly after taking Copenhagen I managed to hit frigates, so all the ships got upgraded and I sailed them over to Augustus and burned down a lot of his coastal cities while liberating three CS'es. At this point Gandhi was starting to run away with tech and culture, so right after making peace with Rome I Dow'ed India. It was a bit tense because by that time Gandhi already had submarines that can one shot my frigates and GWBs, so I had to place a lot of embarked workers near my fleet to see them coming. Fortunately Gandhi never had the chance to make a lot of planes so I burned down all his coastal cities. His capital was inland so I never expected to be able to take it with ships, but it turned out that Delhi was only 4 tiles from the coast, so battleships with range can actually hit it. I only needed to sail over a single lancer to capture the city.

At this point I wasn't sure how I wanted to win. I planned to try a freedom SV because Dido's UB made so much gold, but Gandhi went order with 180+ tourism while I had only 20, and I didn't think I could handle that kind of ideological pressure. At T250 or so I didn't think I had enough beakers to get through the tech tree and I have neglected my tourism up to that point, so the only VC I can achieve in a reasonable time was Dom. Warsaw was on the coast, and Moscow was inland but within battleship range. The only problem was Rome, which was 5 tiles inland. What saved me the trouble of having to sail a bunch of rocket artilleries to the other continent was the placement of Ravenna. I captured that city, and was able to place my battleships in there to hit Rome. In the end I had 16 battleships with range + logistics + supply plus about a dozen fighters and the land army to take Edinburgh and Marrakech; can't remember ever making a military that large.

SPs were liberty, then exploration except for navigation school, patronage for scholasticism and to unlock FP. Rationalism was the next tree, but I opened it pretty late. However, with the culture and free policies from WF and IG I managed to fill it pretty quickly. I only started getting ideologies tenets after all that, but the +25% science from factories were pretty helpful. In hindsight it was probably a better idea to go order rather than freedom because with treasure fleets even blank water tiles were 2F 2H 3G, and I think it would have been a lot better to have citizens work those nice tiles instead of sticking them into specialist slots.