Does gold work out to be more valuable than free techs?
This is a hard one to answer. On the one hand sometimes you finish Pottery get a free tech and nab a free Calendar. On the other hand sometimes it gives you Mining, something that you were currently working on and that only has 3 turns left. It's hit or miss. Gold will always have value especailly if you're looking to rush-buy Settlers. A free tech is fine obviously but it's not always going to be super relevant. What I will say is that free techs get much better once you have Mining and Pottery but like it's always going to be a bit of a gamble. You're also probably taking Faith since that's like turn 20ish. There's no one right answer here.
How are you managing to keep your cities growing well after staffing your Universities? On Turn 111 after you staff your fresh-bought University in 8 pop Goshute you are getting the food from your best 6 tiles, your city tile plus Granary. That would barely keep a family fed. You have finished Tradition so you do have an Aquaduct there. Did you take the +15% growth pantheon? (actually looks like you took Camp food) Are you sending a food Caravan there? Do you have one or more Maritime CSs allied? We Love the King Day? That's one of the things that chokes off my growth immensely, filling those Specialist spots when I hit Education.
Food from camps helped me a lot that game since I had so many of them. I basically never use food caravans and didn't that game. I always try and keep my We Love the King Days rolling so it probably had it at the time. I had no CS allies that game, nor CS friends, beyond my one Mercantile ally. I purposely avoided things like Consulates and making tons of CS friends for a few games to test the build out further. You obviously should try and get as many CS allies as possible but I wanted to make sure that you could just live off of 1 Merc for the big happiness buffer. Never had a problem with it in any of my games so I was reasonably satisfied.
I'm also wondering how you managed to spy successfully on the tech leader, when they normally defend their cap with their own Spy, and also do it to Rome without prompting a DoW the first tech took. Were you bribing Caesar to stay put or attack someone else?
I'm wondering how your spies fail. In all of my Deity games I've never failed to steal techs with my spies. I've never had one killed except during coup attempts on CSes once I get my first one to level 3 promotion. Yes, I was paying Ceasar to DOW China and Ottomans. Also, stealing techs will basically never prompt war. The biggest mistake that people say is that "they promise to stop spying on you." Never lie. Lying gives you huge negative diplo modifiers. When he confronted me about him I told him "my spies go where they please" and that was that. He might DOW me if he caught me later after promising to stop. As long as you don't lie you should be fine.
You say it was a trivial amount of Gold to deflect Suleiman toward China on Turn 99, when you had 1351 Gold, and 12 Turns later you can afford to rush-buy 4 Universities. Were you the only one with Truffles and did you have Friends you could sell them to for 240? How did you crank that much gold in that many Turns? Did you sell a bunch of GPT to Friends on Turn 111? It's impressive.
Yes I had control over all of the Truffles that game it seemed. Yes I sold all of my gpt for flat gold. Yes I was getting 240g for most of many of my luxuries. Playing nice and paying people to DOW each other is a great way to make a lot of friends.
This minimal military tactic is very different to me and I don't know how you managed to not be in a permanent state of war. But I would love to learn more.
Every 5 turns I look at the civs near me and the civs near them. I trade them and see A) if they're willing to go to war and B) what it will cost me. Since the answer is usually "yes" and "not much" it's not hard to avoid war for the entire game past a certain point. The scariest part of the game is on turns ~70-100 where you don't have much gold and the AI haven't expanded enough to meet a ton of neighbors with contested borders. The game is easy mode cruise control past turn like 150 though. The reason why I was fine with having no gold, no army, no nothing on turn 160 is because I've never lost from that position in my life as of BnW. I'll always get some gold from trades/whatever a few turns later and it'll always be enough to keep the wars going.
I think you are not honest if u say '1 archer and walls are always enouph to def'. Really. Usually AI fails war, but sometimes they can do something.
I'm being honest but I'm more than willing to recognize the fact that I may just be lucky. Every time the AI wages war with me I easily fend it off with a pathetic force. Now, that being said, I play a lot of civ. A lot of stuff comes naturally to me. I always expand on hills and across rivers. I always look to create choke points. I always scout ahead to see incoming armies and I always try and pay that civ to DOW someone else. Etc. etc. Some of it is skill. Some of it is probably luck. Still, I've never actually lost to these kinds of early rushes even though I tend to ignore military for the most part.
Have I ever had Zulu start 10 tiles away from me and wage war with me? No, I haven't. Pangea maps are random as heck and there are a lot of civs in the game. I'm not going to cook any settings or do anything special to force situations to occur. My playstyle works for me. I've lost like 2 Deity games so far. One time I was playing on the weirdest pangea map ever where I was between 3 civs who had no access to the rest of the world except to go through me. Think of it like a cross with me being in the middle and the bottom of the cross leading to the other civs. On turn 80 or something Monty, Greece and Russia all DOW'd me so that they could expand beyond "the cross." I lost that game. The other game that I lost was to Ghandi who won a culture win on turn 262 because I had no idea what I was doing or how the culture win worked.
I didnt see in this guide anything Shoshone-special but anyway got some fun reading it. I want just to notice that in my last game for Shoshones I only got 2 ruins. Shoshones gain more from ruins but they get nearly the same count of ruins (you get scout from start, but second scout comes slower) as other civ - and from my experience average ruin count is far not 5, may be 3 or 4.
Lowest that I've ever gotten was 2 on a map where I was surrounded by 3 opposing civs who were all within 15 tiles of me. That was a weird game. Getting 4-6 isn't rare or uncommon at all for me on Standard Pangea maps. Do you sometimes get less? Sure. Stuff happens. There's a reason why you open Pottery with the option of building a Shrine after your 2 Pathfinders in case you're worried about not getting a Pantheon.
Still, I don't build 3 Pathfinders because I expect to get a million ruins. One is getting me a Worker. Period. The other 2 are meeting CSes, civs, finding expansion locations and finding me NWs. They're also finding me 4ish ruins on average. I rarely get as few as 3 and I've only ever gotten 2 once. Building scouts early and often is great since the AI puts 0 effort in checking their surroundings completely. I've found ruins within 2 tiles of a city more times than I care to count.
I also do not understand why you dislike food-caravans. "We Love the King Day"s is a nice thing, but not always possible if you dont like to pay 24 gpt for lux or buy military CS on the other side of map. Moreover "We Love the King Day" boosts food from caravans.
Because everything has trade-offs. Using Caravans for food is caravans that aren't getting me gold and science early on when I sorely need it. The reason why I can pay 16gpt and 1 luxury for a WLtK day is because my trade routes are giving me a lot of gold each (especially after Markets and Constabularies kick in). Still, I'm also getting science out of the deal and the computers that I'm trading with are now slightly less likely to attack me. Both options provide me with food. Gold caravans net you science, a bit of a positive diplo modifier (it's small but it is something) and gold can also be used to pay people for wars, buy science buildings, etc. If I could magically have tons of gold and food caravans, sure, I'd obviously take both. Then reality kicks in and I remember that you don't magically have everything at your disposal at all times.
I can not decide whether your position on last screen is good or not. You should be around even in tech to best AI, but you will leave without gpt for 20 turns. And you have no units at all. What you will do if Suleman make peace with China and attacks you?
It's literally never happened once. I've never lost a game past turn 150 or so. The computers are mass expanding at that point and everyone hates everyone. I can play as greedy and stupidly as I want. Doesn't matter if I don't have gold or units. I will 100% no get DOWed because Rome, China and Ottomans are all in perpetual war with at least 1-2 other players. The game gets waaaaaaaaaaaay easier in that sense. As soon as borders become contested it's just not even possible to lose. Getting there safely is the hard part.
I've updated the guide a bit to cover more of the basics.
