Pagan Culture

Hi folks, I wanted to start up another SG since it looks like the Fox series is going on a mini-break. It's a very straight forward variant but I'm not sure if it's been done before.

Here are the proposed settings:

Version: BTS 3.13 (no BUG please due to log crashes)
Difficulty: Monarch
Map: Continents
Speed: Normal
Size: Standard
Opponents: Brennus, Charlemagne, Justinian I, Montezuma, Saladin, Zara Yaqob
Our pagan leader: Pericles
Our chosen victory condition: culture, but all VC's are enabled.

Variant: If an AI asks us to adopt a state religion, we must refuse and immediately declare war. We are free to take peace at any time of course. In addition, we are never allowed to found a religion or adopt a state religion. We must stay in paganism all game (defying the UN if we need to). We are not allowed to research/trade for monotheism.

My pre-game thoughts: The game is filled with warmongers and we will be at war for a large part of the game (I think). Because of the variant rules, our access to cathedrals will be severely limited (no missionaries). We can use the culture slider but it will obviously come with risks given the neighborhood. Wonders and corporation culture may be a safer option.

We get bonus points if we build the Parthenon and the Statute of Zeus.


Roster:
-------------
shyuhe
open
open
open
open

It'll be a strict 24/loose 48 policy. Sets will be 10-15 turns each. I'll post a start position once we have 4 players.

You really should add Isabella to the mix. She is sure to start a war or two with against the pagans (us). I'm a bit tired of space races, so a war-heavy game sounds good. Sign me up, please.

Edit: perhaps we could use the HoF mod. It has most of the improvements from the unofficial patch and many convinient alerts but doesn't seem to break anything.

I was originally thinking of playing as Isabella - that's why I didn't add her. Since we're playing as Pericles, adding Isabella sounds like a good idea. I'll just crowd the map with one more AI.

I'm open to using the HOF mod. Frankly I haven't had that many problems in my offline games with "game break" issues. I realize they exist but you can work around most of them. I'll leave that for the team to decide.

Roster:
shyuhe
yena
open
open
open

Issy doesn't declare war on you if you're in NSR, just she gets awful angry if you're a different religion. But crowding the map will work out, religious tensions.

(Not a signup.)

I doubt they'll declare on us. I imagine we'll have to declare because somebody asks us to convert.

I'd like to sign up.

Seems like fun: A warmongerer game going for culture. The phalanx will make us survive the early game. We also should mix in some early wonders. The Pyramids would be great, as we need a strong GA-farm. Also the first gp may be a GE who builds another wonder in one of the weaker cities.
Agg AI anyone?

Culture isn't really my favorite victory condition, but doing it while being the word villain No.1 sound like a lot of fun.

*signup*

Ok. I think that makes 4 of us. I'll roll up a start tomorrow and get this game going.

Roster:
shyuhe
yena
mystfly
qwertz
open (I'll leave this open through the end of the first set)

nice, this is btw my first SG, so don't blame me too much if I do someting wrong

Lurker's comment: How about making the DoW in reply to an adopt state religion the only time when you can declare war? Otherwise it seems very straightforward to eliminate the AIs from your island and turtle to a CV.

Swiss Pauli said:

Lurker's comment: How about making the DoW in reply to an adopt state religion the only time when you can declare war? Otherwise it seems very straightforward to eliminate the AIs from your island and turtle to a CV.

Click to expand...

But that won't stop the guys on the other continent, and excessive warfare will slow us down.

Swiss Pauli said:

Lurker's comment: How about making the DoW in reply to an adopt state religion the only time when you can declare war? Otherwise it seems very straightforward to eliminate the AIs from your island and turtle to a CV.

Click to expand...

That does sound like a great idea to me. I think once the other civs on *our* continent are eliminated, the wars (the fun) will be gone mostly. This way, this will happen way later.

Are we allowed to have vassalls? If yes, we can vassallize the other civs and let them do the big part of the research for us once we apply culture mode (slider).

Is Agg AI an option? I think there will be some DOWs even if a continent is a happy budd/hindu block.

Why is Zara invented to the party? Can we replace him with Izzy for some more spice?

No we are not allowed vassals as we can't force them into paganism. The map is full of religious nuts so they will probably not change their religious civics to paganism.

A good point about not being able to declare war. I hadn't though of that. If they want us to change religions and we can't declare immediately, we must declare as soon as possible. Regarding our own abuse of declaring war, I doubt it'll be an issue. I think our hand will be forced before we will want to declare.

Agg AI is not an option. I rarely play with it and I don't like what I see with it (harder early game but easier late game).

Zara is in the party because he's a strong AI. Plus he favors religion. Almost all of the AI like theocracy in this game. I will change Charlemagne to Isabella though.

You guys seem to be working under the presumption that it will be a trivial task to clean up our continent... If you have no trade routes with any of the AI, it slows down your tech rate a lot so I wouldn't get ahead of ourselves in this department. It's pretty likely that we'll be in early BC wars that will lead to damaged relationships that we'll never be able to salvage (so no OB).

I think that by staying in NSR and having at least 2 religions on the continent (not both founded by the same civ of course), the other AIs will war against themselves quite much and we won't have THAT much problems to keep out of war. The most common demands will be to join their war (am I right with my assumptions? I never did anything like this so I may be totally wrong), so we don't have to DOW them. We'll happily tech to lib > rifles and conquer our continent and apply culture mode.

I think we will have quite a lot of wars early on and the diplomacy won’t be easy. At some point of the game we will conquer our continent, but the question is how advanced will the other continent be by then. Also defying the UN might be a challenge if we get that far.

Kicked up the start and played 40 turns to get the ball rolling. We have a tough starting position. But more on that later.

Our pagan leader:


And our start:


It looks like we're on a penninsula and the east is a dead-end. So I decide to settle in place to keep the fish in the bfc. Not an ideal start location as we'll need Moai to get midgame production. But it'll do for the time being as it has hills and forests to chop.

I send the scout west and we find tundra marble a little bit to the west. Too bad the oracle is a longshot against 6 civs that start with mysticism And we can't take CoL anyways...

We meet our first neighbor (and only contact so far) in 4 turns:


yup. We're definitely warring this game I sent the scout a little SW and found Monty's borders. He's VERY close (you'll see later).

The scout went further south into the jungle but was eaten by a lion while hiding in the jungle There's at least one more civ out there as Monty has fewer EP against us than we do on him. However I have no clue who it is. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism have already been founded at the end of 40 turns. Not too surprising there. Thankfully Monty did not found any of them so we won't be forced into a war with him yet.

We got a nice event at the beginning of the game:


I opted for the risky option as we had plenty of space under the cap. The anger will wear off next turn at which point we may want to consider swapping into slavery.

The tech order went mining --> BW --> AH --> wheel. Research has been set to agriculture (a little backwards of an order but Monty nearby made me hurry BW and AH).

We do not have BW, and it doesn't look like Monty does either. However, we (Pericles and Monty) both have horses in the capital's bfc. I changed around the start build order to push out a settler and settled Sparta on turn 40. So here's what our empire looks like:



Sparta has a lot of strong tiles to work at size 4. However the obvious problem we have is that we really can't fit any more cities without taking out Monty first. I vote that we rush the sucker with chariots - we need to at least take his capital to open up more land for settling.

We'll play at 10-15 turns each - just pick a convenient hand over point between 10-15.

Roster:
shyuhe (just played)
yena - UP
mystfly (on deck)
qwertz
open (I'll leave this open through the end of the first set)

My thoughts:
It looks like rushing the Monty is a must. Chariots aren't my favorite rushers but as long as Monty has no metal, we'll be fine. Tenochtitlan also looks like a good candidate for a legendary city .
Tech-wise I think writing should be a priority to get OB with Monty and IW also seems quite important, not only for localizing the iron, but also for cutting all those jungles in the south.


Also some questions:
Why did you "workboated" the claims instead of fish? -> doesn't look like a good trade for me.

Do I need to disable/uninstall the BUG mod somehow or is it done automatically by the save?

the problem is that once Monty'll have archers, no chariot will be able to take him down. I suggest you wait till Iron Working before getting to buisness.

This is monarch so monty has archers already, but if we outnumber him it shouldn't be a problem. Waiting for IW and hoping for iron is a bit too risky IMO. I was also thinking about teching HBR and doing a HA rush, but I have never done this before so I'm not sure how efficient this would be.

Got it. 15 turns, right?

Things could be worse, the city sites look decent. The plan is to prepare for a Monty rush with a chariot army, but how about the no-DoW-unless-asked-to-change-religion rule (if we even agreed to follow it). I guess all rules are out when Monty is nearby