The proximity of Wash and especially Cathy did not bode well. Also, the nearby locations for city sites were saaaweeet; so I went large. I built a total of four more cities; one to the east to get iron and wine, one to the south on the river lake tile with wheat iron and gems, one to the SW near Fujisama, and one on the isthmus far to the west to get the gold whales and horses and possible sea access.
Since the latest patch my understanding has been that culture victories can be equally fast with one city and four. I am not a specialist at heart and so all my cities end up pretty similar. Before the latest patch the fewer cities the better, but now I find that as long as I settle quickly and can build culture and wonders in all my cities at roughly the same pace, I always finish at roughly the same speed. 344 was roughly par for the course for me, and considering I had five cities, I thought it was good.
For SPs I opened tradition, finished liberty, finished piety, finished freedom, finished tradition, finished patronage. My goal is always no more than 10 turns between SPs, but in this game I lost that in the middle and was at maybe 12-13 turns per SP. My culture games are always the same; first policy may take forever or not, then a few fast ones, then slowing down thru the midgame, then fast towards the end. Its the bulge in the middle I've been trying to cut down on. Obviously I wasn't very fast with this big empire.
B/c of my big empire I never had to worry about much. I did have trouble remaining peaceful and forging a strong alliance. I made fast friendships with Wu and Wash, but everybody was mad at me for creating a fifth city. Cathy broke a RA and DOWed me pretty early on. I really dragged it out and enjoyed chewing up her units with my jag-swords, but I didn't really try to take her cities. What I really wanted was peace, and I worked really hard to try to get another one or two civs in to the super-friendship alliance with me Wu and Wash
.
France was a complete introvert and wanted nothing to do with anybody. Germany England and Japan were really kicking up hostilities with each other so I could only pick one of them at the expense of the others. To make matters worse, each of them had some problem with one of my two friends practically the whole game. It was very frustrating, and I have to agree with the sociopath comment from a previous poster. By midgame my alliance was broken, and essentially every single civ was either at war or denouncing every single other civ
.
I always kept a strong military. The tradition and freedom policies made this relatively cheap, my large empire kept the science flowing, my strong military meant nobody but Cathy was dumb enough to DOW me, hence all of my RAs were making it to completion. I was making money hand over fist and buying up all the city states by midgame. Everybody hated me but they still paid between 80-109 for my resources and I had a ton of them. On king this really didn't matter at all b/c usually the civs are so broke you have to loan them money for RAs anyway, so actually having them all guarded against me just meant they saved more of their money for RAs with me
. The only downside was they would never sell me their lux, but I was happy from about turn 80 onward so no big deal.
Towards the end of the game I aquired a huge military tech advantage
. I decided to go ahead and take the southern hemisphere with a circumnavigational war. I started with rifles and artillery vs Cathy's swords, moved on to infantry and artillery vs Oda's samurai, and completed my journy by kicking down Wash's backdoor with mech infantry, rocket artillery and bombers against his minutemen and cannons. All three wars took maybe 20 turns or so combined.
Of course Napolean had to seal his own doom b/c he didn't know his place in the world, so after he DOWed me I took some of his cities just to get pearls and make a more symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing empire, but at this point Utopia popped and it was all over. Napolean was lucky b/c I was 1-2 turns away from giving birth to four giant death robots
who's sole purpose would be to amuse me at his expense. I was really curious about Paris which was defense of 96. I wanted to practice cracking that nut without nukes...
under golden age(119 for half way), built Utopia in 13 turns. I prebuilt some buildings earlier to shave some turns with hammer overflow but i didn't have a single turn in spare.
