Immortal Challenge 10: Inca dreamstart

Hello!

The tenth installment of IC isn't going to be challenging per se. But afaik civfanatics enjoy racing to victory in their pursuit of fastest victory times. This game I believe is suitable for achieving a really good finish time. Or else, this can be a nice chance for Emperor players to step up. Whatever.

Inca can build terrace farms on hills that gain +1 compared to regular farms for every adjacent mountain.
Pachacuti's UA is to pay half cost for maintaining roads and railroads, unless they are in hills - those are free. His units pay but 1 to enter any tile with hills.
Finally, Inca train slingers instead of archers. They've got 1 less in exchange for promotion to withdraw from melee attack. Not bad but I'd gladly trade the slinger for a unit that can murder sheep and deer.

Our civ is top, our start is great, our enemies are doomed! You won't need luck here but still good luck

I'm thinking just settle in place.

looks like a possible good OCC location, lets see what we do with it

What is the map type? Also, how does the slinger work?

well when I rolled it it was Random map type iirc. If you really want to know the exact type, it's

All the usual stuff (opponent number, cs number, speed etc) is standard

EDIT: slinger has a chance to run 1 tile back when it's atatcked in melee, just like caravel. If it succeeds, the attacker moves into former slinger's tile and the slinger moves 1 tile back. Neither one suffers any damage, and the attacker pays his usual movement cost instead of all remaining moves. Chance to retreat is decent, but according to game manual it declines as attacker's speed increases, so withdrawinng from a modern armor is gonna be much harder than from a swordsman. Retreating several times per turn is possible. The promotion persists on upgrade.

Dont cover your workers with slingers.

Or a Great General.

I'm going to give a go at this one when I get home. I'm thinking I will settle in place. Starts like this with Inca give you a hard choice between two good alternatives - settling next to Mountain for the Observatory or saving that hill for a Terrace Farm. But I don't think that I can forego settling on the coast, anyway. Maybe on the Gold 1 tile to the right.

Hey guys. I just moved up to Immortal and may give this a try. Just curious: how is this a dream start? The gold is nice but -2 food. 2 luxes which are good. One fish. Seems like it's food poor.

It's not the absolute most cooked start ever. It's still missing the river and the first tile Oasis to be "perfect". It's just that relative to all the tundra ice-ball starts in the other IC's, this one is good.

Dream start = riverside + mountain + petra god mode. With pachacutti, petra is even better because you can get absurd growth by spamming terrace farms on all hills instead of just farming riverside hills as you would do with petra.


Think of it this way, if there are about 15 desert HILLS, petra gives you 15f 15h 15g per turn more than you otherwise would. Throw in desert folklore to get the strongest religion and you can pretty much do whatever you want however you want.


Edit personally, I consider a god start with pacacuti to also have many hills with 2-4 adjacent mountains (even if it means fewer viable tiles in the late game) as it means that early terrace farms will get your capital to size 16-20 by turn 100 just killing science and renaissance wonders in 3-4 turns to build.

Turn 70

Huntyadown said:

Turn 70

Spoiler :

Turn 70 Ethiopia completed Petra and I just left. If you can't get Petra This whole thing turns into a really un fun map. Not hard or impossible, just not fun. There's little spots to expand to and OCC is only going to be feasible with petra.

If anyone knows how to get a sub turn Petra plz let me know.

Click to expand...

I usually manage it around turns 60-65 on deity when I really shoot for it, usually grabbing either ToA or HG on the way. However, it requires a super early game worker steal from a neighbor AI (can't wait for turn 20+ to get it from a CS) as well as some strong growth/production tiles.

Plan is pottery - mining - beeline petra rarely I will pick writing after pottery if I think I can build it between granary and watermill as then its turn cost will pay itself off. It may look like a significant cripple but really, the growth from HG/TOA + Petra will overcome that slight early deficit like its a joke.

I'm trying to finish a Byz "avg start" on deity through a domination based early CB rush (I only planted capital, all other cities were from war). Game played out extremely awkward and warmongering is slow, let alone that my comp crash on turn 238 o.o. I'll give a shot at this map for kicks afterwards and discuss how I managed to get petra (assuming I did)

I will say that I didn't even have a chance to get Petra or HG on this map.

yanner39 said:

Hey guys. I just moved up to Immortal and may give this a try. Just curious: how is this a dream start? The gold is nice but -2 food. 2 luxes which are good. One fish. Seems like it's food poor.

Click to expand...

some map info to address this question

Can't provide a SS at the moment, my game crashed. I really gotta get a new computer

However. Since this is immortal and I never get to get GL on deity, I went

pottery->writing->mining(got from a ruin actually) -> beeline petra

GL was built on T39 exactly as the Wheel was completed so I got to pop mathematics then. I began to work on HG and completed it 1 turn after teching petra.

Finished building petra on ~T67.

However, Ethiopia picked DF up on T10. I wanted to cry. I am about on T180 atm and have been struggling for happiness all along. I founded 5 cities including capital. I'll try to throw in a SS later to show how stupid Inca unique improvement can be. I founded my 5th city around T100 and it's now my 3rd pop city@ size 15. A single non hills tile is ran. Everything else is +2-+5F/2h terrace farms.

Been leading in tech since I poped education but the shape of the land makes it extremely hard to do war. Science is slower than what I'm used to on deity but I'm still way ahead of any AI running around 420 BPT on T180. I'm currently planning to go slightly out of the science path for oil/flight and just rape a few neighbors with it. I don't think I can manage the happiness for full flight domination though (my favorite)


I settled capital 2 tiles from mountain besides the river 2 tiles NW of the flood plain wheat. My goal was to grab as many petra hills as possible. I hate to sacrifice mountain side for capital, esp when I shoot for HG+Petra but the growth, production and gold gain from doing so was just too big. Had I went OCC I would've hugged the mountain losing some desert hills. I dowed England around t20 after finally finding the lands of a neighbor and stole a worker. I had already had to trade 4gpt for 90g to mayans to rush-buy my first worker a few turns ahead however. Delayed workers is the prime reason why I miss wonders on deity, I was starting to be scared of missing GL by a few turns.

Winning screenshot crashed the game...

T286 OCC science win, nothing special except the pop. 38 city with 250ish hammers was the biggest I've ever built. I think at the end I staffed every workable tile and all the science and production buildings.

Settled the hill/river/mountain tile. I rushed shrine for DF, then took a chance and got NC up before getting Petra around T80. I knew I had some time because Haile was at war with Kammy. Meant skipping all the other pre-medieval wonders though, but once observatory was up I had my pick.

I played this one moodily. Pacal hit my capital with a GP early on (possibly before he'd even enhanced, it was weird), and I was so pissed I DoWed just so I could cap the GP and delete him angrily. Could have done this a lot faster with him as a perma-ally. I think diplo would have been substantially faster too, but it seemed a little risky as everyone had really high GPT and was very CS-focused. But I made that decision late and let a few GAs pop that I would have stopped if I'd planned science the whole time.

This was fun. Pacha was my first OCC deity win, which was also a Petra start, so it was nice to relive that without having to do the rerolling to find it. I love that you can build roads on literally every hill at no cost and immediately hammer anyone who sets foot across your borders.

Yeah, I just missed Petra by 2 turns (all but Pyramids went crazy early in my game) but this map is Inca perfect. So many mountainside Hills and amazingly defensible spots. I've got 4 cities closing off the choke points, with scads of Slingers defending, and now I think I will just grind to launch. See how Tall I can go.

So I finished my "I don't know what VC to pick" game as a T261 domination.

For the sake of it, I replayed from T100 to do what I had mentioned above, that is, attack Ethiopia to take ToA and then play for science victory since the absurd amount of choke points had made pre artillery/flight wars rough. Landed a T245 science victory which was fairly poorly played, I saved my GSs so long that I completed the tree and did 3 future techs while completing the last pieces...

Anyway Inca is hands down my fav civ and it is even better below Deity because you have more room to expand. They can make the most out of about any landscape and they have the best growth potential across multiple cities.

My T245 science had cities size
42
30
26
24
22
16
16


Both Victories SS below

In view of the potential of the start, will give this a try

OCC CV will be the game of choice, last huzzah before CV changes