Immortal Challenge 13. Poland

Turns out it's an isolated jungle start, and you start in the middle of huge swathes of jungle and marsh.

So this one is much harder than the previous one - good thing is that we play Poland, a civ that can adjust to almost all situation thanks to its UA.

As I knew that we got isolated start, I started with the same opening as the previous one. monument - granary - worker - stonehenge - library - NC - settler - 2 caravans - oracle - etc.

I did not have enough cash to buy granary this time so I did hard build it. I pre-chopped (chop one turn and stop - later you can chop it with one turn) forest near 2nd city and chopped them asap.

Later, tech will be slower than the previous game as you do not have observatory at your cap. I opened rati with Poland UA when I got astro and had to use one GW to get secularism too (could not time my culture well so I had to choose a policy 2 turns before that)

SP: full tradition - pat right 1 - aesthetics - rati left 1 and going for right 2 (as you are going to make lots of trading posts on jungle tiles).

you can go for exploration or commerce instead of aesthetics. When I play quick speed, I tend to go for peaceful victories, but it's up to your choice.

In fact, getting 4-5 frigates from your 2nd city and get other capitals with lots of wonders seems to be the best option.

Opted for liberty, trying to leverage the isolated start into spamming cities like no tomorrow. Barbarians were a major pain in the rear though, and I had some serious gold issues early on (-10 and zero science for several turns).

Ended up founding 7 cities, for 8 in total.

Prioritized early exploration to get to know friendly CS and take advantage of Patronage/Consulates for free friendly with everyone.

SP: Liberty, Patronage, 2 in Aesthetics (unnecessarily, I thought I might do culture, then I met a runaway Morocco with (by the end of the game) 50k culture in the bank.

Then full Rationalism before Ideologies (finished Patronage -- had one policy left -- before I had to pick an Ideology). Almost everyone had picked Order, so I picked Order too because I didn't want to risk Ideology unhappiness. Started gunning for Science victory -- thought Diplomacy might be possible, but because of Austria marrying off City-States, would fall a little short (or require absurd amounts of gold to defeat the 200+ influence buffer AIs had in some City-States).

Squeaked out a victory on turn

Some screenshots:

At t164, dealing with unhappiness.

At t263, victory, stats.

Abused food caravans and sent 3 into Warsaw from my three outlying cities, then used the rest of my trade routes for $$ trade (oddly, all with Babylon which was 30 gpt, far and away better than anyone else).

I definitely need to figure out a standard priority queue for a liberty opening... I felt like I shot myself in the foot by sinking into -gold and orange unhappiness. I tried settling on every lux, even if I had that lux, figuring I could trade the duplicate to the AI for something unique -- but the AI was stingy/traded with themselves and thus I couldn't make use of my extra dye apart from 6 gpt until much later when I met everyone else and someone finally had spares I could trade.

Glad I managed to survive and win, but felt rocky and far behind all the way there. Was always behind in Science, probably from those rocky early turns of -gpt and severe unhappiness.