Round 11: to 1945 AD
Time to put this one to bed, I decided.
I started off with some rush-buying, especially the wonder Coventry was busy with:
The late cultural wonders are a tough call. They're very expensive, especially compared to the "cathedrals" for each religion, which provide the same +50% culture magnifier at a much lower cost. Still, another +50% culture would help my third, lagging city, and the hit singles are valuable for trading.
I also, following everyone's advice, changed the slider to 0% culture. It wasn't making much difference, and I would need the gold shortly.
I also did some more work on the diplomatic side. I gifted Liberalism to Peter (and to Frederick, though he needed to be given a few of its pre-requisite techs as well). Shortly after that, I went back to see Peter:
It didn't really break of the Jewish lovefest on the other continent, though. Qin and Peter formed a defensive pact shortly after this. And Frederick refused to consider changing civics at all. Perhaps if I'd stuck with Buddhism a little longer and worked harder to convert them, I'd have been more successful. But with the size of my population, it's unlikely that any of the AI civs would win a diplomatic victory, so I really wasn't that concerned.
I got several more Great People. In spite of running so many artist specialists that I lost count of them, London refused to generate anything but Great Prophets:
I got two more GP from London, despite the odds running at around 75% in favour of a GA. I'm becoming convinced that the game has a bias towards GP points from wonders over those from specialists. Anyway, I used the GP for the Islamic and Christian shrines, for the extra gold per turn. Oh, and I got a Great Scientist from Hastings. I used him for an Academy in Dublin, which was actually my best science city at this point in the game.
You might have noticed that the sliders were down to 0% in that shot. That was because I was raising funds to buy cathedrals in my three cultural cities as well as another wonder:
This one also went in Coventry, since it needed the boost the most. I prioritized building the remaining cathedrals and temples in Coventry first, followed by Hastings, with London getting them all, but last, since it needed them the least.
Meanwhile, I finished building Scotland Yard, churned out four spies, and dispatched them to Chermussia to keep tabs on my friends across the water. They were behaving predictably:
You might notice that the price for sabotaging Qin's Apollo Program was rather cheap at this point. But I didn't do it. It wasn't so much to avoid the risk of a diplomatic demerit as it was to keep Qin on that path. In one game, Qin declared war on me and went all-out when it became obvious that he was going to lose the space race to me. Granted, the AI seems blissfully unaware when the human player is pursuing a cultural victory, but I didn't want to run the risk. Ditto with Freddy and Peter. Coventry is a coastal city; the last thing I needed was for it to come under attack. Even having its surrounding tiles pillaged would have been a real setback.
My power rating actually dipped below Qin's and Freddy's at one point, so I started changing more cities than just York to producing military units. I did very few upgrades, preferring to produce new units and periodically delete the oldest and most obsolete ones.
I also got Guinness busy churning out other Wonders. Qin beat me to the Pentagon, which was both disappointing and worrisome, but not surprising, since I'd been going after the cultural techs and wonders. Once I got Plastics, I started building the Three Gorges Dam--mainly to keep it out of the AI's hands. Since Guinness was growing close to 20 pop and needed to rush this wonder (my spies revealed Qin was building it as well), I moved in the Workers and started changing the tiles around Guinness from farms to watermills and workshops.
Since being educated about this counter-intuitive mid-game production in the Qin ALC game, I've tried to refine it a little. I've noticed that watermills are preferable to workshops; they produce fewer hammers, yes, but they provide more food. This allows you to work the inevitable mines without having to resort to any farms. It also allows you to run engineer specialists.
But I've notice that if you're not careful, you can end up with fewer than the maximum number of watermills the map should allow. If a tile has more than one border on a river, the game seems to randomly select which one will get the watermill. Since you can't place watermills opposite one another, you could end up with a watermill on one tile right opposite from another tile that only has the one side bordering a river.
The trick is to build watermills on the tiles with the fewest river borders (usually only one) first. This way you dictate where the watermills go. In the above screenshot, I built the first watermill on the tile 1 west of Guinness, which only has one river border. Then I built the one on the tile 1W/2N, which has two river borders, and the last watermill went on the 1W/1N tile which has three. If I'd built on the 1W/1N tile first, I could have ended up with the mill on its southern or northern borders, which would have ruled out a watermill on one of the other two tiles.
Anyway. I FINALLY got a Great Artist! Not from London, but from poor little Coventry.
I used him for a 4000-culture boost to coventry, which almost made it even with Hastings. All three cities were running as many Artist specialists as they could while still growing their populations. Coventry and Hastings were producing about 825 and 850 culture per turn, respectively, while London was producing around 900 and, of course, had a big head start thanks to its wonders.
Sure enough, in 1925, London achieved Legendary status:
I was using it to build missionaries and kept doing that, shipping them over to the other continent to enhance my income. I kept running the Artist specialists in London, where I'd build National Epic, hoping for another GA. This is also why I only converted one floodplain back to a cottage.
I was tantilizing close to winning now. To ensure I'd be left alone, I went to see Peter, who was the friendliest AI civ at this point:
One thing that cracked me up is that Qin also had a defensive pact with him, but gave me a -2 diplomacy demerit because I had "signed defensive pacts with his rivals"! Talk about not knowing who your friends are...
A few turns later, in 1941, Hastings achieved its goal:
Of course, I checked Coventry and did a little math to see how long it would take. Notice I still was not using the culture slider! I was still running Caste System, so the culture was coming from specialists then getting multiplied by buildings. I had to build a few colloseums and temples in some cities (including Madrid) because of the unhappiness created by other civs running the emancipation civic, but it was manageable.
In 1944, I could see that victory was at hand:
And sure enough, on the next turn...
YES!! Another win! It sometimes amazes me that I've won every ALC, since I still lose Prince games every now and then. But behold the power of the group mind!
And this was a very significant cultural win: almost no use of the culture slider, and only one Great Artist. The bulk of the culture came from specialists and was then multiplied by buildings and wonders. Of course, having six religions and spending a long time in Organized Religion to spread them definitely helped, as it allowed each of the three cities to build all six cathedrals as well as six temples (which, collectively, were equivalent to another artist specialist in cultural output).
On to the post mortem!
