To recap from the First Spoiler, I had settled our capital in the location to the north-west with Corn, Pig, and Gold. I played toward a Town-heavy capital, despite the fact that there are two Peaks in the Big Fat Cross.
The Pig and Corn were shared with the coastal City by the Fish, which became my Great Person Farm.
I fought with Boudica starting in 125 AD, when the amount of unclaimed land was starting to run out. The war went quickly, thanks to having built up a large stack before starting, and the last targeted City was captured in 400 AD.
Boudica's capital seemed suitable for The Heroic Epic and it helped me to pump out Units for quite some time. Later, I repurposed the City for Ironworks.
The next main war was against Gilgamesh. He was the tech leader and he had many allies from having spread his State Religion to nearly every player. War was declared in 660 AD, but it wasn't until 960 AD that I was able to capture a City. Most of that time was spent bribing AIs into wars and out of wars, to reduce the amount of diplomatic penalties that would be required to continue warring on this diplomatic-love-fest of a map. Meanwhile Gilgamesh also was bribing AIs into wars, often against the very war ally which I had just brought into a war with him.
Wonders built during that time:
520 AD The Great Lighthouse
560 AD Shwedagon Paya (to cash in on distributed Failure Gold)
620 AD The Hanging Gardens
BUILT BY ZARA: 800 AD Mausoleum of Maussollos
960 AD Angkor Wat
1010 AD University of Sankore
1200 AD The Taj Mahal (using a Great Engineer, as I still lacked Marble)
I missed completing the Mausoleum of Maussollos by 1 turn. Zara whipped it in his capital. I therefore delayed my Golden Ages and ended up with unused Golden Age potential at the end of the game. In the last couple of turns, for fun, I founded all of the Corporations with the extra Great People. Founding Standard Ethanol can really hurt, as it will take away the Food from whichever Food Corp it replaced in that City prior to having founded Standard Ethanol, and your City will likely start to lose Food! Fortunately, I founded the Corp just before the game ended and thus the City did not have time to shrink in terms of population points.
In hindsight, launching a Golden Age or two without MoM would have been a stronger play than waiting to land MoM.
The war lasted until 1390 AD, after which Gilgamesh was relegated to Cities which I did not want to own.
Since both of Gilgamesh and I had been bribing many of the AIs, Zara and Saladin became the new tech leaders, thanks to our traded techs plus their own research initiatives.
Monte had "declared" war on me by taking Boudica on as a Vassal, and I had yet to give Boudica peace. It was her way of taking revenge.
With Gilgamesh begging for mercy, my western forces wanted a new target. Saladin's stacks were looking quite scary and thus I took the Units from the Gilgamesh war to fight against Kublai, allowing me to use those Units without having to drag them halfway across of the world back to Montezuma's area. Meanwhile, I already had Montezuma's forces under control (mostly thanks to Zara drawing away many of Monte's forces).
Actually, I had a stack of Knights in Zara's lands which were intended to capture the Mausoleum of Maussollos from Zara, but much like the Crusades, I discovered in this game that Knights alone are a bit of a silly play when the AIs have Medieval Units. Thus, I had not found a suitable way to use the Knights until Zara joined the war against Monte and then I could strike Monte from behind under cover of Zara's forces. Knights on their own would have likely been picked away by Longbowmen behind of Castles and counter-attacking Pikemen.
In 1580 AD, Kublai had been defeated, and a turn later, war on Zara was declared.
In the long-ago Succession Game of the Month where we had every AI led by a Tokugawa Leader, I had proposed to my team the concept of mass-Liberating Cities to an AI for diplomatic bonuses. In that game, after our own Culture had made it hard to Liberate some Cities back to AIs, the idea got dropped.
However, for this game, I have refined the idea, and I was able to turn Furious AIs into Friendly AIs with some mass-Liberations. In real life, you would significantly anger people to steal their land, relocate them, and then steal their newly granted land. Yet, in the context of the game, doing so tricked the AIs into liking me again.
There weren't enough Sid's Sushi Resources on the map and thus I went for Cereal Mills. It really does take a lot longer to go for Cereal Mills, as those extra techs come at a time in the game when they are still expensive. On the plus side, the lack of Culture from the Corporation pushing us toward Domination is actually a very useful trait of Cereal Mills.
Mining Inc was the other main Corp which I targeted.
Therefore, land which did not contain Resources for either of those Corps became low-priority land, to be gifted away. I had to redraw some of the map territorial demarcation points after Coal was revealed, but otherwise, this approach, plus the location of Wonders and Holy Cities, determined which Cities I would keep and which land I would give up, to avoid exceeding the Domination Land Limit.
At the end of the game, I controlled:
20 Cereal Mills Resources on the map, earning +15 Food.
34 Mining Inc Resources on the map, earning +34 Hammers.
In after-game testing, I discovered that I would have still earned +15 Food from 19 Cereal Mills Resources and thus could have paid less Gold per Turn for the same benefit.
The Score looks nice at 280K, but I think that XOTMs automatically scale down the Score to a correspondingly smaller value on the game's original Difficulty Level (Immortal down to Noble, in this case), making the altered Score unlikely to compete with Noble games for Score.
Space was the Victory choice, arriving close to 1800 AD.
Saladin helped me out by trading Physics and Electricity to me. I had to steal Radio from him as he had started building all 3 of the corresponding Wonders on the turn that he learned the tech.
It was a fun game, and yet it was quite time-consuming to first get all of the AIs to hate each other and then to make some of the AIs love me again.
Thank you to the staff for continuing these competitions and to the players for continuing to participate and to share your experiences!
.This really sped up my conquest. Attacked Boudi with 13 Knights, and Sumer with about the same number.
