Challenge-IV-07

[Denniz]

While the general Hall of Fame is an ongoing competition, we are running a series of ten games called the Hall of Fame Challenge Series. Standard Hall of Fame rules (*) still apply, but any games meeting the settings of one of the games will be counted towards the Challenge.

(*) Please read the >> HOF rules << BEFORE playing!​

Settings:

• Victory Condition: Cultural (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Emperor
• Starting Era: Renaissance
• Map Size: Standard
• Map Type: Inland Sea
• Speed: Epic
• Required: No Tribal Villages
• Must Not Be Checked: No Barbarians, Permanent Alliances, One City Challenge
• Civ: Any
• Opponents: Any
• Version: 3.19.003
• Date: 6th February to 6th June 2011

Must not play as Inca.

The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker.

 

[colonelmustard]

I submitted a game for these setting, mostly out of frustration. My thoughts going into the settings were to go Liberalism right away, maybe take someone's cities, but it's not like an ancient culture game at all. It was more challenging than I thought it might be and I had to be more of a diplomatic push-over than I like to be. I'll likely try some more and try better to play my game instead of exist in the AIs' world.

Mistakes I made: since it's Renai, I adopted the religion that spread to me immediately, which just gave me early war problems. I sacrificed tech for culture early, which gave me little to trade to help relations, and since I was hurting in tech, I couldn't field a competitive army to break up other close victories from other AI. I got rolled a few times.

 

[kcd_swede]

This one was harder than I thought going into it. All the religions get dealt out at the start, so catching a lot of religions is very unlikely given the map. Also, the diplo situation is very precarious, so I had to run NSR/Free Religion almost the whole game (no Pacifism).

Had a very good GPFarm. But only 1 religion for the longest time. I in fact gave up on the idea of getting more religion, and decided to go for corporate culture. The only corp that made sense in my game due to no seafood and scarce gems was Creative Constructions. Since your cities start with a forge and you start in mercantilism (if you want), that GE is very easy to get (I think I got 3 of them... 1st built Sistines, 2nd built 80% of Versailles, 3rd saved for CC). Everything else I got was GA's... bombed 0/4/4... last GA was used to start a golden age which reduced final legend city by 1 turn... synch'd OK with 2 and 3 going legend on same turn, 9 turns after my Hermitage city.

I ended up getting 2 more religions, which I spread to all 9 of my cities, and had 3 cathedrals in each legendary city.

I am totally clueless whether teching all the way to Combustion for Creative Construction was worth it or not from a "turns to legend" perspective. I had +9 hammers and +27 culture from it, which goes through the multipliers. But if I got the religions earlier, I would probably not have gone so far in the tech tree. Then, the AI would have hated me and destroyed me for being so weak.

As it was, I was able to give lots of tech demands which kept me safe and out of all wars. So ithe corp route was probably the right call for avoiding war. Thus it is very hard to judge if it was the right call for fastest culture victory, since a war would slow you down a lot (or more likely just end the game... thus, going without corp and getting lucky is probably fastest).

I had Americans and Germans as my closest neighbors, and they were both pretty weak. That helps a lot. Also, all of the AI were very balanced with each other, nobody started running away with things. 2 Apollo programs were completed, but no SS parts when I won by culture. I forget the date... but its on the table.

 

[colonelmustard]

Yes, I think I might try finding the "lost" tech, if there is one, at the beginning so I have something to trade around. Lots of work to be done to do it well in these settings.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Mistakes I made: since it's Renai, I adopted the religion that spread to me immediately, which just gave me early war problems. I sacrificed tech for culture early, which gave me little to trade to help relations, and since I was hurting in tech, I couldn't field a competitive army to break up other close victories from other AI. I got rolled a few times.

If you really need a Technology for "fair trading" Diplomatic bonuses, you could build up significant Wealth (via Wealth "slider" and optionally using a Great Merchant Trade Mission) and trade it for Mansa Musa's next "monopoly" Technology. Then give it to all the other Civs for +4 "fair trade relations". The amount of Wealth needed will be huge, even compared to the beaker value of the target Technology, but its less risky than researching a Technology and then a few turns before you complete it, find that nearly all Civs eventually get it, leaving you with few Civs to give the Technology to.

Other AI "Monopoly" Technology traders that are almost as willing as Mansa Musa to trade Technologies include ... (reveals information about the game that probably came from source code perusal, so it's "protected" by spoiler tags, in case you do not wish to know it):

Spoiler :

Other AI "Monopoly" Technology traders that are almost as willing as Mansa Musa to trade Technologies include Pericles (10%), Peter (10%), Willem van Oranje (15%), Asoka- (20%), Catherine (20%), Gandhi (20%), and Wang Kon- (20%). Compare to Mansa Musa+ (00%). The percentage means what percentage of the Civs must have a Technology before they are willing to trade it (for them it is no longer a Monopoly Technology, but it still is for many others and that makes it valuable for Diplomatic "fair trading" bonuses. The caveat is nearly all (if not all) Civs will trade any Technologies with you at Friendly. Civs with a + after it (only Mansa Musa) will trade Technologies to you until they see you receive 20 Technologies, not including those trades they forget about. Civs with a - after it, will trade only when this threshold is 10 Technologies or below. All other Civs, will trade only when this threshold is 15 Technologies or below. (Some Civs have a trading threshold of only 5 which makes them poor Technology trading partners regardless; Tokogawa is notable at 5 Technologies and 100%, making him absolutely worthless as a Technology trading.)

Sun Tzu Wu