When you pick Hermetic Order but you play as Dom Satan:
It is not as easy as you think it is to get all the Great People in the game. You have to secure a lot of Great People before the Medieval era starts and making the Classical ones obsolete: 4 × Generals, 4 × Admirals, 3 × Merchants, 4 × Scientists, 5 × Writers (and 1 × Great Prophet too), while preventing the AI to grab one. Except... the AI loves Campus and the Scientists: when the game show the first Medieval Scientist, it is overpriced while the AI is still gathering more and more Great Scientist points. So you have to find a solution on how to secure those Medieval, then Renaissance Scientists.
Meanwhile, Theatre Squares are not as early as the others districts, so securing all Writers isn't a easy task. Moreover: the AI will buy any Great People once it has enough Faith at the first occasion, which add a countdown to find a solution.
Divine Spark, Pingala, the Oracle and the Classical Republic are very potent together, it helped a lot for the Scientists and the Writers. But it is very unlikely we could build the Oracle, then a Campus, a Theatre Square, an Encampment, a Harbor and a Commercial Hub and their buildings in less than 60 turns, while having to expand, improve the lands, and such. Playing on Online speed seems to reduce the Production cost, but not the rewarded Great People points, making those projects twice as powerful.
In this play-through, I couldn't find a solution each time: I missed Emilie du Chatelet, a Renaissance era Scientist. You cannot "Shift + Enter" in order to stockpile enough Great Scientist points so that you could buy the overprice one, then all the others afterward: the game will automatically give it to you at the beginning of your next turn. Which at least give a 1 extra turn delay. Declaring war on the AI doesn't change its behavior: it will buy the Great People at a set turn, no matter the events.
Expansion by combat is the way to go: a Civilization reduced as a single city will not be able to have the Great People points and the Faith needed to compete, while slowing down the Era Progress by being behind, so the game would not shorten the era. Except... when doing it? Most of the resources are already dedicated at making sure the Great People are secured. Scamming the AI in order to levy nearby City-States seems the cheapest way to do the job, but we do not really control what we are getting. We really need an explosive and lucky start to do it all basically.
Basically, all the challenges is from the first 3 eras and deal with all the parameters. It changes a lot on the "standard" play, where we first expand, then build and snowball. Here we need to build, which makes expansion harder.
I had high hope from Alfred Nobel (+50 GP points on Online speed, instead of +100) and mostly from the World's Fair since the reward doesn't scale to +50 but stays at +100 at Online speed.
Alas, this came when I was about to get my last Great People, so it didn't help at all. Plus, the Patronage is completely bugged when you recruiting the unit instead of paying. Let's say we have +100 free point for each Great People. How it should work is that we take the leftovers (for example: if we have 860/840 points, we have 20 leftovers), then add those +100 points, so +120 points. Yet it doesn't work that way:
- If the leftovers is less than 100, then it is set to 100.
- If the leftovers is over that 100, then it is set to the leftovers and the free 100 isn't awarded.
Which is extremely bad for Pedro II, since it has a leftovers of 20% of the cost of the Great People.
- I have 839/840 points, and patronage by paying. The math is done right and we get 20% of 840 + 100 = 268, and we start the next one with 268 points.
- I have 840/840 points, therefore I can chose to pick it. The math is done wrong: as 20% of 840 = 168, and 168 > 100, we start the next one with 168 points.
