Xerol
Emperor
Unfortunately this submission probably won't count, but I've just finished a Huge Warlord Domination in 1200AD, besting the current record by over 100 years. I didn't do a detailed writeup but I did make note of some highlights and things I'd do differently.
Settings: Pangaea, 17 opponents, temperate climate, high sea level.
Vanilla 1.71
I chose Rome due to Praetorians and cheap Courthouses. The Praets were easily best until pretty much the end of the game, but I eventually switched to knights to cover the huge distances between my production core and the front lines, and to combat axes which were a problem until I upgraded to maces.
I started out taking out Japan to the north, Spain to the northwest, and America to the southwest. Chopped henge early, although I probably didn't need it since the culture slider got me most of the tiles I needed by the end game. Went after France and Russia next, which cleaned out the southwest and I turned Washington into a science farm (with GL) but it only managed to make one GP, and that was a prophet 3 turns before victory. The rest of the military action was quick and simple, the hardest part was getting roads up fast enough in my new territory. I think I had about 50 workers in the recently-conquered areas and I was still struggling to move knights across large areas of jungle and hills. This was really a problem with England, which was around a "corner", and the opposite direction of where I wanted to expand, so I had about a dozen knights stranded down there for 10 turns healing and waiting for roads to be built. Persia and China were perpetually at war which helped a lot with taking them over, I allied with China to wipe out Persia and then backtracked over China to pretty much seal it.
Popped two artists, one from Music and one from the Prophet farm. One thing I'd definitely do next time is save the artists until I had most of the territory I needed outlined, and then pop them in the middle to fill in the gaps. Waiting for borders to pop easily added 20 turns to the date, and I can probably get pre-1000AD (40 turns less) with a creative leader or earlier use of the culture slider. I pushed for Nationalism and Gunpowder late, but never used either and that was about 30 turns that I should have been running full culture. I might also go with an Arid map to reduce the amount of jungle chopping/road building needed. Definitely need to concentrate on infrastructure early and military later, possibly using a civ with a fast UU because my biggest enemy was distance. Scouts early too, my second city was from a hut-popped settler and I didn't actually build a settler of my own until at least 2000BC.
Spain had founded Buddhism, and I set up my capital as a prophet farm so I could get gold in Madrid. By the end of the game there were about 50 cities with Buddhism, not as many as I'd have liked but almost all of them were mine (Hinduism was the religion of the day on the Western half of the continent, which I never even treaded into except for England). Also had Confucian capital and that contributed another 30 gpt, on top of the 100 from Buddhism and a bunch more scattered about from Spiral Minaret. Even with all of that, the forbidden palace in the middle of the action, and cottages everywhere I was still running -140gpt at 80% culture at the very end. Going with the earlier concentration on infrastructure, I might try to get two religions in one city so I can keep my research up earlier in the game and culture up later. Also need to specialize cities more, forego barracks in a couple cities in favor of missionary farming. I could've easily spread Buddhism to another 20 cities and Confucianism to another 50 for another 140gpt altogether, which would've made break-even at 80% and about -125 at 100%.
I hardly lost any units the entire game, and had a bunch of level 6 Knights by the end, most with Combat 3/March/Blitz or Combat 4/March. Also had a couple CR3/Combat1/Melee Praetorians which were later upgraded to Macemen. With Praets you can easily run over entire civs with only 4 or 5 units until they get Feudalism, but absolutely NO other civ had it by 1200AD. Some didn't even have Alphabet. I got currency early so I was able to keep other civs broke and my research rate up by selling tier 1 and 2 techs for huge amounts. It's almost broken at this level.
I detailed my crashes in the email so I won't go into too much detail here. Both happened while videos were playing, the first when I founded Islam in 1050AD, it zoomed on the city, the ground disappeared, and then the machine just shut off. The computer shut off again when playing the Domination movie. Can you turn these movies off entirely? My computer can handle the Huge map and several hundred cities and units on the screen at once, but for some reason can't play the movies. (Note the shutoffs were complete power-downs, I think my power supply just isn't providing enough juice. Also took me about 20 minutes to power the machine on again after the second crash.) In neither case did I even have the opportunity to do anything differently as I'd saved immediately before (autosave in the first case) and the crashes occured during the interturn. Unfortunately I didn't read the crash rules until submitting the game so I don't have all the required saves, and therefore this probably won't count. That's probably a good thing, though, since I'm pretty sure I can beat 1000AD next time.
Attached are the start file, 80BC save, and post-victory save. I definitely need to manage my save files better, and might keep a printed out copy of all the rules next to my computer from now on.
Settings: Pangaea, 17 opponents, temperate climate, high sea level.
Vanilla 1.71
I chose Rome due to Praetorians and cheap Courthouses. The Praets were easily best until pretty much the end of the game, but I eventually switched to knights to cover the huge distances between my production core and the front lines, and to combat axes which were a problem until I upgraded to maces.
I started out taking out Japan to the north, Spain to the northwest, and America to the southwest. Chopped henge early, although I probably didn't need it since the culture slider got me most of the tiles I needed by the end game. Went after France and Russia next, which cleaned out the southwest and I turned Washington into a science farm (with GL) but it only managed to make one GP, and that was a prophet 3 turns before victory. The rest of the military action was quick and simple, the hardest part was getting roads up fast enough in my new territory. I think I had about 50 workers in the recently-conquered areas and I was still struggling to move knights across large areas of jungle and hills. This was really a problem with England, which was around a "corner", and the opposite direction of where I wanted to expand, so I had about a dozen knights stranded down there for 10 turns healing and waiting for roads to be built. Persia and China were perpetually at war which helped a lot with taking them over, I allied with China to wipe out Persia and then backtracked over China to pretty much seal it.
Popped two artists, one from Music and one from the Prophet farm. One thing I'd definitely do next time is save the artists until I had most of the territory I needed outlined, and then pop them in the middle to fill in the gaps. Waiting for borders to pop easily added 20 turns to the date, and I can probably get pre-1000AD (40 turns less) with a creative leader or earlier use of the culture slider. I pushed for Nationalism and Gunpowder late, but never used either and that was about 30 turns that I should have been running full culture. I might also go with an Arid map to reduce the amount of jungle chopping/road building needed. Definitely need to concentrate on infrastructure early and military later, possibly using a civ with a fast UU because my biggest enemy was distance. Scouts early too, my second city was from a hut-popped settler and I didn't actually build a settler of my own until at least 2000BC.
Spain had founded Buddhism, and I set up my capital as a prophet farm so I could get gold in Madrid. By the end of the game there were about 50 cities with Buddhism, not as many as I'd have liked but almost all of them were mine (Hinduism was the religion of the day on the Western half of the continent, which I never even treaded into except for England). Also had Confucian capital and that contributed another 30 gpt, on top of the 100 from Buddhism and a bunch more scattered about from Spiral Minaret. Even with all of that, the forbidden palace in the middle of the action, and cottages everywhere I was still running -140gpt at 80% culture at the very end. Going with the earlier concentration on infrastructure, I might try to get two religions in one city so I can keep my research up earlier in the game and culture up later. Also need to specialize cities more, forego barracks in a couple cities in favor of missionary farming. I could've easily spread Buddhism to another 20 cities and Confucianism to another 50 for another 140gpt altogether, which would've made break-even at 80% and about -125 at 100%.
I hardly lost any units the entire game, and had a bunch of level 6 Knights by the end, most with Combat 3/March/Blitz or Combat 4/March. Also had a couple CR3/Combat1/Melee Praetorians which were later upgraded to Macemen. With Praets you can easily run over entire civs with only 4 or 5 units until they get Feudalism, but absolutely NO other civ had it by 1200AD. Some didn't even have Alphabet. I got currency early so I was able to keep other civs broke and my research rate up by selling tier 1 and 2 techs for huge amounts. It's almost broken at this level.
I detailed my crashes in the email so I won't go into too much detail here. Both happened while videos were playing, the first when I founded Islam in 1050AD, it zoomed on the city, the ground disappeared, and then the machine just shut off. The computer shut off again when playing the Domination movie. Can you turn these movies off entirely? My computer can handle the Huge map and several hundred cities and units on the screen at once, but for some reason can't play the movies. (Note the shutoffs were complete power-downs, I think my power supply just isn't providing enough juice. Also took me about 20 minutes to power the machine on again after the second crash.) In neither case did I even have the opportunity to do anything differently as I'd saved immediately before (autosave in the first case) and the crashes occured during the interturn. Unfortunately I didn't read the crash rules until submitting the game so I don't have all the required saves, and therefore this probably won't count. That's probably a good thing, though, since I'm pretty sure I can beat 1000AD next time.
Attached are the start file, 80BC save, and post-victory save. I definitely need to manage my save files better, and might keep a printed out copy of all the rules next to my computer from now on.
