Science win: turn 235
TL;DR: Sloppy start, WTF moment with mountains
. No military + simcity, space commies with Statue of liberty.
Early game
- Start: Saw all the salt and went for mining + scout in hope of capturing a city state worker and quickly get the salt online. No city state
, so no payoff.
- Cleaned the island for barbs, but sloppy with scouting caused problems when they spawned on my desired settle location. Got my warrior killed and settler captured trying to claim my spot, but my scout managed to recapture with only slight delay.
- Massive happiness problem. Postponed settling my 3rd city for some time due to that. (did not help that I forgot the crabs initially as a lux. (Only fitted 3 cities on the island)
- Missed all early wonders - close at hanging gardens but got beaten by 1 turn.
- Got salt faith religion late. (later tithe + x% production)
- Lots of shipping trade routes and focus on happiness buildings to catchup in growth.
Mid game
- Had ships + scout investigating the nice rock circle
.
- Met a couple of civs with boarders out salt trading finally increase happiness
- Disbanded most military
- slight punish mid game when, barbs plundered my trade routes, but a privateer + couple of ships got it under control
- Got first wonders in leaning tower + porcelain tower to get some extra academies down.
- Oxforded into radio and ideologies as the first picking up freedom.
- Bad choice, Byzantium in particular and everybody else in general went for order. and with sacred sites and pagodas and moskes they had a handy tourism to sent me to negative happiness again (despite my Eiffel tower and Broadway)
- an religious engineer rushed statue and liberty, before I joining my comerades in the red revolution.
- Traded some coal from Egypt to get workers college bonus + production with factories.
- United Nations got founded but I had no chance to influence, but got trade with rest of nations (except Portugal which Ottomans had eaten in the early game).
- Ottoman and Attila also warred me for some time, but no effect due to mountain fortress.
Late game
- Picked up a couple of culture wonders to make up for lost culture with revolutions.
- Spend gold on science buildings / research agreements.
- In UN, always just threw 1 plus vote on each proposal to get + opinion bonus.
- Finished Space pioneers and rationalism, put some points into liberty which I had sunk two policies in early to get some happiness but never got to that.
- Tried to time the bulb production etc. but ended up over sciencing and under producing (only had two engineers to hurry, and had to hard build the rest - tried to finish liberty for bonus great engineer but timing was a bit off.
Final thoughts
- Really tough being isolated in the beginning (water not the mountains)
- Quite a surprise with the mountains - Had definitely not paid enough attention to "donut" map type.
- Really a challenge in true simcity (minimum interaction + no military needed)
- A bit of a shame the island does not have shallow water connection to the mountains circle
. I think it could be a fun challenge to dip 2 into military to get an general and settle the mainland, but even after knowing the map I think it would be way to slow to go for that.
An interesting map - A bit disconnecting due to the total isolation.