Note: jorissimo posted a Phoenician UHV guide for a development version of DoC 1.16, and there is some discussion of that version in this thread. These are worth consulting. But I figure there should be a UHV guide for the Phoenicians in the finished version of 1.16.
The following strategy borrows elements from strategies described in those earlier posts, but mixes them in a slightly new way. I have also made sure to include some markers—key game turns to watch for—so players have some idea whether they are progressing fast enough if following this guide.
UHV Conditions
1. Build a Palace and the Great Cothon in Qart-Hadasht by Turn 120.
2. Control Italy and Iberia on Turn 134.
3. Have 5000 gold on Turn 154.
The Phoenician UHV game is built almost entirely on luck. Or, more particularly, on the management of luck. If you are allergic to Save/Reload shenanigans, look for a different UHV game to play.
(Alternately, if you have figured out a way to win the Phoenician UHV without using those shenanigans, please post.)
The Great Cothon
The first piece of luck comes in the very first condition: building the Great Cothon. Unfortunately, Greece also likes to build it, and if they are of a mind to build it, they will beat you to it. It doesn't help that even if they aren't building it, if they generate a Great Engineer they will probably switch production just to grab it.
You could screw with Greece by declaring war, landing some troops on their peninsula and ravaging the landscape. This generally works, but it will piss off the Greeks, and you will need them later for tech trading.
So here's the first place where you have to decide if you're going to use shenanigans to win. If Greece beats you to the Cothon, the graceful thing is to resign the game and try again from scratch. Or you can reload an earlier save and use World Builder to construct an alternate reality in which Greece didn't decide to pursue the Cothon. Is this cheating? Or are you merely taking a short-cut to that sequel game where Greece chooses not to chase the Cothon? That's between you, your conscience, and your ethical theory about what constitutes cheating. I merely point here that if you don't want to go through the tedium of launching a new game, the World Builder will take you to that new game without having to resign and relaunch.
But what about the Palace? I hear you cry. Any tips on getting that in Qart-Hadasht?
Yes. Build it in Qart-Hadasht by building Q-H as your first city.
Opening Moves
You will spawn in Phoenicia, with a Settler, an Archer, a Sacred Band, and random units that will have flipped to you. You will also have a War Galley, two Galleys, another Settler and Archer, and two Work Boats floating nearby.
First, move the floating Settler and Archer onto the Copper-bearing island nearby. Then load the other Settler, Archer, and Sacred Band onto the boats and send them westward until you hit Tunisia. Unload and build a city (Qart-Hadasht) north of the Stone. Boom. Your Palace will appear inside it.
The same turn, after settling Carthage, settle Kition on the Copper island. You will have left one of the Work Boats behind; use it on the nearby Fish. (The other Work Boat will have gone to Q-H.) Send your starting fleet (the War Galley and two Galleys) back to Kition to idle in port.
End that turn by turning the Culture slider up to 100% and holding it there for four turns (at least) so that Kition's borders expand to encompass two wooded tiles. (If the other civs crowd Kition about, you may have to run Culture at 100% for six or more turns.) Do not change your starting Civics: keep Republic and Slavery. Start your research by beelining Contract first, then Currency.
What do these opening moves do?
By settling Q-H first, you automatically generate a Palace there, saving you the time you would otherwise have to spend on building it. This is a very old trick, and so is the Kition gambit, which gives you an impregnable fortress with great production and a strong food source to power it. Meanwhile, you are no later in starting the Cothon than you would have been otherwise, and you will instantly get two Workers when you found Q-H to bring the surrounding resources on line. Be sure to chop the forest and mine the hill.
If Greece is not chasing the Cothon, you will build it on or around Turn 94, thus meeting the first condition.
The Latin War
On Turn 90, Rome will spawn and begin to rapidly spread. This is very bad news. Around about Turn 120 they will declare war on you and spawn a Conqueror stack next to Q-H. They will also spread out and founded new cities in Italy, Gaul, Illyria, Iberia, and the moons of Jupiter, possibly. (I kid, but not by much.) After hitting you with an automatic DoW, they will go on to do the same to Greece and Egypt, generating more stacks of doom.
And in the face of that onslaught you will have to conquer Italy and Iberia, clearing them of Rome and any other civilizations, by Turn 134.
So what you want to do is to knock them out first. Destroy Rome before it declares war on you.
The strategy I'm about to outline can be ticklish to execute, but I've had success with it on several test games, so I think it is basically sound. You have to rush them, taking advantage of the cheap Light Swordsmen and the amphibious Sacred Bands.
As soon as you found Kition, set it to building a Barracks, then a third Galley and six Light Swordsmen. This army should finish building around Turn 103. Meanwhile, after finishing the Great Cothon, set Q-H to building a Barracks, a War Galley, and 5 Sacred Bands. (The starting unit will be your sixth.) You can continue to build Sacred Bands after that as insurance, and you probably should, but you will very quickly know if you need them or not.
The timing is crucial, but it should work out to within a turn or two. As soon as you have built your sixth Light Swordsmen, load the army onto your three Galleys and send it and the War Galley to the mouth of the Adriatic, there to rendezvous with the second War Galley you built in Q-H. Immediately move the armada up the Adriatic into Roman waters, and disgorge the army onto the Wheat tile beside Mediolanum.
Here is where luck may or may not be with you. You might have to delay if there are military units on that tile; and you should delay if there are two or more Legions on tiles next to that Wheat. But more often than not you will surprise the Romans and they won't have any strong units nearby, and Mediolanum will likely only be garrisoned by two Archers. You will likely lose 2 or even 3 units in the assault, but 6 Light Swordsmen can take out 2 Archers, even with defense bonuses. Unless the coast looks very clear, don't leave the city as a hostage to fortune, but raze it (accepting the stability hit) and garrisoning it long enough for it to burn. Move your surviving units down toward Rome, sticking to the wooded hills.
Meanwhile, swing your fleet around Italy to pick up the Sacred Bands in Q-H and make for Rome with them. It will probably also be guarded by only 2 Archers, but even if there is a Legion inside, your surviving Swordsmen and the Sacred Bands (which can attack directly from the ships with no penalty) should be able to take them down. Keep Rome and any other cities you have to conquer; one razing is enough.
In my test games, this one-two punch is often enough to cause the Romans to collapse, but it's far from a sure thing, so swiftly move your army to assault any surviving coastal cities. If you're lucky, one of them will be in Iberia. If you're unlucky, there might be one in southern Italy, and it will be a tough nut to crack, requiring some of the units you are building in Q-H. If you are extremely unlucky, Rome may still have several cities hidden in Gaul or Pannonia, in which case you will have a much longer fight ahead of you than you anticipated. Don't bother to try making peace with them unless you could use a few turns of breathing room; the Conqueror event abrogates all peace treaties, so you might as well keep fighting.
But this strategy will give you a more than reasonable chance of knocking out Rome before they can spawn Conquerors, and it will give you at least one city in Italy to meet that half of the second UHV condition, and might even give you an Iberian city. Even if not, you will have a dozen turns until the deadline to build a Settler and carry it over to the Iberian coast, and Q-H will be a beast of a producer by that point and can punch out a Settler in five or six turns.
Your stability will be underwater by this point, but it shouldn't be life-threatening. Still, let your new cities starve down to nothing and let them stagnate there. You only need notional cities on those peninsulas, not productive ones. In other words, impose a Carthaginian peace upon the Romans, but this time from the other end of the stick.
Money and Great Merchants
As you are fighting Rome, you will probably make the breakthrough that will allow you to meet the third condition: discovering Currency. But even this will require some strategy.
First, you should trade for some of the prerequisite techs, but that means having a tech that the other civilizations want but don't have. In my test games, I've found that Contract usually fits the bill, and that Greece will even give you a cash bonus on top of Calendar in order to get it. So start your research path by beelining Contract: Construction - Arithmetic - Contract. Trade for Calendar. If you can also trade with Rome for Math, you can take it, but it's not necessary. (Also, don't give them Shipbuilding under any circumstances.)
To further speed your research, take advantage of your Republic civic to hire scientists: with two cities, running Republic is liking having a free Library. Go ahead and let Kition hire a scientist after it has grown to size 2; it won't appreciably delay the army you're building. In Q-H, wait until you have built the Cothon before hiring a scientist; otherwise, prioritize population growth until you have maxed out at the happiness limit.
With these in play, you should discover Construction on or around Turn 83; Arithmetic on Turn 89; Contract on turn 96; Math (assuming you've traded for Calendar) on Turn 102; and Currency itself on or around Turn 113.
As soon as you have Currency, turn taxes up to 100%: you don't need any more techs for the UHV. You will also be able to hire merchants as specialists; in Kition and Q-H, switch from scientists to merchants. Also, switch to Merchant Trade as a civic, and set your two main cities to building Glassmakers. As soon as those are built—and you should run a food deficit in Kition to speed up the Glassmaker; but don't starve it down a level—hire a second merchant in each city.
Be Careful: It might be that Kition will generate a Great Person while you aren't looking, and there's a 98% chance or better that it will be a useless Great Scientist rather than the Great Merchant that you need. To prevent this, watch (or reload an earlier save) and when Kition is one turn from generating a Great Person, remove the specialist to stop generating GP points. You will not lose the points you have generated thus far, but you will be half-way toward generating a second GP after Q-H has generated its GP. Once Q-H has generated its GM, hire as many merchants in Kition as you can to resume your march for a GM.
Because a lot of those GP points in both cities will have been generated with science specialists, you will be very likely to generate a Great Scientist rather than a Great Merchant in both. In Q-H you will likely have a 50% chance of getting the one you need. In Kition, which will generate the second GP, you will also have about a 50% chance because half of its points will have been generated by merchants after Q-H has generated its GP. You are in fact unlikely to generate two Great Merchants, and you will not have time to generate a third (or a fourth if you are unlucky enough to generate two Great Scientists). What to do?
Again, shenanigans.
You could resign the game at that point. You could also use World Builder to replace a Great Scientist with a Great Merchant. A slicker way, one that only breaks the rules a little bit (maybe) is to reload an earlier save and try to generate the alternate GP. To do this, remove a specialist long enough that the GP generates a turn later, which will result in a new "roll" for a result. You might have to do this a couple of times, pushing the spawn date back two or three turns from the earliest possible spawn date, but with the odds of getting the right result being 50-50 (approximately) in both Q-H and Kition when it comes time to spawn, you won't have to delay long to get the wanted result.
The first GM will appear in Q-H. Where to send him?
If you discover Currency on Turn 114, you will have forty turns of tax revenue in addition to GM money. You should be getting 40+ gold per turn after turning your research off, and that amount will only increase as you hire merchants in your cities and mine the Silver in Iberia and work the Orchards in Sicily or Italy. Eventually you will be earning 60+ gold per turn, unless your empire is running sub-optimally.
So that's anywhere from 1600 gold to 2400 gold you will pick up just from your tax revenues, leaving the GMs to generate between 2600 and 3400 gold. You can get 2000 gold for a GM in India, in Indraprastha; but you can get 1800 gold in Jerusalem. Twice 1800 is 3600 (I double-checked my math with a calculator), which means that barring some kind of catastrophe, you can finance the third UHV condition just by moving your GMs across the Mediterranean without having to chance them on the barb-infested road to India.
Q-H's GM should pop up around Turn 120. The second would spawn on about Turn 150, but you will get a Golden Age starting on Turn 134 which will boost your GP output, and it will spawn closer to Turn 140. As the deadline is Turn 154, and Jerusalem is only a few tiles from Kition, you shouldn't have any trouble in collecting your money.
A Carthaginian Cheat Sheet
To sum up the strategy in a handy how-to guide:
* Settle first city on Q-H. Build Great Cothon, Barracks, a War Galley, 5+ Sacred Bands; a Settler (if needed for Iberia); Glassmaker; whatever else is expedient—War Galleys are a good investment if paying the UHV game, and nothing else much is. Run a scientist after building the Cothon, switching to a merchant after discovering Currency. Hire a second merchant after building the Glassmaker. Look for a Great Person to appear there around about Turn 120; send him to Jerusalem or (if you're feeling both brave and desperate) to Indraprastha in India.
* Same turn as you settle Q-H, settle a second city (Kition) on the Copper island. Build Barracks, a Galley, 6 Light Swordsmen; then a Harbor, a Temple (to help maintain borders), a Glassmaker; then whatever is expedient—again, War Galleys are a good investment. Immediately use the Culture slider to blow Kition's borders out to encompass at least two wooded tiles. Work the Fish. Hire a scientist either at population 2 or 3, but remove him the turn before he is set to spawn a Great Person (if that spawn would come before Q-H's GP would spawn). Only rehire a specialist after Q-H has generated its GP, and make it a merchant (and hire a second merchant on building the Glassmaker). Kition's GP should spawn no later than Turn 150, and thanks to your Golden Age it should spawn before then.
* With both Q-H and Kition you will probably have to save/reload and change spawn turns in order to get the GM instead of a GS.
* Run research at 100% as long as possible. Tech order: Construction, Arithmetic, Contract; trade Contract for Calendar (if possible); Mathematics, Currency. Turn research off at that point.
* DO NOT use the Phoenician Unique Power (buying units for cheap). You will need all the money you have to finance your research at 100%. In fact, you will have to take gold from Greece and sack the Roman cities in order to deficit finance that far. In the meantime, your army should be big enough and should build soon enough to take down Rome without having to buy units.
* Use Light Swordsmen to attack Mediolanum via the Adriatic; move the same fleet to Q-H to pick up Sacred Bands, and take Rome in a pincer move by sea (direct off ships) and land (using surviving Light Swordsmen). Mop up remaining cities until the Romans have collapsed or been utterly conquered. Raze only one city if it can be helped. Don't forget to settle a city in Iberia if you haven't conquered one from the Romans. On ending the war, you can disband most of the army you have built to save on expenses.
* Likely, the Greeks will declare war on you at the same time they declare on Egypt, Babylon, etc., on account of Kition being in their sphere of action. This will be annoying but not crippling as it will probably happen after you've beaten the Romans. Anyway, the Greeks will have no way of attacking Kition with any stacks; they will generate no stacks near your other cities; you can outbuild them with War Galleys. The only danger might come from random Greek units wandering into Italy or Iberia.
* DO NOT gift a former Roman city to the Greeks so as to help your stability. There is an excellent chance the Greeks will collapse, in which case the Romans will respawn, with Conqueror stacks, a really pissed-off attitude, and an automatic DoW against you.
* Note that no part of this strategy relies upon popping advantageous goodie huts. Any gold or techs gained from those will make your game easier, but nothing from them will be necessary unless you find yourself in a really bad strategic situation vis-a-vis Rome.
The following strategy borrows elements from strategies described in those earlier posts, but mixes them in a slightly new way. I have also made sure to include some markers—key game turns to watch for—so players have some idea whether they are progressing fast enough if following this guide.
UHV Conditions
1. Build a Palace and the Great Cothon in Qart-Hadasht by Turn 120.
2. Control Italy and Iberia on Turn 134.
3. Have 5000 gold on Turn 154.
The Phoenician UHV game is built almost entirely on luck. Or, more particularly, on the management of luck. If you are allergic to Save/Reload shenanigans, look for a different UHV game to play.
(Alternately, if you have figured out a way to win the Phoenician UHV without using those shenanigans, please post.)
The Great Cothon
The first piece of luck comes in the very first condition: building the Great Cothon. Unfortunately, Greece also likes to build it, and if they are of a mind to build it, they will beat you to it. It doesn't help that even if they aren't building it, if they generate a Great Engineer they will probably switch production just to grab it.
You could screw with Greece by declaring war, landing some troops on their peninsula and ravaging the landscape. This generally works, but it will piss off the Greeks, and you will need them later for tech trading.
So here's the first place where you have to decide if you're going to use shenanigans to win. If Greece beats you to the Cothon, the graceful thing is to resign the game and try again from scratch. Or you can reload an earlier save and use World Builder to construct an alternate reality in which Greece didn't decide to pursue the Cothon. Is this cheating? Or are you merely taking a short-cut to that sequel game where Greece chooses not to chase the Cothon? That's between you, your conscience, and your ethical theory about what constitutes cheating. I merely point here that if you don't want to go through the tedium of launching a new game, the World Builder will take you to that new game without having to resign and relaunch.
But what about the Palace? I hear you cry. Any tips on getting that in Qart-Hadasht?
Yes. Build it in Qart-Hadasht by building Q-H as your first city.
Opening Moves
You will spawn in Phoenicia, with a Settler, an Archer, a Sacred Band, and random units that will have flipped to you. You will also have a War Galley, two Galleys, another Settler and Archer, and two Work Boats floating nearby.
First, move the floating Settler and Archer onto the Copper-bearing island nearby. Then load the other Settler, Archer, and Sacred Band onto the boats and send them westward until you hit Tunisia. Unload and build a city (Qart-Hadasht) north of the Stone. Boom. Your Palace will appear inside it.
The same turn, after settling Carthage, settle Kition on the Copper island. You will have left one of the Work Boats behind; use it on the nearby Fish. (The other Work Boat will have gone to Q-H.) Send your starting fleet (the War Galley and two Galleys) back to Kition to idle in port.
End that turn by turning the Culture slider up to 100% and holding it there for four turns (at least) so that Kition's borders expand to encompass two wooded tiles. (If the other civs crowd Kition about, you may have to run Culture at 100% for six or more turns.) Do not change your starting Civics: keep Republic and Slavery. Start your research by beelining Contract first, then Currency.
What do these opening moves do?
By settling Q-H first, you automatically generate a Palace there, saving you the time you would otherwise have to spend on building it. This is a very old trick, and so is the Kition gambit, which gives you an impregnable fortress with great production and a strong food source to power it. Meanwhile, you are no later in starting the Cothon than you would have been otherwise, and you will instantly get two Workers when you found Q-H to bring the surrounding resources on line. Be sure to chop the forest and mine the hill.
If Greece is not chasing the Cothon, you will build it on or around Turn 94, thus meeting the first condition.
The Latin War
On Turn 90, Rome will spawn and begin to rapidly spread. This is very bad news. Around about Turn 120 they will declare war on you and spawn a Conqueror stack next to Q-H. They will also spread out and founded new cities in Italy, Gaul, Illyria, Iberia, and the moons of Jupiter, possibly. (I kid, but not by much.) After hitting you with an automatic DoW, they will go on to do the same to Greece and Egypt, generating more stacks of doom.
And in the face of that onslaught you will have to conquer Italy and Iberia, clearing them of Rome and any other civilizations, by Turn 134.
So what you want to do is to knock them out first. Destroy Rome before it declares war on you.
The strategy I'm about to outline can be ticklish to execute, but I've had success with it on several test games, so I think it is basically sound. You have to rush them, taking advantage of the cheap Light Swordsmen and the amphibious Sacred Bands.
As soon as you found Kition, set it to building a Barracks, then a third Galley and six Light Swordsmen. This army should finish building around Turn 103. Meanwhile, after finishing the Great Cothon, set Q-H to building a Barracks, a War Galley, and 5 Sacred Bands. (The starting unit will be your sixth.) You can continue to build Sacred Bands after that as insurance, and you probably should, but you will very quickly know if you need them or not.
The timing is crucial, but it should work out to within a turn or two. As soon as you have built your sixth Light Swordsmen, load the army onto your three Galleys and send it and the War Galley to the mouth of the Adriatic, there to rendezvous with the second War Galley you built in Q-H. Immediately move the armada up the Adriatic into Roman waters, and disgorge the army onto the Wheat tile beside Mediolanum.
Here is where luck may or may not be with you. You might have to delay if there are military units on that tile; and you should delay if there are two or more Legions on tiles next to that Wheat. But more often than not you will surprise the Romans and they won't have any strong units nearby, and Mediolanum will likely only be garrisoned by two Archers. You will likely lose 2 or even 3 units in the assault, but 6 Light Swordsmen can take out 2 Archers, even with defense bonuses. Unless the coast looks very clear, don't leave the city as a hostage to fortune, but raze it (accepting the stability hit) and garrisoning it long enough for it to burn. Move your surviving units down toward Rome, sticking to the wooded hills.
Meanwhile, swing your fleet around Italy to pick up the Sacred Bands in Q-H and make for Rome with them. It will probably also be guarded by only 2 Archers, but even if there is a Legion inside, your surviving Swordsmen and the Sacred Bands (which can attack directly from the ships with no penalty) should be able to take them down. Keep Rome and any other cities you have to conquer; one razing is enough.
In my test games, this one-two punch is often enough to cause the Romans to collapse, but it's far from a sure thing, so swiftly move your army to assault any surviving coastal cities. If you're lucky, one of them will be in Iberia. If you're unlucky, there might be one in southern Italy, and it will be a tough nut to crack, requiring some of the units you are building in Q-H. If you are extremely unlucky, Rome may still have several cities hidden in Gaul or Pannonia, in which case you will have a much longer fight ahead of you than you anticipated. Don't bother to try making peace with them unless you could use a few turns of breathing room; the Conqueror event abrogates all peace treaties, so you might as well keep fighting.
But this strategy will give you a more than reasonable chance of knocking out Rome before they can spawn Conquerors, and it will give you at least one city in Italy to meet that half of the second UHV condition, and might even give you an Iberian city. Even if not, you will have a dozen turns until the deadline to build a Settler and carry it over to the Iberian coast, and Q-H will be a beast of a producer by that point and can punch out a Settler in five or six turns.
Your stability will be underwater by this point, but it shouldn't be life-threatening. Still, let your new cities starve down to nothing and let them stagnate there. You only need notional cities on those peninsulas, not productive ones. In other words, impose a Carthaginian peace upon the Romans, but this time from the other end of the stick.
Money and Great Merchants
As you are fighting Rome, you will probably make the breakthrough that will allow you to meet the third condition: discovering Currency. But even this will require some strategy.
First, you should trade for some of the prerequisite techs, but that means having a tech that the other civilizations want but don't have. In my test games, I've found that Contract usually fits the bill, and that Greece will even give you a cash bonus on top of Calendar in order to get it. So start your research path by beelining Contract: Construction - Arithmetic - Contract. Trade for Calendar. If you can also trade with Rome for Math, you can take it, but it's not necessary. (Also, don't give them Shipbuilding under any circumstances.)
To further speed your research, take advantage of your Republic civic to hire scientists: with two cities, running Republic is liking having a free Library. Go ahead and let Kition hire a scientist after it has grown to size 2; it won't appreciably delay the army you're building. In Q-H, wait until you have built the Cothon before hiring a scientist; otherwise, prioritize population growth until you have maxed out at the happiness limit.
With these in play, you should discover Construction on or around Turn 83; Arithmetic on Turn 89; Contract on turn 96; Math (assuming you've traded for Calendar) on Turn 102; and Currency itself on or around Turn 113.
As soon as you have Currency, turn taxes up to 100%: you don't need any more techs for the UHV. You will also be able to hire merchants as specialists; in Kition and Q-H, switch from scientists to merchants. Also, switch to Merchant Trade as a civic, and set your two main cities to building Glassmakers. As soon as those are built—and you should run a food deficit in Kition to speed up the Glassmaker; but don't starve it down a level—hire a second merchant in each city.
Be Careful: It might be that Kition will generate a Great Person while you aren't looking, and there's a 98% chance or better that it will be a useless Great Scientist rather than the Great Merchant that you need. To prevent this, watch (or reload an earlier save) and when Kition is one turn from generating a Great Person, remove the specialist to stop generating GP points. You will not lose the points you have generated thus far, but you will be half-way toward generating a second GP after Q-H has generated its GP. Once Q-H has generated its GM, hire as many merchants in Kition as you can to resume your march for a GM.
Because a lot of those GP points in both cities will have been generated with science specialists, you will be very likely to generate a Great Scientist rather than a Great Merchant in both. In Q-H you will likely have a 50% chance of getting the one you need. In Kition, which will generate the second GP, you will also have about a 50% chance because half of its points will have been generated by merchants after Q-H has generated its GP. You are in fact unlikely to generate two Great Merchants, and you will not have time to generate a third (or a fourth if you are unlucky enough to generate two Great Scientists). What to do?
Again, shenanigans.
You could resign the game at that point. You could also use World Builder to replace a Great Scientist with a Great Merchant. A slicker way, one that only breaks the rules a little bit (maybe) is to reload an earlier save and try to generate the alternate GP. To do this, remove a specialist long enough that the GP generates a turn later, which will result in a new "roll" for a result. You might have to do this a couple of times, pushing the spawn date back two or three turns from the earliest possible spawn date, but with the odds of getting the right result being 50-50 (approximately) in both Q-H and Kition when it comes time to spawn, you won't have to delay long to get the wanted result.
The first GM will appear in Q-H. Where to send him?
If you discover Currency on Turn 114, you will have forty turns of tax revenue in addition to GM money. You should be getting 40+ gold per turn after turning your research off, and that amount will only increase as you hire merchants in your cities and mine the Silver in Iberia and work the Orchards in Sicily or Italy. Eventually you will be earning 60+ gold per turn, unless your empire is running sub-optimally.
So that's anywhere from 1600 gold to 2400 gold you will pick up just from your tax revenues, leaving the GMs to generate between 2600 and 3400 gold. You can get 2000 gold for a GM in India, in Indraprastha; but you can get 1800 gold in Jerusalem. Twice 1800 is 3600 (I double-checked my math with a calculator), which means that barring some kind of catastrophe, you can finance the third UHV condition just by moving your GMs across the Mediterranean without having to chance them on the barb-infested road to India.
Q-H's GM should pop up around Turn 120. The second would spawn on about Turn 150, but you will get a Golden Age starting on Turn 134 which will boost your GP output, and it will spawn closer to Turn 140. As the deadline is Turn 154, and Jerusalem is only a few tiles from Kition, you shouldn't have any trouble in collecting your money.
A Carthaginian Cheat Sheet
To sum up the strategy in a handy how-to guide:
* Settle first city on Q-H. Build Great Cothon, Barracks, a War Galley, 5+ Sacred Bands; a Settler (if needed for Iberia); Glassmaker; whatever else is expedient—War Galleys are a good investment if paying the UHV game, and nothing else much is. Run a scientist after building the Cothon, switching to a merchant after discovering Currency. Hire a second merchant after building the Glassmaker. Look for a Great Person to appear there around about Turn 120; send him to Jerusalem or (if you're feeling both brave and desperate) to Indraprastha in India.
* Same turn as you settle Q-H, settle a second city (Kition) on the Copper island. Build Barracks, a Galley, 6 Light Swordsmen; then a Harbor, a Temple (to help maintain borders), a Glassmaker; then whatever is expedient—again, War Galleys are a good investment. Immediately use the Culture slider to blow Kition's borders out to encompass at least two wooded tiles. Work the Fish. Hire a scientist either at population 2 or 3, but remove him the turn before he is set to spawn a Great Person (if that spawn would come before Q-H's GP would spawn). Only rehire a specialist after Q-H has generated its GP, and make it a merchant (and hire a second merchant on building the Glassmaker). Kition's GP should spawn no later than Turn 150, and thanks to your Golden Age it should spawn before then.
* With both Q-H and Kition you will probably have to save/reload and change spawn turns in order to get the GM instead of a GS.
* Run research at 100% as long as possible. Tech order: Construction, Arithmetic, Contract; trade Contract for Calendar (if possible); Mathematics, Currency. Turn research off at that point.
* DO NOT use the Phoenician Unique Power (buying units for cheap). You will need all the money you have to finance your research at 100%. In fact, you will have to take gold from Greece and sack the Roman cities in order to deficit finance that far. In the meantime, your army should be big enough and should build soon enough to take down Rome without having to buy units.
* Use Light Swordsmen to attack Mediolanum via the Adriatic; move the same fleet to Q-H to pick up Sacred Bands, and take Rome in a pincer move by sea (direct off ships) and land (using surviving Light Swordsmen). Mop up remaining cities until the Romans have collapsed or been utterly conquered. Raze only one city if it can be helped. Don't forget to settle a city in Iberia if you haven't conquered one from the Romans. On ending the war, you can disband most of the army you have built to save on expenses.
* Likely, the Greeks will declare war on you at the same time they declare on Egypt, Babylon, etc., on account of Kition being in their sphere of action. This will be annoying but not crippling as it will probably happen after you've beaten the Romans. Anyway, the Greeks will have no way of attacking Kition with any stacks; they will generate no stacks near your other cities; you can outbuild them with War Galleys. The only danger might come from random Greek units wandering into Italy or Iberia.
* DO NOT gift a former Roman city to the Greeks so as to help your stability. There is an excellent chance the Greeks will collapse, in which case the Romans will respawn, with Conqueror stacks, a really pissed-off attitude, and an automatic DoW against you.
* Note that no part of this strategy relies upon popping advantageous goodie huts. Any gold or techs gained from those will make your game easier, but nothing from them will be necessary unless you find yourself in a really bad strategic situation vis-a-vis Rome.
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