7OTM07 - Completion of Modern Age (end of game) Spoiler Thread

[Eyswein]

At the top of your post please post:
Difficulty Level & Victory Condition Achieved (Note: Culture was goal for 7OTM07)
Recap of turns per age (turns in Antiquity, turns in Exploration, turns in Modern Age)
Score = Total turns in All Ages (fewest is goal)

A few questions to consider:
- What Legacy bonuses did you choose and why? What Civ did you choose & why? What other start up things did you do at the beginning of the Modern Age?
- What was your plan for achieving the Victory Condition? What are the major steps you planned to take? What events, if any, changed the plan in execution and to what new plan? Any interesting decision points?
- Early order for technology/civics? What did you later prioritize for technology/civics?
- How did the leader bonus and civ unique ability impact your plan/play, if at all?
- Did you settle more towns/cities in the Modern Age? What was your mix of towns vs cities?
- What were key production/purchase focuses?
- What government did you select? Which bonus did you chose most and why?
- Any other good info?
- How did you focus your use of influence for diplomacy?
- Any surprises/frustration/elations you ran into, how did you deal with it?
- Did you enjoy the game?

 

[MACKA0ili]

Immortal - Cultural Victory
Antiquity - 105 turns | Exploration - 88 turns | Modern - 44 turns
Score = 237 turns total

I decided to play as Russia for this final age since they start out with culture and science on districts of which I had a lot of from conquest. For mementos, I stuck with Lotus Blossom for the extra 4% science and culture from gold income and put back in Shakokidogu for another cultural attribute point which I spent on getting to 25% extra culture from the end of that tree. I chose the cultural golden age to keep Holy Eumene (+4 culture per converted foreign settlement, +1 culture per owned converted settlement), Deep Roots for +52 extra culture from the relics I gathered, 2 expansionist attribute points to get a free pop in all my towns, a science attribute point to get the gold and happiness discount on buildings and then Lyceums just because. I made sure to set all of my natural wonder settlements to resort towns and at least 4 urban centers so I could buy enough museums without having to convert towns. I also chose elective republic for the extra 20% culture celebrations which would be constantly active this age.
I was going to go full into culture to quickly get hegemony up for the extra artifacts from research. Before then, I spent my initial cash stack on explorers and museums and built trade routes in my capitol after researching steam power. I befriended a cultural and economic city state for an extra artifact and more gold to work with and spent the rest of my influence on trade routes and agreements to build up alliances for the 10% culture bonus per alliance. I was so focused on pumping up my culture that I neglected my gold and production a bit which slowed down my progress since I had to wait a few turns to purchase another explorer closer to an artifact spot or on another continent. Jose Rizal's quests for starting trade routes with everyone came in handy since a lot of them would give you 1k gold which would be just enough to buy another explorer. After hitting hegemony fairly early on, I realized I didn't need all that culture for future civic artifacts since I had enough artifacts in the pipeline to complete the legacy path. I decided to research facism for the extra +3 production from specialists and the first russian civic mastery for the +15% production. When the final artifacts rolled in, my capital was at about 160 hammers per turn which gave me 10 turns to complete the world's fair wonder.
During this time, Isabella declared war one last time. And so, I spent the last 10 turns finally finishing what I started in the exploration age and fully eliminated her; razing her new settlements and claiming the one that eluded me in the fog of war back then. Overall, it was a pretty good age. I do like modern despite how short it can be if you prep correctly. I probably would have been faster if I focused more on gold than culture. I'm getting a bit faster now, but I still can't get sub 200 total turns. My exploration and modern ages are probably about 20 turns longer than they could have been and I know there are some people who can go even lower. For the game as a whole, I like the fact that we were allowed choose our mementos past the first age. I've never really done that before since I honestly just forget that you can change them during the age transitions most of the time. I'm liking how each of these games can be so different to the last; the amount of settings that can be either fixed or free helps a lot with the variety. It's probably also a bit harder to put these together because of all the options so I really appreciate you guys trying out these different setups each month.

 

[Manpanzee]

29 turns Modern
50 turns Exploration
101 turns Antiquity
180 turns total

Civ: Russia (more culture is obviously good, I did care at least a bit about the science for Factories, and there's a relevant +hammers tradition)
Mementos: Culture attribute and Diplomatic attribute (zzz)
Legacies: Golden Age Universities, rest attribute points
Government & Ideology: Culture/science celebration, Democracy (I wanted the +wonder hammers, didn't really care about the specialist culture by the time I got there)

I set up three cities and left the rest on towns. One town was an Urban Center to allow Museums on all four continents.

Mostly just gold-buying Museums and Explorers, with Merchants, some miscellaneous military, and a single Factory thrown in. I believe I had the cash to afford nine Explorers, aided by a lot of Silver available from trade routes.

I was able to stack up a bunch of +hammer modifiers to help with World's Fair: Russia tradition, Democracy policy, both sources of Leadership, a couple Diplomatic attribute cappers, and a seven-Coffee Factory. I was also lucky enough to have four Militaristic IPs spawn this age. It turned out I had enough that four chops let me zero-turn the World's Fair, finishing it the turn I unlocked it.

I did notice that town-city connections still seem to be pretty buggy and inconsistent. I've had games where nearly every settlement sends food with ease, and others (like this one) where tons of towns are inexplicably unable to send food to cities less than ten tiles away. Some of that is probably Archipelago related, but not all. Definitely still stuff to fix there.

 

[Calcifer]

54 modern
75 exploration
135 antiquity

total 264

Spoiler legacies :

Mementos: economic attribute and +gold from resources in cities

Went Mughals to buy wonders with gold. Probably not the best choice because you need to research their whole civic tree for that and that delays egemony timer.

As usual with modern age it went pretty straightforward as you just focus on your desired victory. In this case maximise culture output and buy a bunch of explorers. I managed to get 7/8 exploration artifact so the path was completed with the researches on egemony.

It was my first game on archipelago so definitely could have done much better.

 

[Bleidraner]

33 turns Modern
57 turns Exploration
100 turns Antiquity
190 turns total

The Plan:
Double down on culture to rush to Hegemony while spamming Explorers in the 4 continents by whatever means possible. Have museums (or Universities) in all 4 continents. Get 11 artifacts before Hegemony (1 from Culture befriending, the other 10 from Natural Wonders and excavations) to time it so you can end the game when you get to Hegemony, by researching Antiquity in all 4 continents and getting the final 4 artifacts in 1 turn.

The Execution:
I finished this a couple of days ago, so writing from memory. I am not going to say it was just clicking through, as optimizing the paths of the Explorers is very important and pushing culture takes a little bit of skill. But almost. Modern is pretty broken. I will focus my write up on the things that I could have done better.

I slotted in diplomatic and cultural attribute points mementos. I chose Mexico. I thought hard about this, and I knew that with Jose Rizal I was going to be in a celebration all age long, so I thought the 30% bump to culture from Mexico would be very good. I did not think I would have time to go into the civilization civic tree at all, so I did not take that into consideration in my decision, although Mexico is amazing there too as you can get 2 culture buildings with just one civic researched. Maybe Catherine would have been better, but I did not feel I needed to set that up in Exploration, as I felt Mexico would work great.

I misstimed things a little bit. I thought I would get to Hegemony by t27, but got there by t25. I was missing 1 artifact as I had not chosen the free artifact for my first culture gift from the IP but something else. So I did not get the last artifact until t27. I was also running a little bit behind researching Progressivism for the 30% bump to building wonders and also late for Mass Production for the Factory, so my production monster Aksum was not quite ready, I had timed things for t27, I lost 1 turn there. I could have fixed all these problems in a very simple way by dispersing 1 or 2 scientific and cultural IPs and accelerating befriending for the others but I did not realize I needed to do that due to my misscalculation.

I also had a problem with the production accelerators. I had 10 coffees and slots to place them in Aksum and also the 30% bump from Progressivism, but both together only cut from 9 to 7 and that really does not make sense to me, it should have gone from 9 to 5 at least. One of the accelerators is likely bugged or I am very bad at maths (very likely the latter ). I ended up slotting the 7 tobaccos I had plus 4 coffees, as that seemed to give me the biggest bump.

Regrets:

The biggest issue was having only 2 production IPs in the map. The 2 production IPs I dispersed took down the building time for Worlds Fair by 4 turns, a couple more production IPs would have allowed me to same turn the Worlds Fair. Well some times the Map God giveth and some times He taketh away.

Another regret is that the game did not offer me the possibility of changing my capital to Waset in the transition to Modern. It was the second biggest city and the highest production one by far by the end of Exploration, so I thought I would be able to change capitals, but it seems I do not really understand the logic of that choice you are given in that game mechanic. Oh well.

This was a lot of fun, in spite of my initial reaction of Oh no! Archipielago! Archipielago was great. Thank you GoTM staff. Dare I ask for 2 GoTMs per month instead of one?

Spoiler :

 

[GoblinMatron]

Total: 193
Modern: 30
Exploration: 65
Antiquity: 98

Mementos:
Complaint to Ea-nasir (economic attribute)
False Beard (2 culture on wonders)

Civ:
Qing
I wanted both gold and culture and Qing gives that.

Legacies:
militaristic (3): Land of Opportunity (10 Production in distant land settlements), 1 expansionist attribute
cultural (3): Deep Roots (2 culture per relic from previous age (+48)), jose rizal modern legend cultural(+15%culture, -10% science)
economic (2+1): Tap the Source (2 gold per turn per unique resource), 1 economic attribute
scientific (3): Golden age universities, 1 scientific attribute

Government:
Bureaucratic Monarchy
for the gold

Plan:
- Declare war on Pachacuti to get his city on the green continent
- establish many trade routes
- buy many explorers to get the artifacts
- discover Hegemony quickly
- get to the militaristic IPs quickly and sit on them, so that no AI can disperse them
- disperse other IPs to get the gold, science and culture

Game:
The game mostly went as planned. All the trade routes meant that the other leaders did not declare war and I could focus on the IPs and explorers.
I was very lucky to get 4 militaristic IPs, so it only took me one turn to finish the Wrold's Fair.

Regrets:
- I missed one silver that I could have gotten
- I could have had a better spread of settlements to be able to buy explorers closer to the excavation sites and natural wonders
- I forgot that the cultural IP gives an artifact, I should have befriended one

This game was extremely fun, thanks GotM staff!
It seems I need to get better at the exploration age.

 

[Suicidekills]

Immortal Cultural Victory
Turn 39 Modern
Turn 70 Exploration
Turn 115 Antiquity
Total Turns = 224

I chose Mughal India as my Modern Civ. The idea was to buy my way to a Culture Victory. I haven’t played the Mughals since my first game and was very intrigued by the buying Wonders Civic.

With my Legacies, I really wanted the university legacy card to get merchants ASAP, but I was worried about my culture production with the -25% from Mughal Ability. I went with the two culture ones instead (Relics and Founder Belief). The +3 on science Quarters and attribute shaved the turns to Merchant from 14 to 10, so it wasn’t the worse.
After doing some intial maintenance, my gold went towards buying explorers mostly. I believe I started with three. Once I almost had merchants, I saved my gold and influence to purchase merchants and improve trade relations respectively. On one turn I must have started about 10 trade routes. This led to a lot of happy leaders. By the end of the game, I had an alliance with everyone except that pesky Hatshepsut. I was not able to break her.

My main problem was trying to figure out how to get through the culture tree as efficiently as possible. It was tough deciding between going full culture to get to hegemony as fast as possible and then build the World’s Fair, or going through the Mughal Civics tree, which would allow me to purchase the World’s Fair. I feel like I had more Gold than Culture at the end, so the balance was a little off. I didn’t play perfectly, so maybe a few turns could have been shaved off. It was really nice to get that last Relic on Turn 39 and then just buying the World’s Fair for 5k gold.

Besides that, the game was basically exploring for artifacts as fast as possible usually through Gold, and then buying the World’s Fair. I had a lot of fun buying Wonders. I had a lot of fun with my first Game of the Month. I will be back for more. Until next month…..