A map for enthusiasts (NTT)

[Pedro78]

Seems like I've been waiting for this map for months. You know, that kind of map where you want to snowball but there's simply no snow? So you decide to wait until winter, and when snow finally comes it becomes such a rewarding experience?

Anyway, without further ado, leader is:

Spoiler :

Who else but brave Toku for this kind of map?

The start:

Spoiler settings :

Deity
Standard
Normal
Continents
No huts
No events
No technology trading

I played it to 500AD and am in a very promising position, so the map is totally winnable. It's just a good map to get the "started from the bottom now we here" feeling, because you actually start from the bottom

I attached both the starting save & a WB save in case someone wants to play without NTT or at a lower difficulty, although you will only get the full experience with Deity+NTT

 

[Fippy]

You are too generous Pedro, i wish the wine would be incense thou ~~

 

[Pedro78]

If I WB in 2 incenses, will you give it a go?
(But a win with incense wouldn't be a real win cos, you know.. +1 happy per cathedral is a bit cheesy)


Btw it's not isolated, I tend to get bored in isolation nowadays.

 

[Fippy]

Will play (with wine ) in the coming days, looks fun

 

[Pedro78]

Huh.. anyone knows why AIs will stay in Merc even though they have Astro + Economics?? I must have lost 3000 this game because of stupid merc... This map becomes a real pain in the Renaissance era -- T174 right now and could still lose to a bad RNG roll: NTT makes AIs really slow to get Rifling, but they might still beeline it when you're really unlucky.

On generous maps, NTT can sometimes make the game easier, but on poor maps it is quite tricky to get out of a tech hole when you don't have access to trades. Right now the "started from the bottom now we here" feeling is gone, but otoh being at T170+ and not yet being in a winning position is quite motivating.

 

[Swordnboard]

Huh.. anyone knows why AIs will stay in Merc even though they have Astro + Economics??

I can't really find a solid explanation, but using the debug mode gives us access to the AI's numeric scoring of various civics for our empire, which is a start. The points scale is a little bit opaque (maybe someone could do a code-dive to find out), but most of the scores respond sensibly to empire changes. For example, I world-buildered in lots of towns and saw free speech and universal suffrage's scores increase. But free market's score was unexpectedly low and didn't respond to most changes I made (it did increase if the AI had a corporation for what it's worth). On the other hand, mercantilism had a pretty high score and state property / environmentalism were evaluated really highly. Not sure what the revolt threshold is or if there is one, but the AI seem to adopt whichever civic has the highest evaluation.

 

[Fippy]

Did your game look similar to this, Pedro?

 

[Pedro78]

A bit lazy to write-up at the moment, but here's a T84 save (don't have any earlier saves sorry). It contains a few small spoilers compared to your position, so you might want to play a few more turns before you open it.

I'll make my usual little comments in the next post.

 

[Fippy]

Okay, ran out of time for today (continuing tomo) so no hurry.

 

[Pedro78]

@Fippy

Spoiler (just in case someone else ever feels like joining in) :

• I went for Writing before BW/Myst. Pretty unusual as I usually like to chop a lot early on, but here I didn't really have anywhere to expand to. If our neighbour wasn't Hammy but someone else, then I would have gone BW right after AH in hope for Copper, but here I wasn't going to Axe-rush him anyway.
• We settled in different places. I think going for the fish before the clam hurt you as the fish city takes much longer to pay off.
• I didn't spot the Western Copper early on (scouted Hammy out first) so I went for Iron Working in hope for iron, and had a settler ready for either the Fish spot or the Copper spot by IW.
• I felt like cottaging the Wine and saving all forests for maths chops was quite efficient. Later it hurts to destroy towns to put wineries, but I think the early benefits were worth it.
• I also felt like saying something else but I forgot what

You plan to go Axepult? Another advantage of your game is that one of Hammy's cities that was hilled in my game is flatland in yours, no big deal though. A fun aspect of this game is that NTT makes catching up pretty tricky once you've killed Hammy -- you can't solve all your problems by bulbing Philo

 

[Fippy]

I was thinking about that too Pedro

Spoiler :

BW good with little commerce? In the end i stopped thinking and just did so lol, with working coast sometimes..

Wanted to do something "special", like Samurai or Longbows but not sure how much sense that makes.
Axepult feels like standard play, would really like to use Samurai..but can it be done in reasonable time?

 

[Pedro78]

Spoiler :

I think BW was bad here, mostly because you had plenty of hammers to build a library in Kyoto without it, and not much infra to build elsewhere for a while. But sometimes even with little commerce BW is required because you can't get any production without it, so it kinda depends.

Samurai are too far away. Trebs might have been an option if we could avoid fishing (kinda hard here ). And Samurai are still inferior to Axes+Catapults if the AI has longbows (because they're 70 and will still die quite often against Walls+LBs).
I really don't see any other solution than Axepult here. At least you'll be rushing Bowmen with melee units, lotsa fun! And then you'll have to catch up with the other guys
(I stopped at T174 and am still far behind in tech, although I figured out a way to win any VC 100% by now -- never had such an exciting mid-late game)