Round 4: 565 BC to 245 AD
This wasn't necessarily the most exciting round, but I did start to make up for some lost ground, and the SE started to come into its own.
I started off by making the suggested course corrections. For starters, I changed the tech I was researching:
Yikes! 52 turns?
Well, I stuck with it, trusting the SE would shave several turns off of that. Fortunately it did. In addition, as you'll see, I tech traded like crazy once I gained the ability to do so.
I also changed builds in Moscow to a Setter and managed to churn one out pretty quickly with the help of a chop. A few turns later, I founded my 4th city:
So that cuts off Ragnar from my land, such as it is.
REX was one priority, but as everyone made clear, so was research. With the SE being the goal here, that meant libraries. I pop-rushed some of them:
As you can see, I put the overflow into a Worker--another suggestion from the posts here, to take full advantage of Expansive's benefits. The Worker completed in 2 turns rather than the listed 6.
I didn't pop-rush all of the libraries, however--some of the newer cities really needed to grow so I'd have the population to turn into Scientists.
Speaking of new cities, I founded another one:
And a couple of turns later, I finished researching Alphabet:
Someone else may care to work out how many turns that was. I'm pretty sure it wasn't 52, so the SE did start to make a difference. You can see that, in fact, by checking the turns required for the other techs:
Quite a difference from earlier in the game, eh? Especially at 20% on the slider! By this point I had libraries in almost all my cities and was running 1 or 2 scientists as well. I don't think I've had a game before where getting the SE up and running made such a dramatic difference.
With Alphabet in hand, it was time to go visit the neighbours. As you might expect, Ragnar was useless. As I recall, he won't tech trade anything until he reaches Friendly status. Hinduism had not yet spread to any of my cities (though the diplomatically-useless Confucianism did), so relations with him weren't going to improve anytime soon. That meant it was down to the Ottoman and the Chinaman:
(If "Chinaman" is an offensive term now, I apologize. It's tough for a middle-aged guy like me to keep up on this PC stuff sometimes.)
So... do I have Iron? You betcha, though I had to wait for a 3rd border pop to claim it:
Running those scientists, plus the Philosophical trait, meant I got my first Great Person pretty quickly.
It was difficult to decide what to do with him. On the one hand, I could start stockpiling Great Scientists in anticipation of the Liberalism race. That was tempting, but I didn't like it. First off, I don't like the idea of having Great People sitting around doing nothing for you. Second, I was still woefully behind in techs and needed to do everything I could to catch up.
In most of my games now I'm primarily using Great Scientists to lightbulb technologies. Merging and Academies have become much lower priorities. I do the math, and they rarely compare to all the flasks you get from a lightbulb--not to mention the immediate and potentially strategic advantage. So some of you might think it a naff move, but I popped the GS for Compass.
I then went to see what I could get for it:
That, I thought, was a pretty decent deal, especially since I have horses, and as you'll see, it didn't end there.
But I had other things on the go. REX continued, though I was down to my less optimal city sites now:
It'll never amount to much, but if it can run a couple of scientists (probably not until Civil Service, though I could be wrong), then it's worth it. I also think I need one more city, this one south of St. Petersburg to claim that spice tile. I caught Mao sending an Axe and a Settler into my territory and I suspect he was trying to claim it for himself, despite its high-cost location. He currently has a spice monopoly, so maybe the BetterAI is trying to maintain it? Or maybe it's just the usual AI habit of claiming any free land. In any case, I canceled our Open Borders agreement and have to make my mind up about this city soon.
With cities everywhere, my Scouts were now free to go roaming. I set them to auto-explore--mistake! Two Scouts wasted time exploring their home turf, and I lost another one when it ended a turn next to a barb city. One more example of how even with a Better AI, automation is rarely a good idea.
They did reveal, however, that Ragnar has focused on a military build-up:
Hmm. I'll have to start building a defensive force myself, just to be on the safe side. My Axes are all in Rostov; my inner cities are all protected by a single Warrior.
Remember I said I wasn't done with trading Compass? Well, not directly. Remember I got Horseback Riding from it?
Overall, then, I think popping Compass paid off handsomely. Isn't that part of the idea of the SE--lightbulbing techs which you can then trade?
However, I'm not yet running a pure SE; as no doubt many of you purists have noted, I keep inching up the slider. Hey, I'm fighting for my life here. Maybe once I get Code of Laws, Philosophy, and CS and switch to Bureaucracy, Caste System, and Pacifism, I
might feel comfy with pushing the slider down to 0%. Not yet though.
Finally, towards the end of the round, the continent's favourite religion spread to me:
At last! I converted immediately. It will take a few turns, however, to accrue the full "We care for our brothers and sisters of the faith" diplomatic benefits--in other words, for Ragnar to consider tech trading with me.
Thats fifteen screenshots, so that's it for this post. I'll follow up with a "state of the world" post with more information about where things stand. Stay tuned!
). Even if you are defeated you can learn a lot from this one.
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