Here's a close up of Freeland:
I placed three of the Earthling Settlements on inhospitable islands in the frozen north, LOL:
In the screenshot immediately above you can see that there is a Brasilian city next to Freeland called Jimboomba. This is a city that I founded. I know, this is a One City Challenge, what was I doing?! Let me explain. During the game I received the "Solid State Citizen" quest which offers a reward of 12 Purity affinity points (or 12 Supremacy affinity points if you prefer). One of the steps in the quest is to build an outpost. I purchased a colonist and built an outpost within two tiles of an alien nest. My thinking was that I could satisfy the quest requirement by building the outpost but I wouldn't be in breach of OCC rules because before the outpost would have time to grow into a city I assumed that the aliens would destroy it. To my surprise (and annoyance) the aliens did not once attack the outpost, even though there were no military units defending it! The outpost eventually turned into a city. I gave the aliens another few turns to attack and when they didn't I sold Jimboomba to Brasilia for 270 energy.
Below is a screenshot of the technologies that I selected during the game. I think that for an OCC challenge the three most important technologies to beeline to are Communications, Orbital Networks and Field Theory (lower right corner of the web) because they all give large boosts to science.
- Lasercom Satellite gives 15% science
- Mantle gives +3 science and 10% science
- Feedsite Hub gives +1 science for each international trade route (plus it offers a free covert agent from its associated quest)
- Command Center offers a free covert agent from its associated quest
- The Quantum Computer wonder provides a free technology as well as +5 science
(Side note: for those of you who are unaware, there is an interactive version of the tech web available on the
Apolyton website.)
I wanted Freeland to have as large a population as possible in order to work as many production tiles as possible, so I built the Gene Vault and Ectogenesis Pod and I beelined to Nanotechnology (far left of the tech web) for the Nanopasture and to Biospheres (lower right of the tech web). I also made sure to get Vertical Farming and Industrial Ecology (both in the top left quadrant) which synergize with the Ectogenesis Pod.
It took me about 25 turns to build the Exodus Gate. Near the end of construction I had all seven of my covert agents back at Headquarters helping with the build (each agent boosts the production of wonders by 1% when you switch the Spy Agency's project to "Research and Development").
This was my second attempt at the map. In my first game I finished building the Exodus Gate a couple of turns before one of the AI factions won the game (so I was about 20 turns too slow). In that first try, for my Virtues, I went down the left-hand side of the Prosperity tree. In my second game I followed Acken's suggestion to use the Knowledge tree and then the Might tree. This is a much better path for an OCC challenge because when you only have one city you really need all the help you can get with science production.
The final screenshot below is of my military units at the end of the game. For most of the duration of the game I had literally zero military, LOL. Fortunately, no other faction declared war on me, although some leaders who went Supremacy or Harmony did become extremely hostile towards the very end. My approach to diplomacy was to (i) sign Cooperation Agreements with all the factions who offered them to me; (ii) abstain from declaring war on other factions; and (iii) send trade vessels to each of the other factions. I kept Brasilia friendly by making sure that I always sent at least one trading vessel to one of its cities, even if doing so meant giving up a more profitable trading destination. It also helped that Brasilia went Purity like I did, in both games that I played.
I got DoWed by Brazil and ARC together around T160 but by that time I already had one Angel built so I just went on a conquering spree 
) by settling a city to get the affinity quest done, but it was in the middle of the desert and it had ZERO food tiles around it, I sold it for cash and AI puppeted it, it stood there with 1 pop for over 30 turns taking up space for a "normal" city which would grow and contribute.
