[Vanilla] Benchmarks for Quick Games

[cylenalag]

I have no time for standard or worse speeds. I've seen that standard games generally say at T100 that you should have at least 10 cities, a couple sea units, and 4 trade routes, but what should it be for us who don't have time or patience for standard games or slower? I've personally pushed it to T80, but feel it could be sooner. What are your Quick experiences?

 

[yung.carl.jung]

On quick speed at t100 you should probably be planning towards your victory. As you can see from the screenshot I am pretty close to flight, I think I got my spaceport down roughly on turn 115 or 120. By t100 on quick speed you want to have settled all of your cities, have built your relevant districts, have many TRs up, built all the essential classic/medieval wonders, and have all your general gameplan mapped out in terms of cruising to victory. I definitely feel you, I agree that standard speed takes too long. I often spend 4+ days on just a single game, which is insane. However quick speed comes with its own problemsm which are innumerable. Warfare is horrible, units get outdate way too fast, eras fly by, there is much less room for the player to make microdecisions and so on. Hopefully this post helped you in some way!

 

[cylenalag]

Yes thank you! I had a feeling getting a spaceport down around t120 was the big ticket.

 

[cylenalag]

@yung.carl.jung What do you think of playing standard games as if you're playing Quick speed? So instead of just 10 cities at t100, you are already pushing hard to your victory condition? I just won a King-level game (and recently got R&F) doing just that and won a culture victory at t200 with Rome, first thinking I was playing a Quick game so: Warrior->Builder->Warrior->Settler->Settler->Settler->Campus so I have 4 cities by t30 or so and ready to put down GP after campus and get AH with Magnus w/Provision to really churn out the remaining requisite 6 settlers, sometimes relegating one to another city to speed it up even further so I get 10 cities by t80 and running GS card, Settler card, builder card->feudalism builder card and have Liang at a builder-centric city also with good production to quickly get resources to bankrupt the other civs with while giving them 10g back each turn until they get the +10 favorable deal boost if I want to ally with them. I found it invigorating and didn't even notice the slower speeds, it still felt like a good pace.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Yes, lately I have been questioning whether going super wide is even necessary. I think a good player can definitely achieve very competitive victory times with 8-10 cities, because you will get your infrastructure up so much faster not having to invest thousands of hammers into settlers.. Personally I think going for your VC at T100 is too early on standard.

I have gotten the spaceport tech as early as T140 though, so realistically you can definitely go into tunnelvision mode at T120/T130. Whether or not building research labs is worth it is still a hotly debated issue, for example. But yes, I agree you barely notice the slower speed. Slower game speeds have so many advantages for the player it's insane. Going from Quick/Deity to Standard/Deity feels like playing on Emperor again!

 

[Victoria]

Yes, lately I have been questioning whether going super wide is even necessary. I think a good player can definitely achieve very competitive victory times with 8-10 cities,

9-12 is fine, even on standard speed. There is a difference between Dom and peaceful SV in number of cities.Dom is faster but you have to conquer a lot to make up for it. All about adjacencies.
Not a quick player so cannot translate 100% so maybe 8 will do.