[GS] Benchmarks Thread: Compare your T100 stats!

[yung.carl.jung]

I thought I was the only one seeing that issue. Makes two of us, I guess.

Also, the recent game had got me thinking: What governors do you get, and how do you promote them? I think I have much improving to do in that regard:

For SV: Magnus - Promote Magnus Provision (settler don't cost food) - Pingala - Liang / Reina / Amani -get all three relevant Pingala promotions - get any of Liang / Reina / Amani I don't have yet - get Moksha - promote Reina until district buys - get Spaceport boost on Pingala.

I usually pick up a few more promotions for Magnus and Liang along the way, but honestly don't know which ones to prioritize, none of the bonuses seem all that great to me. 20% more growth and 20% more district production are the two promotions I feel most strongly about.

In my next game I will focus even more on faith and culture and try to get Moksha promoted instead of Reina.

 

[The Highwayman]

For Science games:

Magnus is always 1 or 2. Sometimes I'll get a wild hair and go Liang first at Early Empire to get early 4 charge builders (always with China) and then get Magnus at State Workforce to chop Pyramids or Oracle, then a couple more settlers while I hammer out the Gov plaza/AH. Often times I'll go Pingala with the Gov Plaza title and Magnus Provisions with Ancestral Hall title, then chop away at my expansion. Pingala gets promoted to Grants with Recorded History/D Tactics (his second promo buffs whatever I'm weaker in, or culture if it's a tie).

An alternate to the above is remove Liang and include Amani for an early Suze (=diplo favor!) and era score. Sometimes I'll have her do the 5 turn tour if there's a batch of city states without suzes once I get the first envoy in them.

In the mid game, I'll grab Liang's fishery, mainly to buff the Mause city, but if there are several beast coastal cities she may do a mini tour before coming back to the aforementioned one. But not too often. Then I chose Pingala's other tier 2 promo that I didn't take earlier, as the city he's in has likely been chopped to 10 pop to bolster that yield.

Then it's Reyna or Moksha time, promoting them straight to the relevant space port purchase, and finally Pingala's boost to space projects promo.

I used to promote Amani to tier 4 to guarantee a suze, but it's often not necessary and it's expensive. More likely to do this in a culture game, or if Antananarivo or Nan Madol is in the game and they're heavily contested (why couldn't one of those be in my current game???).

Very late game I may bring in Victor if I have extra titles simply for the extra aluminum, but it's very situational and not too game changing since most of the time there's only 1 aluminum in a given city.

I haven't messed with Magnus' vertical integration - that's a lot of production to boost one city and my IZs are typically too spread out to make use of this.

It's not too rigid but there is an outline. I'd be interested in hearing yours and others thoughts on this.

 

[The Highwayman]

@yung.carl.jung Who do you consider the top science Civs for fast Deity games in the current version of the game? My general thoughts are Pericles, Hojo, Qin, Seondok, Trajan based on my own experiences and others' results.

I'm going to wrap up my current Ottoman domination game (needed to release some stress) before the new civs drop on Thursday and then I'll be going in on them. But after, I'd like to continue to refine my science game with one of the top civs.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

@yung.carl.jung Who do you consider the top science Civs for fast Deity games in the current version of the game? My general thoughts are Pericles, Hojo, Qin, Seondok, Trajan based on my own experiences and others' results.

exactly those 5. I play a lot of Japan, Rome and Greece because they have some of the best designs imo, not just because they are strong. Korea I really dislike the design, but she is undoubtedly very strong for SV. Maybe China is one I would rate slightly lower than those other 4 (less consistent, less early bonuses) but they're clearly a contender. I have only finished one or two games with them, I will actually play my next game as China I think

Russia, Germany, Nubia and Aztec are really good, but not particularly for science, just for all VC.

 

[The Highwayman]

I agree, those 3 designs are fun and powerful. China's ceiling may be just as high, as the early - late/middle game techs and civics can get 1 turn shaved off consistently. The great wall can supplement a lot of culture too, so once the majority of the cities have reached their pop cap of usually 10, they can work the walls for culture and gold if quality production tiles are not present.

I think the Aztecs' Legend of the Five Suns is particularly powerful. More governor flexibility since there's no need for spaceport buying. Mediocre cities can also get their districts online faster if they're not being "Mangused" into existence.
Australia can boom if you can go on a liberating spree and get a lot of breathtaking appeal. That's pretty map dependent though. I suppose the dream is to liberate every 20 turns or so but that's probably not going to happen often. Production can be a bottleneck over science and this could alleviate that.

 

[KKirrin]

appreciate the governor write up, i still get lost in the weeds there late game, never make enough use of liang in particular which is silly because it takes so little effort, at least for that first promo. i do like the early amani gov for sov and use that a lot for CS like nan madol but hadn't thought of her spamming her every 5 for era, that's awesome.

where would you guys rank kupe on that list? most of my sub 180 science wins are with him but i almost always feel like they'd have been faster on another civ if everything went as well. seems like he's a good choice for a consistently fast science win regardless of the map but not necessarily the fastest if you get a good load out. a game with peri/nan madol/anta and multiple science CS seems like the dream, and i find it really hard to imagine anyone else is keeping up with peri's cultural snowball there.

anyway, here's another good one, this was my fastest deity culture win to date, T164/Pericles/Lakes/Standard 1 fewer ai. trying to speed that up by adding a bit of early religion for monu/etc...to not great results. still on the fence as to whether ancestral hall is helping as well, or if it's just delaying me too much in the early expansion phase. peaceful win but 2 cities were flipped from gilgamesh for a total of 16. i basically tried to keep science decent so that i could tech to flight>computers but the game ended before computers. got pretty lucky with rock band RNG, 7k activation pushed me over for the win. also helped that tamar was wrecking teddy all game and kept his culture way down

Spoiler PeriT100 :

Spoiler T164Win :

 

[The Highwayman]

@KKirrin Nice game there.

You have many sub T180 science? You may want to take my advice with a grain of salt then since my best standard settings science win is T201. I'm getting better though

Kupe is so strong with production along with culture and faith. No need to invest that much production with builders. You can almost strictly faith buy them for improvement to luxuries and fishing boats. Really strong on certain maps with lots of coast. Basically guaranteed golden age in classical. With earth goddess, which is awesome with him, classical expansion is a breeze. The only hindrance I see would be campus adjacency, since bonus resources can block a lot spots and the inability to chop stone, deer, wheat, and rice to insta build or grow a city to 10.

 

[KKirrin]

a bunch on emperor but only a handful on deity (2 kupe 1 peri), none lower than 175. seems like every time i'm about to break that threshold i get shafted on the tech order. def worth mentioning though that i play suuuper greedy, often barely building any military at all and just hoping/assuming i can win over/bankrupt nearby AI. like if you look at that culture win I didn't even build walls (tourism mistake too, still learning culture) and that archer in corinth was the entirety of my military on T164.

leads to some fast games but it's not uncommon for me to bail on a game on T100 or so when a surprise declaration means i have to totally shift gears and costs me turns. i do enjoy the element of risk it adds though, keeps things interesting. I play a lot of games until poli phil too and will just reroll if I don't think the game has potential or if peter is next door, etc, so the low turn victories are probably overstating how well im actually doing in the scheme of things. they're fun, though, and at this point if I know I'm going to win but it won't be particularly fast it feels more tedious than enjoyable to slog it out.

yeah i do love kupe and i feel the same way about the campuses, that kinda stuff can feel messy. He's especially enjoyable when you've got walls up and the barb raid hits but they can't find anything to pillage because your districts haven't finished and all your improvements are fishing boats, so they just kinda flail around. its interesting to hear hoji as being up there with him, i might need to spend some more time working on adjacency (though the above game had nan madol). i never seem to get that much out of him compared to peri.

 

[The Highwayman]

Hojo is worth the time investment on district planning and adjacency. Very versatile too if you want to do religious science or not. Hojo is more like a "let me take what's good about a bunch of other civs and do it all" kind of leader. A very fundamentally sound leader.

Double production towards the following:
Theater Square is just awesome, along with Greece-like adjacency. No hill requirement either. Culture is obviously critical in space games. Peri's is better with the free envoy, but this is a very comparable version of the TS.
Holy Sites lower the opportunity cost for religious science. Poland like adjacency. Not 100% necessary but viable.
A couple of encampments in space port cities are good for production as well as a few eurekas tied to them. If I need to build a few, may as well be in half the time, no?

I think practically speaking, his IZs are as good as Germany's since you don't need the specific comm hub placement or keep bonus resources around. The unique factory sucks, but if you build 3-4 of them you might get 12-16 more culture and +2 regional production. However in my last game, Electricity wasn't even a requirement for future techs, so in that scenario I would skip it completely. Womp. If the culture was regional, it would be quite strong in helping finish out the culture tree.

His campus adjacency is incredible, but can take time to ramp up in some cities.

Of course stronger gold income from Harbors and comm hubs and easier to get the splendid era score is nice.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

a bunch on emperor but only a handful on deity (2 kupe 1 peri), none lower than 175. seems like every time i'm about to break that threshold i get shafted on the tech order. def worth mentioning though that i play suuuper greedy, often barely building any military at all and just hoping/assuming i can win over/bankrupt nearby AI. like if you look at that culture win I didn't even build walls (tourism mistake too, still learning culture) and that archer in corinth was the entirety of my military on T164.

if you're not building units do you just skip most of the Eurekahs/Inspos for them or boost them via GS? I've found that some of my fastest games are the ones where I conquer 1 or 2 neighbors and get pretty much all the relevant Eurekahs/Inspos. In that t184 Rome game I don't think I missed a single military-related Eurekah/Inspo and it sped me up a lot. Pillaging also helps.

otoh I am spending so much of my precious early game time building units and I pretty much always miss the early Great People by a long shot, which sucks. I also have trouble racking up GS points because of that and sometimes need to delay research because I can't get the Eurekah for GS or Inspo for GA.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

anyway, here's another good one, this was my fastest deity culture win to date, T164/Pericles/Lakes/Standard 1 fewer ai. trying to speed that up by adding a bit of early religion for monu/etc...

Impressive... 265 Culture Per Turn at Turn 100.
Makes me want to play some Pericles!

 

[yung.carl.jung]

that's some insane culture for t100. how many cities did you have an acropolis in? I dislike sacrificing a hill, but the district is incredibly strong. you probably got democracy at around t115 right? my personal best is around 130 I think..

 

[KKirrin]

if you're not building units do you just skip most of the Eurekahs/Inspos for them or boost them via GS? I've found that some of my fastest games are the ones where I conquer 1 or 2 neighbors and get pretty much all the relevant Eurekahs/Inspos. In that t184 Rome game I don't think I missed a single military-related Eurekah/Inspo and it sped me up a lot. Pillaging also helps

definitely holding the GS until the last possible moment. as for the eurekas etc there are a couple i never miss (anything on the way to poli phil/kilwa for example) but i do use gold to fill out as many as possible. peri isn't quite as good as kupe for gold but i usually have more than enough to pad my early game to buy the early units then I'll save some gold for 10 turns or so, wait for an inspiration then slot the upgrade card and grab everything i need. if something's a pain i'll just skip it. i probably need to balance them better but i just cant be bothered, rather just rack up as much spt/cpt as possible.

as for the war bit i much prefer peaceful games so i almost always stick with that. i do think that the ideal, perfect world game for the fastest possible science victory involves stealing settlers/running over a couple of neighbors who build campuses early (this is one of the only ways i seem to get the +2 to libraries GS), but it's pretty rare that i can eliminate more than one civ in a reasonable amount of time, and the diplo penalties/warmonger penalties really hurt your flexibility. in general id say something like getting under 200 consistently is much easier peaceful on a decent map but getting under 175 via going super wide by early war seems more practical. buuut i haven't gone that low, so I'm just speculating.

Impressive... 265 Culture Per Turn at Turn 100.
Makes me want to play some Pericles!

yeah he's insane, that's not even close to his ceiling either. i think something like 750 cpt by t100 would be possible on the right map. there's just so much synergy between early culture sovs > more culture > more gpt > more sovs > ...

Spoiler 550 CPT :

that's some insane culture for t100. how many cities did you have an acropolis in? I dislike sacrificing a hill, but the district is incredibly strong. you probably got democracy at around t115 right? my personal best is around 130 I think..

these two high CPT ones are both culture games so i skipped democracy entirely but i think I had professional sports unlocked by like t108? so democracy would probably come online around then, possibly earlier with eurekas. every single city that can fit an acropolis has one, but i think i mistakenly dropped ~3 of them where I couldn't place them (megara and rhodes at least). maybe 13 acro at this point? It's an annoying restriction for sure, but the free envoy is just absurdly good, and even late game the cheap district means you can easily chop an acro > ampi

 

[The Highwayman]

@KKirrin that is a sexy T100 screenshot researching cultural heritage. When did you win that game?

On a side note, is anyone here going to try Gran Columbia science? The extra movement seems very useful for all victory types since it applies to civilians. Better early scouting, faster improvements, settling, you name it. The unique improvement is a little late, but once online your production and gold should go up massively. I'm not saying they'd be a top 5 science, but I think potential is there to not be a one trick pony as some suggest.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

that much culture should be illegal. holy...

 

[KKirrin]

@KKirrin that is a sexy T100 screenshot researching cultural heritage. When did you win that game?

ended up bailing because i thought archs were taking too long to come online. replayed the same map with a focus on early faith with earth goddess and an early religion (procced a relic so I took reliquaries for the early tourism) and brought the win all the way down to T127. basically went writers > printing for the tech tree and poli phil > TD > humanism > cultural heritage > rock bands > pro sports > social media for a couple turns before the game ended. wonders were coli around T75 and kilwa around T85, both chopped. 16 cities in all with a useless 17th flipping to me at the end.

super artificial win at this point but it's pretty cool to see everything come together that fast. only lost one early writer to the ottomans and he let me buy it out from him a couple turns later. This was the first time i skipped religious settlements as pericles in a non OCC game (aside from playing mali desert or something like that) and I only had 2 cities at T50, but both had solid production and the combo of ancestral hall + colonization + magnus chopping with super early feudalism was hilariously strong. Still not sure if I'd been better off just ramping more settlers out of more cities but it was definitely a fun change of pace. culture progress actually looks slower in this game but ive already finished off cultural heritage and am heading for rock bands which iirc came online around t110. and the total in the final didn't include social media

Spoiler PeriT100 :

Spoiler PeriT127 :

gran columbia definitely looks fun, movement buffs just make for such enjoyable games

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I never seem to get that much space with my settings of Deity, Pangaea, Low Sea, All Standard.
Usually I am focusing in on some war which I find fun anyways.

I tried 5 games with Pericles up to turn 100 and they were pretty much all the same.
Never got many First CS meets or Culture CS's close by.
Game consisted of mostly building Army and War.
One game had a massive Barb invasion lol... kinda fun but annoying having to kill so many Barbs.

800+ culture at turn 100 is a pipe dream for my games.
Nicely done though!

Before that I played a game with India and was having fun with war again.
Below is the turn 100 pictures.
When you take a city do Wonders sometimes get Razed?
I thought that Gyeongju was going to have 3 wonders but the one on the East Plains Hill disappeared when captured.
Perhaps the AI was only close to finishing it out.

For some reason I forgot to save the turn 1 game file on this one.
Next time.

Spoiler India Turn 100 Pictures :

 

[The Highwayman]

@KKirrin I've never come close to that at turn 100. Looks like I need to step up my game!

 

[Victoria]

I used to go 10/100 but now 7/70 feels a lot better. It is about feudalism and chopping which should be close to done by T100.
Merchant republic by T100 is another good measure if you go that route.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I used to go 10/100 but now 7/70 feels a lot better. It is about feudalism and chopping which should be close to done by T100.
Merchant republic by T100 is another good measure if you go that route.

Are you saying that you should focus on chopping everything out by turn 100 with 7 cities up and running?
After that expand through war and or settlers?
Are you moving Magnus around for those 30 turns of chopping?
I still find it darn tedious to move him around and get builders in place.
Lately, I've been trying to focus on Levying CS Units and Warmongering.
I find it satisfying for some reason
It feels good to have units from CS's that I don't even have the tech for.
If I don't focus and I miss Golden Ages I get kinda depressed.