I play Noble usually, and on the xOTMs choose Adventurer and have never finished, in fact rarely got as far as 0AD, so am proud to announce that after starting yesterday noonish I got to 980 AD by the end of the evening, strenuously resisting my urges to bow out by reloading before my most recent mistake.
Let's hope I can keep going today and actually finish.
That was the good news; the bad was that I'm still a weak player who makes far too many mistakes -- but at least in this game I'm living with them instead of giving up. So far.
The two differences Adventurer made in this game are the tiny tweak of having the worker move 1S to reveal no new seafood past the hill, before settling in to dig mines and camp out on the ivory. I teched Fishing first partly to work the clams and partly to get a workboat to explore with -- pre-game comments suggested the Big And Small setup often leaves the world entirely connected by galley.
I explored west a bit with the scout before heading east to find Churchill. When blocked in that direction I headed back north and west, losing the scout to a lion on its way back east. Now, I
know I'm supposed to watch for early chances to go to war, but psychologically it is really hard for me to start a fight, so I basically ignored Churchill except to expand east after my first new city (NW on the coast, getting fish and eventually horses).
Next techs were AH for the pigs and to find horses. After that I was fairly disorganized -- BW and Wheel, later aiming for CoL via the Currency route but switched to religion route once Buddhism spread (see below). Kept coming back to Currency then switching to something else as I realized I needed it, e.g. Archery once barbarians started showing up seriously.
I built a galley and a new scout and sent it west, fairly quickly finding Justinian who spread Buddhism to my continent (to an inland city first -- how wierd is that?) I avoided adopting a religion until Justinian demanded it after buddhism spread to Churchill and I'd managed to spread it to Stalin; I failed to spread any further because I took too long to build missionaries and got blocked at one point by the Khmer refusing to open borders for my galley. With 4 of us having Buddhism, one being the apparently gigantic Russian Empire, perhaps I should have built AP by now but I never thought of it until seeing it mentioned in this thread.
I missed out on both Great Wall and Great Lighthouse, but managed Oracle to slingshot CS; all that production in Aksum is great! The capital also has the Colossus, but other wonders are elsewhere because I kept using Aksum to produce units. I built Parthenon, Heroic Epic and Great Library in other cities, HE in my second production city in case I wanted to make more soldiers. I just recently built the Schwedagon Paya and switched to Pacifism for faster growth, though took an economic hit because of the military I'd built by then.
Speaking of soldiers: I built some axemen to attack the English, but found barbarians to the SE on Stalin's territory and decided to give them some experience there first. There was some unclaimed territory to the north with happiness assets; I built a city there and piled up axemen on hills to its south -- only to find what more experienced players would have known from the start: the axemen have 30% or less chance against fortified archers on a hill. So I teched Construction and built 5 suicide catapults, only two of which actually died. There's room for 1 more city to the west, which might give me a useful 3-city colony eventually (after Feudalism), but I don't really understand colonies yet. The English are expanding along my NE border but I don't think they're taking any particularly useful territory.
I was first to CoL and Phil so got 2 more religions, so it seems to me that, especially with my builder mindblock, I ought to go for cultural victory. That means I need to make sure to have the right number of cities for the temples to enable the cathedral/mandir/etc -- 3 each, 9 total? So I don't want a colony just yet, having only 6 cities on the original continent -- or maybe I need to check out how well fortified Churchill is.
Exploring east with a workboat and west with a galley found all the opponents and gave me circumnavigation, getting the +1 naval movement, which helped when I was doing the overseas invasion of the barbarian city.
I need at least one more city, three if I'm going to hive off that colony; there's room for one in the far NW in an area currently generating barbarian swordsmen, one on an island to the West if Justinian hasn't spread that far, and maybe a cultural takeover of an English city on the small island to my S and Stalin's NW. Not sure where the next city will come from, so I either do without a colony or seriously regret not taking out Churchill long ago. Not sure how feasible it is at the moment. I have axes and catapults and can build swordsmen; I have one spy I'll use at least to scout and maybe to sabotage, but I don't want to use him until I'm ready to handle the relationship hit if he's caught.
Overall:
I didn't expand fast enough; I should have taken the far NW position and the marginal NE positions before barbarians and Churchill, respectively, got to them. When I thought of spreading Buddhism I didn't work at it consistently enough -- just got Stalin, which did help a lot since he's big and nearby, but missed all the others. I cottaged some but likely not enough.
I'm reasonably happy about where I am in this game -- top of the graph, but not hugely ahead of Stalin and Justinian -- given my perpetual newbieness. I still need to learn about (a) espionage (b) colonies (c) warmongering, probably the last first. Some people pick a strategy early and seem to stick with it; I have trouble making up my mind and so flounder a lot.
Other comments:
Somebody said Aksum was a good candidate for Moai Statues but I don't understand why -- I reached my happy cap quite a while back and was working only the one obvious location, with the crabs; only recently with the happiness resources on Stalin's continent have I been able to expand to two more sea tiles -- but there is still the health cap, currently 14>12, with a forge. So, at 5 sea tiles worked, are the Statues worth doing?
I like having the random events in the BOTM, despite that in this game most hurt me and only 1 helped (though I wasn't watching what happened to the AI, so maybe more helped, indirectly). The GOTM and WOTM don't have this feature; ISTM people who hate it should get a no-random-events BOTM once in a while, but I'd like them to be turned on for most games.
