Accidental Dom win 1350; I'd just cap'd the last free AI, Cath, intending to get Conquest. I started out by taking Hattie's three very nice mainland cities, finishing off her last island city after taking peace. Mostly used cats and axes/swords and a few maces for that. After marching everything back down south I went after Germany with mostly trebs and musketeers and cap'd him with about half his cities. Rome had been boxed in by Germany and only had 2 mainland cities; he cap'd after I took those two with trebs upgrade to cannon. I belatedly tech'd Astro to get galleons--I'd delayed because of the Colossus benefits--and then took all of Russia except for inland St Pete, again using mostly cannon and muskets but with a few CR3 maces upgraded to grens. I never got to Nat'lism/Taj but ran 3 Golden Ages and had a couple leftover GPs at the end. Moai were very late as I didn't have any stone until getting Germany's. Nice land made this an easier than average Emperor, I think, and I got lucky with the Wonders and Buddhist shrine that Hattie thoughtfully built. Thanks for the game, DS!
@ Xcalibrator: I'm amazed how far you were able to tech. In my game, I never had any real economy at all. Beginning was furocious as written in the 1 AD thread, after that I conquered Bismarck completely with the rest of my 22 HAs, who did awesomly, I think I only lost another 7.
Then I needed to take Rome for Domination and for that I needed War Elephants, so I took all of my I had gotten through Bismarcks cities and researched it. I also got a GE with which I bulbed Engineering which I traded against Feudalism with Hatty, whom I peace-vassaled after that. Produced something like 20 War Elephants and 15 Catapults and the most built unit in the game was actually the Scout, because I used "too much OF" tactics to fill my deficit of almost 100 GPT, so I produced a Scout 'til 1T before end, then set the city to wealth, chopped all Forests around that city stored by Wealth and when done, I released the Scout and whipped it on top for something like 200-300 for a heavy forested city.
In the end I could only say, that I was very lucky to get domination with annihilating Julius, who had 4 cities in my game Praets, Longbows, Maces and the like, but my numbers were simply too strong. If I would have needed to conquer something from Cathy afterwards too, that would have costed me a lot of turns and I also basically had no further way to fill my deficit because all trees were converted to , so troop-production would have become impossible, because all cities would have needed to build Wealth, and not sure that that would have been enough.
But anyhow: pre-1000-AD domination!!!111
And now I want to hear the reports from other players. I see nocho competed again, but my friend lime did too, how were things m8tes .
Only ever built HAs..except for a couple of MPs for cities. HAs were more than enough for this game.
I'll write more later as I'm just peeking in at the moment, but one of the main issues with my date is a damn Roman settler in Rome. After taking the city adjacent to Rome, my HAs were pretty beat up, so I took a ceasefire. (He had a spear in Rome as well so counter attack would not be good and I had 1 Axe moving to that city) Anyway, I took Rome in a couple of turns. JC had a city up N in that jungle that I was not concern about at all at the moment, but point is that JC is not dead...just that one city.
HOwever, that one settler in Rome turned out to take a long trip far West of Cathy and settled some gem island at the very last island. I remember thinking at some point after taking Rome..damn, how does JC have 2 cities. And I could not even see it for a long time.
Anyway, that was a logistic nightmare. Plus, Cathy had settled 2 cities up on that ice island before even settling some good spots are her own continent. Damn Roman settler cost me many many turns.
I expect with luck and good play, early AD conquest is feasible. It's just logistics that's main issue and making sure AIs don't settle those damn islands. Otherwise, AIs were backwards as heck this game and didn't even smell Feud. Biggest concern were Praets, ofc, but I only had to kill 2 of them and got a lucky shot on one of them. (ok ..i just wrote more than I planned, but i'll be back)
@ Lime: Big GZ . Good that I went for domination ^^ .
I think an early AD win would require lots of luck though. Imo., you already were very lucky, that you were able to do completely with HAs, in my game, AIs reached Engineering without problems, Longbows existed at around 1AD already. When I conquered Julius, one city had 5 Longbows and a freaking Castle + 2 Praets, you know yourself, how many HAs I would have needed against that one ^^ . When I conquered it, it had 2 settled GSs + an Academy + TGL for another 2, so that's where he got that much research, but Hatty with a Shrine also had no problems to reach Engineering.
Ah, I forgot:
Thx @ DynamicSpirit for fooling me into again settling wrong and giving me a great map without happiness and commerce .
I had a slowish conquest, 1430 or so. Stole a bunch of workers from Hatty with chariots, but when I wanted to kill her, failed miserably with those chariots. Depressed by that and commerce- and happy-starved to boot, crawled to the ADs and out of sheer inertia turtled from there to cuirs and then wrapped it up capping everybody, staying away from domination by gifting back some cities. Either way I got beat by only 5 centuries or so.
I'm baffled that AIs were teching that well in your game, unless you started your wars later. Maybe it was that I eliminated Hatty and Biz so early. Your AIs may have done more trading and stuff among themselves. Granted for Emp, those dates are about on par that you mentioned. JCs land was fairly bad though, and I don't know what Cathy was doing. Hatty and Biz never got comfortable with me around....feeding me workers and all.
If I'd done things a bit different I think 400-500AD would have been feasible. I lost A LOT of turns...I'm not exaggerating.
Another thing I could have prepped a bit better for Cathy attack instead of leaving galley production for the Roman cities. Plus, the one German coastal city faced toward the ice to the south...although I did end up building some galleys there and channeling them through a fort. Solution would have been to build a settler in advance to plop a coastal city over there somewhere. I have a flaw of tending to focus on one thing at a time: Kill him --> kill her---> Kill him--->eat Cocoa Puffs--->Kill her-->etc.
But ..man..that stupid Roman settler..ha. I mean it is like about 15 turns just to get way over there (Rome to BFE), not to mention having all the units in place.
@ Lime: I started war at about 500 BC with something like 13-15 HAs, after I had oracled Currency and bulbed Maths. I would have been faster, if I had settled less cities and not bulbed Maths, but I hesitated to chop those precious trees without the bonus when I already had a superearly GS (like 1200BC) and also thought about directly going for Construction, because of the tough luck that I normally got with HAs.
Anyhow, it may have been, that Feudalism simply got traded around, because I traded it from friendly Hatty, and with 2 of 4 civs having it (Bismarck dead) , it probably was on the open market. Still, if an AI reaches Engineering, and both, Hatty and Julius did without any problems, Hatty even researched it in only a handful of turns, Hatty needed 3T for Music and Paper with having 5 cities and a 40% shrine and Julius with Gold and his 4 settled GSs had gone all Cottages. I was by far the least developed civ on the map, with sometimes having 50 GNP against AI with over 200.
I had a pretty mediocre Space Victory at 1890 AD. As noted before, I somehow deleted my notes and had to look through the past few saves to figure out what happened.
Really terrible luck with great people. I got a great spy and a great artist at low odds, because my NE city had the Great Wall. When I wanted the 3 GP golden age, I got a great engineer instead, which I did not want to use. For a lot of the game I had multiple GE's, and one of them I was saving for Mining.
Not a single shrine was created, until pretty late in the game when I popped a random Great Prophet and built the shrine in my Wall Street city. I already had both corporations at this point, and I figured the +44 GPT was a little bit better than waiting for a golden age.
The mid game was kind of a complete mess. Missing the GS for Education hurt a lot, and by the time AI's started getting education, the best tech with lib was Constitution. This did help research a bit, by allowing me to switch to Representation, as the pyramids were in Russia. After that I self teched Democracy to build the Statue of Liberty because of the extra GE that I wanted to use as soon as possible. This was probably a mistake, as AI's tend to tech Democracy on their own anyways.
It took me a while to conquer my continent. I kept Bismarck and Caesar alive as long as possible, as some trade partners are better than no trade partners. They were pretty miserable techers though, and my own tech wasn't doing that well for most of the game. I had most of my cities building wealth for a very large part of the game, and Caesar was conquered in the mid 1600's with mostly the HA's that I had built up in the early/mid game that I took Hatty and Bismarck out with.
Then I learned that the continent and 1 island was enough to go over the domination limit, and there was a very interesting time where I was wondering if Catherine would be able to settle her city fast enough so I could give her the last island city. I was already over the land limit, 0.5% percent below the population, and already founded Sushi and was still spreading it as much as possible when she finally settled. And then my game crashed right after I gave her the city! Pretty stressful part of the game.
My late game was very sloppy, and this game inspired me to practice the Space timings better. I usually start a new game when I feel I have an overwhelming lead, which tends to be well before the last leg of the Space race so my knowledge of this portion of the game is pretty lacking (unfortunately Deity completely kicks my butt to the point of not being fun, so I can't easily just move up a level).
1480 AD Oxford with very late Education, and Sushi was founded around 1600 AD with mining in mid 1700s. And then my economy finally stopped being terrible and techs were coming once every 2 or 3 turns (relatively speaking), and later 1 to 2 turns. In retrospect, I needed to just straight up gift most of my techs in order to try to get at least one or 2 more free techs from the AI, and clean up my tech path in general. This is the first time I tried going Democracy > Communism > Medicine, and getting an early Statue of Liberty did not feel like it was worth it. My late game tech choices and builds could also have been done in a better order, as I was waiting on the Engine to finish after Life Support finished. I foolishly waited for my second engine to finish misunderstanding how many turns it reduces from victory (it only reduces the arrival date from 12 turns to 10 turns, so waiting 5 turns to finish isn't worth it).
If anyone else tried going for Space, I'd probably lose by a lot. Looks like a lot of others were having economy problems early on as well though.
One interesting thing about having so many great spies is that in 2 of them turned into quite a lot of free techs. The first one, backfilled all of JC's technology, including Feudalism, Guilds, Banking. The second one I used more or less got all of the AI's techs for the rest of the game. They all took longer than 5 turns to tech anything, giving plenty of time for the spies to sit in their cities. Some time in the middle, Catherine liberated one of her cities, and the Espionage points duplicated to her new vassal which I didn't know about until this game.
Corporation space victories have a very convenient property in that they give you a lot of courthouses for espionage purposes. For me, this was one of those rare games where I never had any issues with emancipation unhappiness, because of the sheer amount of espionage I had to put them back into slavery whenever they switched.
I also didn't realize until now how effective Spy specialists can be because of this. With representation, you get 4 beakers and 4 espionage points, which is not that much worse than a science specialist's 6 beakers (it might even be a little bit better), especially if it allows you to stay in slavery.
I was also able to easily get Catherine back into Free Market whenever she decided to go back into Mercantilism.
Actually on that map, any win that demands teching is imo. a gg. The others are good aswell, if they're pre-1000 AD. It's basically only nocho that played a bad game .
Fascinating how differently the games turned out, given we have the exact same start. In my game Bismarck got blocked off by JC; JC stole the elephant spot, but didn't go further north after that. I didn't workersteal from Bismarck either, so that didn't explain him being slow out of the gate.
Partly due to border pressure with Bismarck due to JC's aggressive settling, JC declared on him not long after. But the German held out with heaps of archers, even against Praets. Until an eastern visitor came for a chat. At that point, in early ADs, Julius had longbows, catas, prats and not long after maces. He teched like a beast, and got even worse when later on powered by the Great Lighthouse (which is indeed great!).
I didn't play a great game either, but also went for space. The situation at 1AD was really poor, especially compared with Jastrow and BiC, so if they go for space they'll easily beat me.
Economy was dire at 1AD, barely making 100 beakers at full pelt, but completing the Colossus helped a deal, and getting the Mids from Bismarck helped too. I managed to kick Bismarck before another round of Praets stopped by, and this time accompanied with catas. He only had 3 cities, plus a 4th further north later (actually a fifth too, but I razed it).
With a HA army well into the ADs, I was in no position to assault Julius' giant army and wicked tech pace. JC was a little unfortunate though. He had been plotting on Cathy for aaaaages, and when he finally declared, she built the AP and stopped the war in the first turn.
AI tech choices weren't great for me, and it was impossible to get any trades going. When I finally got Julius to Friendly so we could trade, I declared on him in the same turn. What are friends for, eh?
Libbed Communism and switched to SP. Didn't want another micromanagement hell of corporations, and SP is decent too. Meanwhile I teched Steel and upgraded some trebs to cannons. Actually gave Julius gunpowder the same turn I declared on him, because... CANNONS! Easily pummelled him with those, and it was nice to have the HE so close, in Berlin. At some point more cannons/troops weren't needed, so Berlin started on the Ironworks instead.
Was first to Music and kept the GArtist for a long while, until MoM had been built. Forget exactly when I started that first Golden Age, but I then basically ran Golden Ages until most teching was done. Really, really hoped for a 5-person GA too, but was unlucky with GPs many, many times in a row, so it couldn't be done. Unfortunately that meant I built all space parts without a GA, which postponed things a lot. I took the chance and launched the 4GP GA a bit early, because I figured it was better to keep teching up to space techs a bit faster in a GA, and genuinely hoped to get a 5GP one. Towards the end of the game I settled a host of great people, and burnt others on late era techs. I needed a GSpy or GProphet, but none would come
As usual, not great timing on the last techs and space parts. I always seem to get in trouble with the stasis chamber, 2nd engine, or both. Not enough forests at the end, so had to wait 4 turns after all (main) techs were done. If it was only the engine I would have launched with one, but I needed stasis too.
I had several "almost domination" scares btw. But thankfully I found a solution that didn't involve keeping JC alive and handing back cities. Rome was huuuge when I captured it, so didn't want to hand it back, nor to deal with ancient Roman culture and citizens. So killed him on that little island, and created a colony on the island NW of Hatty. Later on I had to create another colony to the NE of Hatty. Managed to gift away the Stone city to one of the colonies, but that was all. I hoped it was possible to gift away more cities, but it wasn't. Ended with 66.43% (of 68%). Phew!
Not a fantastic game by any means, but we got to Alpha Centauri in 1770AD.
Some pictures.
Spoiler:
1-turned HE in 600AD
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1-turned Oxford in 1020AD
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Nastily underdeveloped plains cottages, but I postponed building them for ever so long.
Libbed Communism in 1270AD, and changed civics in a GA soon after.
Spoiler:
3-turned Apollo in the mid-to-late 1500s
Spoiler:
The chumps left behind celebrate in 1770AD.
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...and this is their capital (with some leftover settled great people)
Spoiler:
At some point I made a hilarious mistake. Was met with a "You have built a Palace in..." screen and didn't understand jack Lost a heap of beakers to that, but could thankfully rebuild the Palace in Paris in only two turns, so it could have been worse. Bonkers stuff though. A first for everything
Only had a day to play so I pushed my luck for a quick AP win. After meeting 3 of the 4 AIs very early I was hoping they would all be on the starting landmass (or at least reachable by galley) and I could score a quick AP victory. Alas, Cathy was hiding offshore which meant my plans were doomed.
Settled 1NE and researched AH, Mining, BW, Hunting, Writing and then Oracle techs. My initial Warrior walked up to Bismark's borders hoping to steal a Worker, but got bounced back by a Holy City border pop and continued on his way. Got Stonehenge for the GP and also managed to snag Oracle at 1280BC (CoL). Meanwhile I spread out to a few cities and started sending Confucian missionaries out, but soon lost hope that all four AIs were around. By now, I had stalled my economy and from this point it would take forever to reach Optics.
I bulbed Theology, but had to research Masonry and Monotheism myself first as no one would trade those techs. AP was easy to build though I botched it and built it in the Hinduism through sheer carelessness. Not that it mattered much with Cathy still hidden. JC looked to be threathening and probably could have caused some headaches, but he never actually attacked.
Just about the time I was about to creep to Optics, Cathy made contact. I actually never saw one of her units but a Scout something must have spotted my borders. In retrospect she was high there all along, but because JC had closed borders I never saw it was possible to reach her. She was already angry that I traded with her worst enemies but also had the AP religion already, so at least I did not have to sail over a missionary. After a botched election due to poor spy handling (many spies were caught during the game and I did not have enough economy to produce ESP until late in the game) I converted my friends to Confucianism, called the vote as the only candidate, and switched back to Hinduism to double my count and ensure the win.
I had a really embarrassing moment of realization as well in this game. I found out maybe in the 1600's that my NE city didn't have the State Religion despite running pacifism for most of the game after conquering all the land. Definitely not my greatest game.
Noticed, that you probably keep too many Forests 'til too late, and I believe that you have problems with whipstacking, because your 1T-Oxford i. e. is mostly Trees and I see no whip-chain at all. Building Space-parts can also be greatly fastened up by whip-chains. They need to be planned a little, but with having a calculator and understanding the concept, they're manageable well.
I btw. just had an embarrassing realization. Noticed that Liberalism -> Communism is actually possible . Always thought "not possible, Communism needs Liberalism, and I don't have that" not realizing, that it'd be Liberalism getting me that tech .
Haha, that is great Not sure if I've libbed Communism before, but as you could see, it very much works
I didn't feel there was a need to whip the capital or HE city when I could just chop out HE and Oxford. I needed to free those tiles anyway, so it wasn't really an option to keep those forests all the way to the end. Besides, since libbing Communism, I stayed in caste all the time, so couldn't even whip. Of course I could have changed that here and there during GAs, but those boosted workshops and infinite specialists are very nice.
The National park city wasn't very good, though, so even with 7 chopped forests there were not enough base hammers to get anything decent done in good time. So the end game wasn't great, with those space parts, and of course missing the 5-GP golden age.
But overall I'm somewhat pleased with the recovery from 1AD. Certainly not my best game, especially the start, but it was fun and that's the main thing.
I think you misunderstood me, I wrote that you don't chop enough! All Forests should be gone as early as possible after Maths. Improving tiles is more important, except they're bad tiles, but when I build Oxford i. e. , I rarely have more than 2-3 Forests left and that's with extreme Forest-saving in the capital. In SGOTM18, we didn't have a single Forest in the capital, still, we built Oxford in 1T with whipstacking. And whipstacking is also what you should use lategame when building the SS-parts, saving Forests 'til that time would be ridiculous, except those of the NP-city, but not every game has a good one, especially not the GOTMs ^^ .
Yes, then I get you. I did chop forests in another city that I hoped could 1-turn the last space part, but it could not due to crappy base hammers. It was the ice city with two silvers, so only forests on tundra. Most other forests left over, maybe all, were in 3rd ring or worse.
For space parts, I could, and probably should, have revolted (GA) to slavery and whip stacked. But being in SP with heavily workshopped tiles, this hurts a lot more than with corporations. And, since I didn't get a 5GP GA, I may not have been able to change back to caste.
Certainly something to consider for future games though. I was a bit sloppy at the end here, and knew it wouldn't be a great game anyway. Just wanted to get across the finish line to be honest. Wouldn't matter too much if I had managed to squeeze out 1750AD over 1770AD. If some of the people who were in a great position in 1AD went for space, they'd get there well before 1700AD anyway.
Suppose GOTM games don't count for the HoF tables, but if it had, this would actually be #1 -- as brief as that lasts, heh
I had a flavorful game...meaning I used the IND trait and the Musketeers a lot.
I expect to get 2nd place...twice. (but I'm hoping for two first places )
I kinda went for score, but hurt my score because I wanted to go for space race.
Similarly, I hurt my space race date by spending time/resources on settlers and sushi, so I probably ended up winning neither.
1730 AD space, 359,100 score.
In my game Hatty was pinned in with 3 cities. I gave her a useless far-away city for a 4th. However, she teched nicely. guilds, banking, Astro, and even got free Rifling and something else late. Maybe Corporation. I probably could have had free Physics, but didn't want to wait.
As expected it didn't take too long for somebody to beat my space date, though I can at least take some comfort in that WastinTime didn't utterly crush it. Congrats with a good game
Got so little tech trading done in my game, that I'm a little envious reading about the good tech trade partners of you guys. Eventually I gave up trying to get Philosophy from JC, and did it myself. Same with other techs. But at least I got Guilds and Nationalism in exchange for Education and Gunpowder from JC the turn I declared on him. That may actually be the last useful techs I managed to get in trade, albeit the small colonies I had to create did eventually get me useless stuff like MilSci and MilTrad very late.
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I had gotten through Bismarcks cities and researched it. I also got a GE with which I bulbed Engineering which I traded against Feudalism with Hatty, whom I peace-vassaled after that. Produced something like 20 War Elephants and 15 Catapults and the most built unit in the game was actually the Scout, because I used "too much OF" tactics to fill my deficit of almost 100 GPT, so I produced a Scout 'til 1T before end, then set the city to wealth, chopped all Forests around that city stored by Wealth and when done, I released the Scout and whipped it on top for something like 200-300 
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. Good that I went for domination ^^ .
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citizens. So killed him on that little island, and created a colony on the island NW of Hatty. Later on I had to create another colony to the NE of Hatty. Managed to gift away the Stone city to one of the colonies, but that was all. I hoped it was possible to gift away more cities, but it wasn't. Ended with 66.43% (of 68%). Phew!
. Always thought "not possible, Communism needs Liberalism, and I don't have that" not realizing, that it'd be Liberalism getting me that tech 
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