So, my result...
Game status: Spaceship Victory for Byzantium
Game date: 1856AD
Turns played: 198
Base score: 6069
Final score: 62937
The first spoiler saw me with 8 cities and a crashing economy. It turned out that by building cottages and prioritizing code of laws and currency without founding any more cities, I was able to recover quite quickly. I then expanded to about 15 cities before realizing, slightly belatedly, that Tokugawa occupied the silver/deer site to the North, and I was desparately short of health and could do with more happiness.
Coincidentally I'd also just built my first knight and discovered somewhat to my surprise that it had strength 12, not 10. Really must pay attention to what unique unit I'm going to have before starting the game... Thus it was war. Toku at some point became a vassal of the Blue Civ, and in turn they apparently bribed Churchill and the orange Civ into declaring on me (You can tell I was really paying attention to which civ was what, can't you...). Of course, on Quick speed, wars tend to go very slowly, and this one lasted right until almost the end of the game, by which time Toku was free, Orange was no more, and Blue and Churchill were my vassals. I would have ended it a lot sooner to focus on space, but for the realization that Churchill had almost the only aluminium on the map, as well as the only wheat. Sadly, the Quick speed was a bit of a killer here - I finally captured the aluminium the turn before I was about to complete the Apollo Programme anyway- about 1800AD as I recall.
Since I progressed rapidly from cataphracts to tanks, and noone else had worse then longbows/trebuchets, and a few muskets right at the end, it was ... well let's just say, I've had tougher wars to fight before now.
The land was amazing for a cottage economy - I just basically built cottages everywhere and by the midgame the map was full of towns, and I was roughly researching a new tech every turn. But I made the mistake of not arranging some production cities, which meant (alongside the lack of Aluminium), the Apollo Programme took ages to build. As a result, somewhat amusingly, the turn I built it, I already had all the technologies to build just about the entire spaceship, so there was a slightly surreal few moments of going through my core cities, assigning a different spaceship part to each one! After that, it was just waiting to win. I'm pretty sure I could've won a fair bit quicker if I'd (a) not crashed my economy in the BC years, and (b) made a few production cities with workshops to build key things quicker - y'know, just a few minor frills like Apollo, Three Gorges Dam, one or two spaceship parts - nothing crucial
Thanks for the game, Deckhand. An interesting and unusual map. As soon as the results are out and the WorldBuilder is available, I'm going to be very tempted to try replaying it from the WorldBuilder on normal speed, to see what difference it makes.
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. But was too late. Cataphracts are very powerfull, even against Longbows. In my game I vassalized everyone.
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!!!
