Builder's Bargain

[PieceOfMind]

Conquest Victory in 1740AD

Spoiler :

Annoyingly, twice the AP ended my war with the Portugese. The city of Lisbon kept getting reassigned to him as well. When I was forced into peace with him, I just went and declared on someone else while I waited!

Towards the end of the game, I started emphasising the use of cavalry more and used less siege. This dramatically sped up the war and because I was fighting mostly grenadiers, muskets and longbows, I didn't sustain many casualties.

I used build Culture much more in this game than I have previously.

Victory was by vassalizing everyone. First Frederick, then Willem, Joao, Shaka, Pacal and Brennus. Almost did it round a circle.

Spoiler pictures :

By the way, for anyone interested, here is the spreadsheet I used to keep track of hammers while I played the game. It's not the tidiest of spreadsheets I've made but it got the job done. It's mainly fiddly if you ever happen to lose a city, because you need to delete all the numbers for that city.

Spoiler :

 

[Negator_UK]

Ok, I thought Noble would be too easy, so I converted it to Emperor and got stuck in. Silly me.... Can anyone help ??

Spoiler :

Started off OK, spread about and managed to maintain a reasonable tech rate - couldn't find a nearby neighbour to rush and anyway, no copper or horses and got IW late.

Then Shaka attacked me

Beat him off and then sent a stack over to his homeland - he beat me off - easily !!!

I am now stuck in a "Guerre a l'accordion with Shaka" when I should be attacking a neighbour - I need a new plan - any ideas ??

BTW, I thought it would be cool to add the build hammers to each city name to keep track, but the game then makes your next city your capital-name, because that city name doesn't exist yet - sorry about the mess

My emperor start is also attached, along with my current game.

 

[PieceOfMind]

BTW, I thought it would be cool to add the build hammers to each city name to keep track, but the game then makes your next city your capital-name, because that city name doesn't exist yet - sorry about the mess

I did exactly the same thing.

 

[goldys_lackey]

Awesome challenge, VoU. I suspect this is exactly what I've been needing to bring my game over the prince/monarch plateau.

I'm 99% sure I've met all the rules. I've even named my cities as such (in pairs) to make sure I draw inside the lines.

Please take a look and critique at will:

A few screencaps

Spoiler :

My empire @ 150 BC. I settled in place. Don't regret it this time...

And I expended rapidly, my focus being to block off the silver from whoever was my neighbor (I'd met at least 4 AI at this point... probably 2 or more are on my continent)

Norther 3 cities - pretty good city cites up there still (wheat even further up!)

I started on TGL around... 200 BC??? Who knows. I was in it for the failgold (BTW - what are the rules on failgold?). And I got it!

Wasn't expecting that, but of course, I'll take it happily

@ 350 AD, I've expanded thus far... again, between your pairing rules and my penchant for REXing ( I kid, my penchant for REXing trumps all), I'm back to a pultry research rate of 30%, however it isn't hurting me at the moment with tech trades enabled (at least I know where I stand, which is tech parity basically).

The save @ 350 AD

 

[Um the Muse]

Well, I'm giving this a whirl. It seems to be helping, even though I know that I've made some costly mistakes.

I meant to stop at 1 AD, but I guess I got a little carried away. Anyway, here's my empire at 50 AD:

Spoiler :

As you can see, I tried naming my cities after the states in the US in alphabetical order (I actually built Arkansas after Arizona, though).
That links Alabama - Alaska, Arkansas - Arizona, California - Colorado, Connecticut - Delaware and I was poised to build Florida.

Ok, I built my capital on top of the rice. The +1 food is probably a good enough reason for doing so, but I actually did it for the grassland cows. I decided to go for early pottery so I could cottage up the river. I wasn't really thinking though. I really should have built a bunch of farms around the lake because corn + cows (+ rice) pretty much guaranteed that this would be my main settler/worker pump. I compounded the mistake by settling my one and only GS in the capital as an academy.

Tech-path, as best as I can recall: Pottery -> mining -> BW -> AH -> writing -> mathematics -> alphabet (to trade for iron-working) -> currency -> CoL (I've skipped something; I got most of the pre-reqs in a trade or two but wasted in entire turn of research on one of the early pre-reqs ) -> hunting (elephants!) -> calendar

I've been building libraries in many of the cities because a lot of 'em can be used for commerce or scientists so I didn't want to bother with mysticism for the monuments.

A big part of my plan gambled on not needing more than warriors for the majority of the game. Not a big risk on this map, but it definitely let me skip even more corners.

The best thing that I've got out of this challenge is that it helped clarify my tech path (convoluted as it appears above )

 

[MyOtherName]

INVESTMENT shall be understood to mean the number of hammers required to construct the building at normal speed, without modifiers (in other words, the number that shows up in the 'Pedia. In particular, please note that investment does not depend on the number of hammers that you actually invest - if there's a monument in the city, that costs 30 hammers, regardless of how it got there.

Do you really want to neglect modifiers? One of the key points of building sparingly is to take advantage of multipliers -- a Creative player is more likely to take advantage of Temples for happiness, and The Hanging Gardens are a much bigger bargain with stone than without. One of the most common reasons I build Stonehenge is because it contributes many hammers over an extended rex. But the "without modifiers" rule discourages taking advantage of such things.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Do you really want to neglect modifiers? One of the key points of building sparingly is to take advantage of multipliers -- a Creative player is more likely to take advantage of Temples for happiness, and The Hanging Gardens are a much bigger bargain with stone than without. One of the most common reasons I build Stonehenge is because it contributes many hammers over an extended rex. But the "without modifiers" rule discourages taking advantage of such things.

You do realise this thread is more than 2 years old?

 

[coanda]

You do realise this thread is more than 2 years old?

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing about this thread has become obsolete in the meantime; it's still a worthwhile exercise for novice builders. Heck, VoiceOfUnreason is still quite active, so it's even possible he might chime in directly if someone asks him a question.