Domination Victory Turn 290. Unfortunately, it was not a clean playthrough, as I made a really boneheaded but critical error that completely destroyed my game plan (or so I thought- see below). Since I was still relatively early in the game, rather than continue pointlessly I played again from a second start.
First, kudos to the GOTM team for a really interesting game that presented a lot of challenges new to me. I have never played on a huge map, nor against so few opponents, both of which really did affect the game play I realized. The map itself was very interesting and forced me to completely reverse my initial game plan.
In GOTM 105, also a Domination game, I wasted a lot of time getting a religion that didn't serve my win condition very well, so I approached this game not planning for any religion. But after about 15-20 turns of looking around, it became clear that the most salient feature of the map was a real dearth of production. But there was a lot of desert. So I reversed my thinking and settled on a plan to generate early production using Desert Folklore and Work Ethic. I stopped everything else and researched Astrology, then built a holy site. When I went to check on the Great People points, I was dismayed to see that a religion had already been founded ! (presumably because someone else had built Stonehenge), but luckily had chosen Feed the World as founder belief. Moreover, another civ was starting to generate a lot of Great Prophet points, more than just the one from my sole holy site. Was it the same civ with the extant religion or the other competing civ? No way to tell, and I expected that with only three competing civs that only two religions would be allowed. So I immediately started holy site prayers, but even that wouldn't be enough. Luckily I was close to Poli Phi and had already researched Mysticism, so could use the Revelation card and still get a religion with its help.
But here's the error- when I went to check back in a bit later, I realized I had slotted the Inspiration card by mistake, and was generating Great Scientist points instead of Great Prophet points! It was at that point too late to catch up, and I figured that most likely I had lost the chance to get the religion I needed. Since not much of note had really happened in the game with such faraway civs, rather than continue I just re-started and re-played as best I could to that point, but this time made sure to get the right cards and obtained the second religion. Curiously, as the game went on, I realized that all three civs were allowed to found religions, which I did not expect. Has there been some kind of rule change in that regard? If I had known that could happen I probably would have soldiered on, hoping that the other civ took something other than Work Ethic. Oh well. I'm glad to have secured the religion I did, as every belief was actually really important to the game play. In addition to Work Ethic I chose Cross Cultural Dialogue (which helped a lot with science, especially with such poor campus adjacencies initially), Gurdwara (which helped with city growth in desert-heavy cities) and Crusade (which helped a bit in the actual conflict with Yellow Rome).
Overall, the game was really slow to develop for me. I had only 5 cities entering the Renaissance, but managed to get a Golden Renaissance with Monumentality. Since I was by that point already generating a lot of faith, I was able to expand hugely, coming out of it with I think 13 cities. Thereafter it was still a real struggle to catch up to the other Romes, especially Yellow Rome which just took off both scientifically and culturally. Yellow Rome was closer and the bigger threat, so I resolved to go after him first, but how to get at him? My solution was to plant a city just outside his borders. With Moksha with Divine Architect, I immediately built an encampment, and immediately purchased all buildings including a Military Academy. I was getting some 700 fpt at that point, and had used all my accumulated Diplo favor to win the last Great Council, electing to decrease the purchasing cost of military units using faith by 50%. This meant that I could crank out Tank and then Modern Armor armies every other turn. I still ran into the problem that I couldn't re-base my bombers to my assault city- too great a distance, so I did end up purchasing a single ocean tile in a Northern city, using Moksha to instantly build a harbor, and then immediately purchased a carrier, the only naval vessel I used in the whole game.
The warring with Yellow Rome was intense at the beginning, as he had multiple GDRs, but not yet fully promoted. They turned out to be surprisingly susceptible to jet bombers. Once they had been disposed of the rest of the game was a mopping up exercise. Twice I was able to pillage his spaceports before he could launch the Mars Colony- always fulfilling to see the burnt up rocket on the platform!
And once, while attacking Red Rome, which was also being spied upon, I caught the AI shifting its production in that same city from a carrier to a battleship Armada without missing a beat or losing any production as far as I could tell, which confirms me in my belief that the AIs function much more malleably wrt their production queues than we players are allowed to do.
So thanks again for a very educational game. I enjoyed it more than I even thought I would!
