CFC: Fastest Deity Science Victory

I have sold an early relic for like 28gpt. It can be super helpful but of course if you pop one you probably want to hold it for 7 turns first and hope for Religious Settlements. I think it is acceptable to sell them since in theory they are very powerful for Religious Tourism or faith generation with Reliquaries though in practice the AIs are not smart enough to do anything with them. It’s broken, but no more broken than pillaging or DF reselling.

I feel they are more rare than every 7-8 rolls in my games. I think the odds of a “cultural” tribal village are 1 in 7 and then the chance of getting. Relic in one is only like 15% which adds up to like 1 in 100 huts. Maybe the odds are a bit higher because you can’t get a two civic boost but until turn 30 I think, not sure how that effects Relic odds.
 
They will pretty much give you everything they have. But again I think that is not a bug, but more a choice made by the game designers. So I feel it would be wrong to ban it. Even though it does not happen all that often that you get a relic early in a HOF-game. Its kind of like a wonder start. Just something rare and lucky.

I agree it's a design choice. But then again, it appears they intentionally devalued diplo for most AIs before they reach Medieval, allowing the player to buy low, sell high.
 
Weird thing is that AIs will often pay a ton for Relic, but in my current game my first Hero died around T55 and not a single AI would buy the Heroic Relic. Not sure if they value religious and heroic relics differently or that they all filled their GW slot already - though that seems really unlikely given no one had gotten a Great Writer yet and only 2 AIs recruited Heroes (and not sure if either even died yet).
 
Have only sold an early relic (just feels too special) on occasion but I have also noticed Minou's observed discrepancy with heroic relics. Perhaps it needs some testing. I recall many requests from the AI to swap heroic relics. As for the AI purchasing them, that seems to come up later in the game.
 
Following up on the Hero bug, it seems like you don't reveal a second Hero if for instance you are Suzerain of Kumasi, move Amani to a different city state, and then move her back 10 turns later. But, you do still get the 10% chance per envoy (again, not sure if you get a single 10% chance, two 10% chances, or a single 20% chance for Amani envoys). So, I think there will be times when you move Amani in good faith and get extra Hero chances. In my last game I had her in Zanzibar, moved her to gain Suzerain of a different far away city state to reveal more of the map, and then brought her back. I ended up getting a Hero on her return. Seems unavoidable and not too broken, since its like a 1 in 5 chance of a Hero after a 10 turn round trip.
 
Did we agree to ban buying Diplofavour from HOF-games? Playing around with settings again and realized you can have many Kristinas in the game. That can be badly abused if you can buy cheap diplo and resell.
 
ealized you can have many Kristinas in the game
Vicious. Didn't think of that one, Kristina doesn't sell DP cheap though, but if you have a few Kristinas and a few others, you could get a nice extra GPT in the early game. I'm not sure everyone agreed to not use this trick, but I'm against it. The effect of the free money early on is to big to be considered 'by design' imho.
 
Vicious. Didn't think of that one, Kristina doesn't sell DP cheap though, but if you have a few Kristinas and a few others, you could get a nice extra GPT in the early game. I'm not sure everyone agreed to not use this trick, but I'm against it. The effect of the free money early on is to big to be considered 'by design' imho.
To me it is a grey area, but I have not used it so far, and will not use it until otherwise agreed.

I dont know how best to exploit the fact that you can have many of the same civ as the ai, but Im sure there is some synergy to exploit here.
 
I tested a game with all Kristinas. It kind of works, but this was a super heavy war mongering game, so it was very limited how much gold I could get out of them. But the game gave some other new experience. I see now that others have pointed it out earlier, but I was not aware of how amazingly fast Mattias can be. I think with the tilted settings he will also be able to achieve sub-100 turn SV. I played my test run with him to turn 75 when I accedently won a domination victory. It should be a sub110 game if I finish it even with a horrible tech tree. At turn 74 I had 51 cities and 36 campuses.
The map is standard size, but that is probably a mistake. Large should be better. Map is wet pangea with max water. I think age is old, and maybe more deserts...

74lastsave.png


No city flipping, chopping or pillage tricks, just levied troops blitzing. So Mattias is fast!

Some lessons:
  • With the AIs focus on science now, war style games will work much better as they build campuses all over.
  • Mattias is a monster- Firstly because of the suz bonuses combined with Himko, but also cheaper districts and building comes in handy with speedruns. Often you need to chop something fast, and this ability pretty much gives back the old Magnus with 100% boosts in some cities.
  • Kilwa bonus does not affect chops... This was something I had missed.
  • Getting Voidsingers is not given. I failed in this game as there were few huts, and I had to give it up and go for owls instead
  • Etemnaki and lady of the reef is strong on a wet map
  • Chopping maize, bronze and crabs becomes important when you have lots of tiles
  • Happiness is an issue with more than 50 cities. retainers an rep legacy is required.
  • Monpoly can require as few as 2 resorces. allied cs count even unimproved.
  • Max disaster level seems to be better than the lower ones, as it gives more bonuses than it hurts you.
 
At turn 74 I had 51 cities and 36 campuses
Amazing! What settings did you use to get the AI to even HAVE that many cities to conquer at turn 74? My fastest SV is with Matthias as you can see earlier in this thread, but the way you played it I see a <120, <110 or even a <100 might be possible.

Max disaster level seems to be better than the lower ones, as it gives more bonuses than it hurts you.
Interesting, I've experienced the opposite (mainly because of forest being cut destroyed before you can chop them), but you might be right.
 
Amazing! What settings did you use to get the AI to even HAVE that many cities to conquer at turn 74? My fastest SV is with Matthias as you can see earlier in this thread, but the way you played it I see a <120, <110 or even a <100 might be possible.


Interesting, I've experienced the opposite (mainly because of forest being cut destroyed before you can chop them), but you might be right.

Each AI has about 3 cities, so getting 50 is not that hard, but the speed that Mattias can display is quite special. Im pretty sure sub 100 is possible with the right setup, tech tree and some luck. Trying to roll a map for this now. But I dont think I will play a HOF-game out of it. That takes too long.

I think at diety the AI will get 3 settlers of the bat, or at least gets a settler upon founding its two first cities. At this wargame I max the AIs and CSs, and max the water to have the cities as close as possible.

Im not 100% sure about what is best about disasters yet, but the game above it was at least more positive than negative. I think that will be the case in most games.
 
  • 1st place ATEX - 131 turns- Menelix II of Ethiopia
  • 2nd place Bangau - 143 turns - Matthias of Hungary (june 2021)
  • 3rd place always_early - 143 turns - Jayavarman of Khmer (august 2021)
  • 4th place: Bangau - 144 turns - Peter of Russia (apr 2021)
  • 5th place: whacker - 173 turns - Qin Shi Huang of China
  • 6th place: The Highwayman - 178 turns - Yayavarman of Khmer (may 2021)
  • 7th place: Victoria - 191 turns - Kupe of Aoteoroa
  • 8th place: kirrbbb - 195 turns - Matthias Corvinus of Hungary
  • 9th place: Ceydezed - 216 turns - Pericles of Greece
  • 10th place: Bangau - 236 turns - Pachacuti of the Inca
  • 11th place:
Just finished a turn 143 peaceful victory w/ Khmer. Unlocked Offworld mission turn 139 I think, could have been a little faster (141?) with more than 6 spaceports, got a little lazy towards the end. New to the forum; l played Civ 4 way back when and made a big mistake installing 6 last year, have put a disturbing number of hours into this game in 2021. Sort of stumbled into a T180ish win with Khmer on a Tsingy start last weekend, my best by about 20 turns (conquered France around T70 and picked up some great wonders) and got inspired to try a speedrun. Messed around with some of the suggestions on here (Alex breaking one-tech limit is doable but so, so, so tedious; Teddy so tough to balance production/chopping with keeping science/culture) but went back to my guy Jay. Do not know how to get the save file or really even use these forums, but tried to attach screenshots and learnings from the week.

Map: Large, wetlands, legendary, abundant, new, wet, cold start.

Modes: dramatic ages, barbs, heroes, ss, monopolies.

Wetlands obvious choice as Khmer, the rest I think self-explanatory? Not sure new age is ideal for Khmer more generally, but worked out fantastic. Went with cold since Tundra obviously has more woods than for chop cities than desert and doesn't spawn rainforest, plus Khmer can make Tundra work pretty well with their food bonuses. This sort of backfired as I didn't have a Petra city or a place to put Pyramids early.

CS: max Science, max Faith, max Culture minus Vilnius, for gold I picked Hunza, Zanzibar, and Muscat. Industrial obviously Hong Kong but I also picked Johannesburg for potential early production, and Buenos Aires / Mexico City for amenities. Trying to keep cities happy especially if I shunned River Goddess.

2 AIs: Gilgamesh and Mansa Musa. I was tinkering around with settings and this was supposed to be a test run. Thinking was that I could ally Gilgamesh early, trade with him, maybe get some dramatic age cities since Khmer golden age pressure is fantastic. Mali I planned to spy on and steal gold.

Natural wonders: Yosemite, Roirama, Torres, Paititi, Matterhorn, Tsingy.

Still thought I was in the testing phase; when I rolled the start though, it ended up being the start from heaven. Torres, completely surrounded by plains hills.

Spoiler :
Khmer spawn settler view.png



Spawned southwest corner of the wonder and immediately discovered Himiko; needed a river so I moved east. I ended up doing a turn 3 settle, which is very unusual for me, for 2 reasons: +3 reef campus / +4 harbor southwest, and guarantee a holy site and aqueduct on the river in first ring. Ended up I probably could have stayed in place as the harbor city didn't have an aqueduct or holy site location and ended up being kind of useless.

Production was off the charts, so in lieu of scouts my strategy was to go monument=>Himiko, suz and levy a city state by turn 12 and use the warriors to scout. Went mining first since my holy site location had woods on it; ended up not mattering. Normally I'd go Pingala cap, scout out a settler chopping city, but for this one I decided without grassland in the capital that I'd double-Magnus and try to get my gov plaza up ASAP. Worked like a charm. Met Mohenjo Daro turn 4, which was perfect. Same turn my warrior popped a hut with craftsmanship and found a new continent. I found ~10 city states and ~10 tribal villages with Himiko and the warriors and no AIs on my continent. I think I finished the ancient era with something like 73 era score. Hidden bonus of the Himiko/suz strategy was that I had pretty much my entire continent revealed by the time I had ancestral hall / monumentality and got to do a nice long pinfest.

From there it was pretty smooth sailing. Didn't love the tundra region so I went with River Goddess. Delayed religion longer than I expected (T52, just had so much stuff to do), picked Work Ethic and colonization. No woods near holy site in my capital and didn't know if or when I'd get Mahaboudi. Had to grab Sinbad in order to find the AI, which took a minute. When I did I met Mali across the ocean and he paid 93 gpt for my diplo stash which I think was around 400 favor at that point. Initially was hoping to friend Gilgamesh soon and steal Musa's gold, but didn't actually meet Sumeria until after I needed the Inspiration for diplomatic service so ended up allying Mali (he loved my gold income...) and using Grand Master's Chapel to hit the military eurekas.

Overlong list of what could have gone better. The top 3 probably added low-single digit turns to the game, I don't think it would have been possible to get down in the low 130s with my general early-game strategy.
  • The big one: world didn't enter classical era until turn 51, which delayed Chorus and the big science boost (I had ~350 faith by then).
  • Horses spawned on the only flat coastal tile in capital. I almost cried, since I had to chop Sinbad in what ended up being my only plausible Kilwa city (though it did have a +6 Campus) and was left hard building about 7 turns of Kilwa.
  • Geneva and Bologna didn't spawn until very late and I think both were actually behind the ice shelf at the bottom of the map not even sure I found them before earth satellite.
  • Very few bonus resources on the map. Not 100% sure I remembered to select abundant (though there were plenty of strategics, and Taruga never spawned). Only one science CS on my continent and 3 industrial. Johannesburg can be great early-game on abundant resources, but this map had far fewer bonus resources than I would have expected and it ended up being useless. Likewise Buenos Aires and Caguana did nothing for me.
  • Went Holy Site => Gov Plaza => Theater Square in the cap, and made a huge mistake going for IZ as fourth district when I hit pop 10 (you can see the lonely campus pin at turn 102). With no grassland or farms I didn't get to 13 until Wisselbanken got my food up on the CS trade routes.
  • Missed Hypatia, still not really sure how.
  • Nearest flat desert tile was on the complete other side of the continent. Nobody built Pyramids though so I got it around T90 or so.
  • Eventually added Gurdwaras, but never felt the time was right to pick a fourth belief instead of another builder, settler, or military eureka. Should have probably grabbed tithe at some point or cross-cultural dialogue, though I did the math and I was so far ahead in science that it never would have given me more than ~3% lift. If I had grabbed vatican city earlier I would have had more CS converted and more followers.

Learnings/thoughts/musings:
  • I didn't always grab great library (AI really prioritizes it) in my test games, but it's really quite something. I left CS warriors standing next to tribal villages before it completed, and had the classical/medieval eureka scientist Aryabhata (missed hypatia).
  • Mali is a great AI for gold farming in trades, pillaging, or spying, but damn if he doesn't take a lot of great merchants. I think I made one corporation? Not sure how big a deal that was, in a wide-but-tall game you're not getting a ton out of one-city benefits.
  • With a Moksha, grandmaster's chapel and Valetta you can get all your military eurekas and your strategic stockpiles with faith. Very powerful. As mentioned above, my initial plan was to use intelligence agency and steal from Mali but if I tried again I think I'd plan on GMC.
  • Have always thought Bi Sheng was a useless great engineer, but having to recruit since I had to take them all I learned that the Kumasi combo is fantastic. Ended up with 4 extra culture on each trade route, 5.2 with the Kilwa/Pingala bonus. This alone was 5% of my total culture at one point.
  • Theocracy 15% faith discount is super powerful. I switched to democracy at one point to buy my chop tiles but honestly don't think it was worth it. Just generating and spending so much more faith than gold, probably would have shaved a turn or two if I'd ignored tier 4 and gone straight to optimization imperative.
  • High aluminum stockpile is important for getting the most out of Magnus, as you just can't power an empty city that fast. I think I chopped 11 space projects in two turns in my Magnus city -- 7 off aluminum and 4 off of power, with the builders from the first turn putting down solar panels / wind farms on the second turn. Aerospace contractors is a fantastic card for a multi-spaceport setup and got me an extra lagrange project.
  • I almost always build gov plaza in second city, but built in cap this time to get AH and GMC as fast as possible. This was very key for getting a campus up next to flat tiles for GL/Oxford as well as quick double GPP on Pingala given the Magnus start in cap.
  • Very possible that this map (tons of plains hills) would have been better with Jesuit Education. I built holy site first in every city, but probably should have done some campus-only cities once my gold was good enough to buy the library, but there were plenty of +5 holy sites to be had and bootstrapping cities to 10 food / 10 production in 3 turns is too tempting. Honestly didn't even need the full ~2000 faith per turn I was getting towards the end.
  • You can never have enough spaceport chop cities. On a wet map with Mohenjo Daro you can almost always settle a 3 chop city to get your first district. With Khmer/Work Ethic, this is enough to build a productive, well-fed city so you can save Hercules classical charges for Spaceports towards the end of the Medieval Era. Grabbing Hercules at the very end of the Ancient Era ensures he's available for maximum impact. I used him for recorded history boost and early +6 holy sites in cities then basically sat on the charges for Spaceports. I ended at 25 LY/turn, but could have shaved a turn off with another two Spaceport cities and ended the game with Moksha not in a Spaceport city and an extra Hercules charge.
  • Not only are research labs useless -- by the time they're available, you should be at or near globalization -- they're counterproductive, since they drain power from your cities. It didn't end up mattering, but I accidentally took one city out of the space race for a turn.
  • I think it best to use the Oxford / Nalanda free techs around the time you start one-teching and every near-term tech is definitely on the way to space. I saved Nalanda and ended up with one of the useless techs (maybe Telecommunications? I forget.)
  • Armagh more powerful than I remembered. Before Civil Engineering I had all plains and/or tundra hills in next to an aqueduct and a city center, and spamming 3 faith tiles was super helpful.
  • Late-game tribal village hunting is fantastic. Two Eurekas in Atomic/Information are really clutch for getting overflow. I almost stopped one teching once or twice before globalization.
  • I sort of decided it was a peaceful game at some point, but Gilgamesh and Mansa fought most of the game and I'm sure I could have levied a CS on the other side of the map, picked up a city and some Domreys to take out Mali and grab commercial hubs and Etemenanki.
  • One thing from an earlier game -- Fez might be one way to get around one tech per turn, when you have the ~720 techs.
 

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Last edited:
  • 1st place ATEX - 131 turns- Menelix II of Ethiopia
  • 2nd place Bangau - 143 turns - Matthias of Hungary (june 2021)
  • 3rd place always_early - 143 turns - Jayavarman of Khmer (august 2021)
  • 4th place: Bangau - 144 turns - Peter of Russia (apr 2021)
  • 5th place: whacker - 173 turns - Qin Shi Huang of China
  • 6th place: The Highwayman - 178 turns - Yayavarman of Khmer (may 2021)
  • 7th place: Victoria - 191 turns - Kupe of Aoteoroa
  • 8th place: kirrbbb - 195 turns - Matthias Corvinus of Hungary
  • 9th place: Ceydezed - 216 turns - Pericles of Greece
  • 10th place: Bangau - 236 turns - Pachacuti of the Inca
  • 11th place:
Just finished a turn 143 peaceful victory w/ Khmer. Unlocked Offworld mission turn 139 I think, could have been a little faster (141?) with more than 6 spaceports, got a little lazy towards the end. New to the forum; l played Civ 4 way back when and made a big mistake installing 6 last year, have put a disturbing number of hours into this game in 2021. Sort of stumbled into a T180ish win with Khmer on a Tsingy start last weekend, my best by about 20 turns (conquered France around T70 and picked up some great wonders) and got inspired to try a speedrun. Messed around with some of the suggestions on here (Alex breaking one-tech limit is doable but so, so, so tedious; Teddy so tough to balance production/chopping with keeping science/culture) but went back to my guy Jay. Do not know how to get the save file or really even use these forums, but tried to attach screenshots and learnings from the week.

Map: Large, wetlands, legendary, abundant, new, wet, cold start.

Modes: dramatic ages, barbs, heroes, ss, monopolies.

Wetlands obvious choice as Khmer, the rest I think self-explanatory? Not sure new age is ideal for Khmer more generally, but worked out fantastic. Went with cold since Tundra obviously has more woods than for chop cities than desert and doesn't spawn rainforest, plus Khmer can make Tundra work pretty well with their food bonuses. This sort of backfired as I didn't have a Petra city or a place to put Pyramids early.

CS: max Science, max Faith, max Culture minus Vilnius, for gold I picked Hunza, Zanzibar, and Muscat. Industrial obviously Hong Kong but I also picked Johannesburg for potential early production, and Buenos Aires / Mexico City for amenities. Trying to keep cities happy especially if I shunned River Goddess.

2 AIs: Gilgamesh and Mansa Musa. I was tinkering around with settings and this was supposed to be a test run. Thinking was that I could ally Gilgamesh early, trade with him, maybe get some dramatic age cities since Khmer golden age pressure is fantastic. Mali I planned to spy on and steal gold.

Natural wonders: Yosemite, Roirama, Torres, Paititi, Matterhorn, Tsingy.

Still thought I was in the testing phase; when I rolled the start though, it ended up being the start from heaven. Torres, completely surrounded by plains hills.



Spawned southwest corner of the wonder and immediately discovered Himiko; needed a river so I moved east. I ended up doing a turn 3 settle, which is very unusual for me, for 2 reasons: +3 reef campus / +4 harbor southwest, and guarantee a holy site and aqueduct on the river in first ring. Ended up I probably could have stayed in place as the harbor city didn't have an aqueduct or holy site location and ended up being kind of useless.

Production was off the charts, so in lieu of scouts my strategy was to go monument=>Himiko, suz and levy a city state by turn 12 and use the warriors to scout. Went mining first since my holy site location had woods on it; ended up not mattering. Normally I'd go Pingala cap, scout out a settler chopping city, but for this one I decided without grassland in the capital that I'd double-Magnus and try to get my gov plaza up ASAP. Worked like a charm. Met Mohenjo Daro turn 4, which was perfect. Same turn my warrior popped a hut with craftsmanship and found a new continent. I found ~10 city states and ~10 tribal villages with Himiko and the warriors and no AIs on my continent. I think I finished the ancient era with something like 73 era score. Hidden bonus of the Himiko/suz strategy was that I had pretty much my entire continent revealed by the time I had ancestral hall / monumentality and got to do a nice long pinfest.

From there it was pretty smooth sailing. Didn't love the tundra region so I went with River Goddess. Delayed religion longer than I expected (T52, just had so much stuff to do), picked Work Ethic and colonization. No woods near holy site in my capital and didn't know if or when I'd get Mahaboudi. Had to grab Sinbad in order to find the AI, which took a minute. When I did I met Mali across the ocean and he paid 93 gpt for my diplo stash which I think was around 400 favor at that point. Initially was hoping to friend Gilgamesh soon and steal Musa's gold, but didn't actually meet Sumeria until after I needed the Inspiration for diplomatic service so ended up allying Mali (he loved my gold income...) and using Grand Master's Chapel to hit the military eurekas.

What could have gone better:
  • The big one: world didn't enter classical era until turn 51, which delayed Chorus.
  • Very few bonus resources on the map. Not 100% sure I remembered to select abundant (though there were plenty of strategics, and Taruga never spawned). Only one science CS on my continent and 3 industrial. Johannesburg can be great early-game on abundant resources, but this map had far fewer bonus resources than I would have expected and it ended up being useless. Likewise Buenos Aires and Caguana did nothing for me.
  • Horses spawned on the only flat coastal tile in capital. I almost cried, since I had to chop Sinbad in what ended up being my Kilwa city.
  • Geneva and Bologna didn't spawn until very late and I think both were actually behind the ice shelf at the bottom of the map not even sure I found them before earth satellite.
  • Went Holy Site => Gov Plaza => Theater Square in the cap, and made a huge mistake going for IZ as fourth district when I hit pop 10 (you can see the lonely campus pin at turn 102). With no grassland or farms I didn't get to 13 until Wisselbanken got my food up on the CS trade routes.
  • Missed Hypatia, still not really sure how.
  • Nearest flat desert tile was on the complete other side of the continent. Nobody built Pyramids though so I got it around T90 or so.
  • Eventually added Gurdwaras, but never felt the time was right to pick a fourth belief instead of another builder, settler, or military eureka. Should have probably grabbed tithe at some point or cross-cultural dialogue, though I did the math and I was so far ahead in science that it never would have given me more than ~3% lift. If I had grabbed vatican city earlier I would have had more CS converted and more followers.

Learnings/thoughts/musings:
  • I didn't always grab great library (AI really prioritizes it) in my test games, but it's really quite something. I left CS warriors standing next to tribal villages before it completed, and had the classical/medieval eureka scientist Aryabhata (missed hypatia).
  • Mali is a great AI for gold farming in trades, pillaging, or spying, but damn if he doesn't take a lot of great merchants. I think I made one corporation? Not sure how big a deal that was, in a wide-but-tall game you're not getting a ton out of one-city benefits.
  • With a Moksha, grandmaster's chapel and Valetta you can get all your military eurekas and your strategic stockpiles with faith. Very powerful. As mentioned above, my initial plan was to use intelligence agency and steal from Mali but if I tried again I think I'd plan on GMC.
  • Have always thought Bi Sheng was a useless great engineer, but having to recruit since I had to take them all I learned that the Kumasi combo is fantastic. Ended up with 4 extra culture on each trade route, 5.2 with the Kilwa/Pingala bonus. This alone was 5% of my total culture at one point.
  • Theocracy 15% faith discount is super powerful. I switched to democracy at one point to buy my chop tiles but honestly don't think it was worth it. Just generating and spending so much more faith than gold, probably would have shaved a turn or two if I'd ignored tier 4 and gone straight to optimization imperative.
  • High aluminum stockpile is important for getting the most out of Magnus, as you just can't power an empty city that fast. I think I chopped 11 space projects in two turns in my Magnus city -- 7 off aluminum and 4 off of power, with the builders from the first turn putting down solar panels / wind farms on the second turn. Aerospace contractors is a fantastic card for a multi-spaceport setup and got me an extra lagrange project.
  • I almost always build gov plaza in second city, but built in cap this time to get AH and GMC as fast as possible. This was very key for getting a campus up next to flat tiles for GL/Oxford as well as quick double GPP on Pingala given the Magnus start in cap.
  • Very possible that this map (tons of plains hills) would have been better with Jesuit Education. I built holy site first in every city, but probably should have done some campus-only cities once my gold was good enough to buy the library, but there were plenty of +5 holy sites to be had and bootstrapping cities to 10 food / 10 production in 3 turns is too tempting. Honestly didn't even need the full ~2000 faith per turn I was getting towards the end.
  • You can never have enough spaceport chop cities. On a wet map with Mohenjo Daro you can almost always settle a 3 chop city to get your first district. With Khmer/Work Ethic, this is enough to build a productive, well-fed city so you can save Hercules classical charges for Spaceports towards the end of the Medieval Era. Grabbing Hercules at the very end of the Ancient Era ensures he's available for maximum impact. I used him for recorded history boost and early +6 holy sites in cities then basically sat on the charges for Spaceports. I ended at 25 LY/turn, but could have shaved a turn off with another two Spaceport cities and ended the game with Moksha not in a Spaceport city and an extra Hercules charge.
  • Not only are research labs useless -- by the time they're available, you should be at or near globalization -- they're counterproductive, since they drain power from your cities. It didn't end up mattering, but I accidentally took one city out of the space race for a turn.
  • I think it best to use the Oxford / Nalanda free techs around the time you start one-teching and every near-term tech is on your tree.
  • Armagh more powerful than I remembered. Before Civil Engineering I had all plains and/or tundra hills in next to an aqueduct and a city center, and spamming 3 faith tiles was super helpful.
  • Late-game tribal village hunting is fantastic. Two Eurekas in Atomic/Information are really clutch for getting overflow. I almost stopped one teching once or twice before globalization.
  • I sort of decided it was a peaceful game at some point, but Gilgamesh and Mansa fought most of the game and I'm sure I could have levied a CS on the other side of the map, picked up a city and some Domreys to take out Mali and grab commercial hubs and Etemenanki.
  • One thing from an earlier game -- Fez might be one way to get around one tech per turn, when you have the ~720 techs.
Welcome to the HOF! Seems like a great game, and a win in the 140s is very fast! Well done. I agree with most your reflections about the game. Hope you will submit more and even faster HOF-games.
 
Welcome Always Early and thanks for posting your game.

I have not been on the board lately, sadly I had a great HOF game with cooked settings going but I botched it and quit. I had played great up to T80 ir so and then I had Hercules fighting and he was killed by an AI Mulan appearing out of the fog and blasting him for like 40 damage allowing another unit to kill him. I should have just finished the game but the thought of 2 lost Spaceports (had 4 charges left) crushed my will to carry on. Will try another soon I hope.

ATEX 51 cities at T75 is so insane! I forgot Hungary got +2 movement with levied units, that's gotta be key. I was shocked though that there WERE 51 cities available and reachable. Deity AIs get a free Settler when they found their first and third cities - so they don't technically start with 3 cities but will usually have three by T10 or so. In my experience they usually settle a fourth city around T25-T30 zone, but tend to kind of slow down expanding after that and often end up with only 3 cities even at T50 if they get a Settler stolen or a city taken. With 13 AIs the max for a Standard map, you basically have conquered ALL of the AIs "original" 39 (13*3) cities plus their first "expansions". I'm really impressed!

It's great that people keep figuring out new Civs besides Babylon and Norway to try for speed runs.
 
Welcome Always Early and thanks for posting your game.

I have not been on the board lately, sadly I had a great HOF game with cooked settings going but I botched it and quit. I had played great up to T80 ir so and then I had Hercules fighting and he was killed by an AI Mulan appearing out of the fog and blasting him for like 40 damage allowing another unit to kill him. I should have just finished the game but the thought of 2 lost Spaceports (had 4 charges left) crushed my will to carry on. Will try another soon I hope.

ATEX 51 cities at T75 is so insane! I forgot Hungary got +2 movement with levied units, that's gotta be key. I was shocked though that there WERE 51 cities available and reachable. Deity AIs get a free Settler when they found their first and third cities - so they don't technically start with 3 cities but will usually have three by T10 or so. In my experience they usually settle a fourth city around T25-T30 zone, but tend to kind of slow down expanding after that and often end up with only 3 cities even at T50 if they get a Settler stolen or a city taken. With 13 AIs the max for a Standard map, you basically have conquered ALL of the AIs "original" 39 (13*3) cities plus their first "expansions". I'm really impressed!

It's great that people keep figuring out new Civs besides Babylon and Norway to try for speed runs.

I know the feeling. The game you refer to ended in quite a lot of frustration when the win screen suddenly popped up. The +2 movement and free envoys are insanly good. I must admit Im quite surprised at how fast Hungary can expand. I actually ran out of cities to take before turn 80... Therefore a bigger map is needed. As at least 50% of the cities have campuses now, you also get the pillage science in. That speeds it up even more. Next try now Im actually not going himiko first, but Anansi. I will not war too heavily at first, but try to sell diplo and relics, and use gold to levy. That way you can save the Himiko charges to use for envoys, and tech quickly for swordmen/men-at-arms. I have a good map with Kandy as the first CS. But I struggle with Loyalty problems. Not sure if this map will work, but pretty sure the strategy is good.

Also trying Hungary without mods for a all standard game should be fun. Although a lot slower, some of the same strats should work and give a nice finish time.
 
Welcome to the HOF! Seems like a great game, and a win in the 140s is very fast! Well done. I agree with most your reflections about the game.
Thank you! Given you're the resident champ around here, I'm most curious to hear your disagreements. I went back through the old threads here after my run so see a couple places where my strategy differed from other attempts -- there's a ton I'm not sure was optimal so would be interested in hearing takes.

EDIT: and having just read the other thread from religious russians, I now see you detailed your Khmer approach that smashed my T100 yields :) what turn did that one finish??

Hope you will submit more and even faster HOF-games.
We'll see! Not sure I have the stamina for another round of attempts here (the Khmer HOF game was the fifth or six that I played past turn 100, and there were a few others in there), but I have some ideas bouncing around.

It looks like there are basically two meta-strategies floating around this thread:
1. Get a bunch of faith with Voidsingers and a huge boost at Chorus (Ethiopia, Khmer, Russia)
2. Go to war and conquer a lot of campuses (Hungary, Babylon, Aztec)

I'm not a big war guy so probably going to noodle on other peaceful strategies, I've done the faith thing, and at least at the moment am not intrigued with "how do I generate more faith." The overarching key seems to be getting enough culture in the early game to get a huge boost in science, one way or the other, in the middle of the Classical era, so I'm thinking about other ways.

Main one noodling around with is Victoria / Owls / Free Inquiry. Basically this strategy would be to use Maui to create some +5-6 harbors on foreign continents and use free inquiry to get a huge science boost. Half-price district, on the coast, with a building that creates trade routes, and cleans up great admirals creates excellent synergy with the cultural city-states Attuyaha, Antananarivo, Kumasi, and Nan Madol. Since those are the ones you want to meet early anyway, why not try to maximize their contribution. By turn ~60 you could have 7 trade routes generating 6 culture each and 4 harbors generating 20+ science each. In playtesting my best results were on small, high sea level 7 seas map. If you can just spawn close to a three-way continent split there will be plenty of fissures as well. With Reyna & Pingala you could spike to 150+ science just from these if you get Maui in the ancient era and somehow finagle enough faith (excess Himiko charges? chinguetti?) to recall him in classical. I think 8 dockyards by turn 70 is plenty realistic.

EDIT: scratch this -- while it's easier to get +7/8 harbors than I thought, the dockyard is not as strong as I thought it was going into this. I definitely thought RND doubled the adjacency when not on home continent, but it's only +2. So you can still easily get +8s (three resources, off home continent, city center, another district) and 16 spt (and 16 science per turn for 50% of a district cost is great) this strategy isn't going to compete with VS/chorus/monumentality the way it might have if these harbors were 24 spt each.
 
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That's an interesting point about disasters. I had kept it at the default value but I did not realize that Meteor Showers count as disasters too and increase in frequency at level 3 and 4. For some reason I thought they happen once per Era, but apparently this is not true and it sure is a great boost when you find one of these. I will bump it to 3 next game I think to increase the yields but avoid upping the odds of the worst droughts/hurricanes/tornados. Man, in the game I quit due to my Hercules error, I had just upgraded two Man-at-Arms in a captured city and both got redlined by a Tornado right as I moved them to attack the next city. Slowed me down a great deal.
 
Thank you! Given you're the resident champ around here, I'm most curious to hear your disagreements. I went back through the old threads here after my run so see a couple places where my strategy differed from other attempts -- there's a ton I'm not sure was optimal so would be interested in hearing takes.

EDIT: and having just read the other thread from religious russians, I now see you detailed your Khmer approach that smashed my T100 yields :) what turn did that one finish??


We'll see! Not sure I have the stamina for another round of attempts here (the Khmer HOF game was the fifth or six that I played past turn 100, and there were a few others in there), but I have some ideas bouncing around.

It looks like there are basically two meta-strategies floating around this thread:
1. Get a bunch of faith with Voidsingers and a huge boost at Chorus (Ethiopia, Khmer, Russia)
2. Go to war and conquer a lot of campuses (Hungary, Babylon, Aztec)

I'm not a big war guy so probably going to noodle on other peaceful strategies, I've done the faith thing, and at least at the moment am not intrigued with "how do I generate more faith." The overarching key seems to be getting enough culture in the early game to get a huge boost in science, one way or the other, in the middle of the Classical era, so I'm thinking about other ways.

Main one noodling around with is Victoria / Owls / Free Inquiry. Basically this strategy would be to use Maui to create some +5-6 harbors on foreign continents and use free inquiry to get a huge science boost. Half-price district, on the coast, with a building that creates trade routes, and cleans up great admirals creates excellent synergy with the cultural city-states Attuyaha, Antananarivo, Kumasi, and Nan Madol. Since those are the ones you want to meet early anyway, why not try to maximize their contribution. By turn ~60 you could have 7 trade routes generating 6 culture each and 4 harbors generating 20+ science each. In playtesting my best results were on small, high sea level 7 seas map. If you can just spawn close to a three-way continent split there will be plenty of fissures as well. With Reyna & Pingala you could spike to 150+ science just from these if you get Maui in the ancient era and somehow finagle enough faith (excess Himiko charges? chinguetti?) to recall him in classical. I think 8 dockyards by turn 70 is plenty realistic.

EDIT: scratch this -- while it's easier to get +7/8 harbors than I thought, the dockyard is not as strong as I thought it was going into this. I definitely thought RND doubled the adjacency when not on home continent, but it's only +2. So you can still easily get +8s (three resources, off home continent, city center, another district) and 16 spt (and 16 science per turn for 50% of a district cost is great) this strategy isn't going to compete with VS/chorus/monumentality the way it might have if these harbors were 24 spt each.

Its easier to give pointers if I can see your save game, but I think you have the right approach in analyzing cost-benefit of all your strategies in the game. My disagreements are just small details. =) I dont think great library is worth it, and not the Armagh tiles either. I would also not give up the tier 3 government. Fez I think is too weak to make it work. Same with the English approach you mentioned, although there might be some setups that can have a trade based or CH/Harbour-game work. Australia is a strong candidate for such a game, or Portugal. But also Rome or Mongolia in some scenarios could probably be very good.

I never played the Khmer game beyond turn 100, but if I remember correctly it would have ended at about 130. I think many civs can get to 130-140 peacefully . With war things will probably speed up more, and right now Hungary is up there with Norway and Babylon I think. All three should be possible to get sub 100. What other civs can do 110-130s Im not sure yet. Teddy has to be able to do something, but my tries with him so far has always failed. I still want to try a proper China game as well, but have not found the right setup for a China-game yet.
 
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