Challenge #5: Million Dollar Monty

[scherbchen]

'king catholic me anus'???


---

yeah something like that. in spain isabel and ferdinand (from aragorn and castilla respectively if i recall correctly) are known as the *reyes católicos*. they were the ones who completed the *reconcista* of spain (from the arabs who controlled the south) and set forth to gain more souls (and gold) from the new world. prior to civ4 maybe my favourite spanish historical persons from that time and place, now i´m feeling kinda biased

actually it´s kinda odd that someone so 100% christian (as understood at the time) would end up being the number one buddhist in civ though her being a royal pain in the religious butt probably pictures her right.

/rant off

are golden ages really that powerful when going for gold? i´ll probably have to test that out. where are we on the settling of GMs issue? what would you estimate to be the deadline?

 

[Welnic]

Score of 21223. Didn't manage to stay focused, was pretty pleased to be doing this well on prince though, it's a step up for me. Looks like I am ready for it. Ready to try again.

Spoiler :

Founded all religions except Judaism, which was founded by Hatty. Didn't really take advantage of it. Sal and Izzy both picked other religions than my state religion and declared war. I was thinking of attacking Izzy anyway, just not so soon.

Totally messed up the GP farm by sort of setting it up in the capitol, and by building cottages where it ended up.

View attachment 139603

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

are golden ages really that powerful when going for gold?

That's going to depend mostly on your population. Every tile that produces commerce will produce 1 more commerce during a golden age. A golden age lasts 10 turns, and in order for it to be competetive with a merchant mission, we want it to produce roughly 2000 gold. That means you would need to get about 200 gold per turn.

Hmm, that doesn't sound very likely to me.

To get 200 gold per turn from the golden age, you would need at least 200 population over your entire empire (assuming that every tile produces at least one commerce to start with -- which is quite optimistic). That's 10 cities with a population of 20 each or 20 cities with a population of 10 each. I doubt you're getting that in this game with any relatively peaceful strategy.

 

[scherbchen]

okay that makes sense to me, thank ye. probably still a good way to burn those late GPs GSs and those unlucky GAs though. especially when you are at the point where you are only producing wealth in your cities so the hammers from tiles will also get through that golden age boost.

really going to try this again, fun challenge. would be even more fun without isabel *he yells at the top of his lungs*

 

[Tauro]

GMs cant give you so much money

trips to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd city in the top five: 2100, 1700, 1300.

If you do well with your give will gain only 1300 per GM. I was lucky (very lucky) couse napo had the 2nd one.

Another thing: 5 non GM are almost equal to 1,5 GM. Also when you research Nationalism your GPT is poor (about 550 for me).
I'll post some screen right now.

 

[Welnic]

The commerce boost from your tiles gets multiplied by the money multipliers. I think that in my game when I built Ankor Wat I was getting a boost of around 200. But I got 2100 from a foreign capitol on my same continent. Though since the I popped the GM in 1795, it didn't really help.

 

[Tauro]

Here is the end of my research, with 500 GPT. Researching Nationalism costed me about 2800 gold.

Aboot 21 turns later I was gaining about 770GPT, +200 per 8 turns, and I was able to finally build that damned bank in the GP farm
So ( for me) the -1200 gold is compensated by the production boost in my new cities (only banks) and by aquiring divine right and building the minareth.

The start of the last golden age.
What you can do with 3 GP in the last 20 turns? Nothing, except a good golden age.
This is the effect :

+ 150 GPT after only 7 turn.
In the final stage it's better work the sea instead of putting pop to merchants. This allow the growth and you gain + 4 g instead of +3.

A total of 9000 gold in 7 turns. I think I gained about 2700gold

 

[Tauro]

Another little help that I didn't know

If you have very good relations with the other civs your trading routes will be better.
When I gave ecomomy for 60 gold or so to hatty I had Immediately a +12 GPT right after the trade.
I loved this game

 

[scherbchen]

heh, a big hello to the italians right here (and give us back that world cup! *curses*)

italian worker units sound like rest rooms

i really envy all that izzy territory i see in your screenies, damn i can do that! (but the thing is, i can´t ^^)

gosh this challenge is going to ruin my next week... hope you´re all happy!

ps: just out of curiosity... is there any way to tweak the save so that it becomes a (of course not eligible for this contest) peace-only game? i´d love to try out some things without worrying about war.

 

[Tauro]

LOL, hello to you

Izzy land isn't too good to work. The best is to take her out (necessary at all) in 1300 max 1400, couse working that land requires at least two centuries (forget the cottages )
And you can do it only if she has a different religion of the rest of the continent.
I was VERY lucky.

 

[Tauro]

57500

With another strategy, Izzy taked out in 700 and shutdown in 1330 after banking.
And I had four good shrines but no GLH...no trade routes no party

It was very funny warring with only horse archers and a couple of jaguars

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Has anybody looked into this approach?

Spoiler :

Put Izzy in the box: let her score the religions, but try to trap her in Madrid, then take the doubled or tripled up shrines from her after she's burned her prophets

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

Has anybody looked into this approach?

That's a good idea. No, I haven't tried it. My intuition is that ...

Spoiler :

She often founds both Buddhism and Hinduism before settling her 2nd city, but if she gets a 3rd religion, that would likely wind up elsewhere. Two shrines in Madrid might really be enough, but I've managed to get the first 3 religions in T... um whatever the capital is called. You'll be making more money with Wall Street in the capital instead of Madrid, since you can use Bureaucracy in addition to your 3+ shrines, but you might benefit from being able to ignore great prophets and the religious technologies in general. I haven't played very far, but I feel like my technological development has really suffered from the time I spent on researching religion.

 

[carl corey]

Wow, you guys are really duking it out here. I haven't looked at the latest saves, I'll try to do this tomorrow and post the updated scoreboard on page 1, second post. Congrats to Tauro for his 60k attempt.

I might be out of town during the next weekend. Real life and all... In that case, the deadline will be set to Monday, 9th and I'll compile the results then. I'll mention this again when I'm certain about it.

 

[cabert]

i certainly won't be able to try this challenge before deadline, but i was thinking about a few different approaches :
- teching to banking then stopping research while working cottages everywhere (guilds open knights, knights kill isabella, then everybody lives in peace )
- teching to military units asap, start razing all over the place, keep only holy cities with shrine , pillage (targets = cottagers, england somewhere?)
- teching to masonry (pyramids) and CoL, then superspecializing everything = GM en masse (10 great merchants seems doable, don't you think?) +free beakers

 

[Tauro]

Hello
About your ideas:

1)
Useless You need more trade routes than cottages, couse you can't have time to grow them. Forget emancipation, even if you fly with the science (pyramids, a load og specialist per city and so on...) you can't gain it till 1600. If you reach it before means that you are too small to use it well or that you are too poor to break 65/70 K

2)
Early warring is one of the keys, always
I was thinking to take ALL the continents before 500 AD (after it costs the game), but it is quite impossible

3) it's ok, but you have to do in combination with warring, GLH and colossus

Good luck, I keep thinking that 75K is breakable.

 

[cabert]

just one more thing :
no one went for mercantilism+caste system combo?
Could be cool, after you conquer all those pretty cities

 

[Tauro]

Better trade routes

BTW in my last attempt I was able to reach corporation for the +1 trade and the wall street.

In a unbelieveble way, after that, and with free market and open borders to all, I lost ALL the foreign route!!
Why???

 

[Dr Elmer Jiggle]

In a unbelieveble way, after that, and with free market and open borders to all, I lost ALL the foreign route!!
Why???

Probably everyone else switched to Mercantilism. You might need to gift Corporation to your allies to make that approach work.

 

[cabert]

Better trade routes

BTW in my last attempt I was able to reach corporation for the +1 trade and the wall street.

In a unbelieveble way, after that, and with free market and open borders to all, I lost ALL the foreign route!!
Why???

now you see why i advocate mercantilism