Thanks for the congrats, guys!
As I said, it was basically just modifications to your strategies anyway, so the credit is yours really.
I only threw the National Epic in because I'd run out of gpt to support my army: in fact I built too many longbows and had to delete them later when I realised. Had I not built them in the first place I'd have been considerably better off. I'd have gone for Iron Working myself, but I don't think the Iron mine could have been defended like the Gold mine. It would have received incessant pressure due to being on flatlands.
I'd be interested to see the start you've managed, splattery. I didn't think it would be possible to retain many forests whilst still getting to Feudalism on any sort of reasonable timescale. I'm sure a game developed from a start like that would be able to beat my date. I don't know whether I could have held out any better against grenadiers, though, since I couldn't have supported any more longbows than I did for most of the game. Maybe by building fewer earlier and putting in some shields into the Great Library instead for conversion to gold, so more gold is left for going deeper into negative gpt later.
I definitely stand by rotating out longbows as a good thing, though maybe if I were trying again I would take them out even earlier (maybe 30 rather than 40xp), and every so often evacuate my city of all but low-level ones (early enough that knights and such haven't appeared, obviously). Probably a few would be lost in the process, but it would produce a huge number more 10-20xp bows, which have a good chance of surviving those extra few turns at the end once you are reduced to them. The real thing that needs doing, though, is going into the defender selection code and modifying the effects of first strikes on that.
Choosing the next game, eh? As a newcomer to these challenges, I certainly don't know what ideas have already been thrown around, I haven't been thinking of them for a while like some of you. On the other hand, I'm interested in getting involved in the discussion, whether or not I decide to take a casting vote.
I like the looks of a hammer-related challenge somehow, though I think the World Wonder-related one would be likely to work better in that regard than a National Wonder one, since the latter would simply devolve into a commerce race for the enabling techs, I think. I suggest first to own the seven great wonders from the first two ages of tech: Stonehenge, Oracle, Great Lighthouse, Colossus, Hanging Gardens, Great Library, Chichen Itza.
Whether you want to build them yourself or procure them otherwise is entirely the decision of the player, but I would recommend it be held on (at least) Monarch, so as to at least make the player work for it if they want to build them all themselves.
What do you think?
Garath (note second 'a'
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challenge. I'd quite like the next challenge to include a peacenik 
option. 
challenges and 
challenges. I'd quite like to try a 
challenge.
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In a perfect world, the AI should let you as the player choose your defender, but that might end up being a huge player advantage since you could easily optimize your losses (warrior cannon fodder, etc.) It seems like the only effective way of splitting the xp is to move units in and out of the city away from the attackers, but again that is really tedious.
. Double the figure of any of the prior challenges.
