Civ 7 GOTM02 - Completion of Modern Age (end of game) Spoiler Thread

[Acken]

is this just done with screenshots or is there some special program people use to make doing this easier? I guess I could just keep a text file open while I play?

Personally I have the thread open and write down a reply to it while I play. This forum website will save your draft so you don't lose it. I just use the print screen + paste function on windows 11. If you are on say Windows 10 you can use a snipping tool to paste pieces of it. Or print screen for the whole screen.

 

[pkf]

TLDR: Patch crushed hopes. T44 - 30 (28) LPs = 14 (16) Turns.

Well, I kinda messed up the last age progression but I still hoped for sub 30 before I read patch notes. Production (and gold) cost of Factories, Railroads and Ports more than doubled. Techs and civis in modern cost +25% more
I had 4-5 cities with ~150 prod relatively quickly as I beelined prod buildings (military academy) and fascism but any of the 3 buildings would take at least 7-8 turns. It was quite slow almost funny haha.
And: I don't know what they wanted to change with coal and oil, but either resource just didn't have an impact - which is also hard to say because the game wont show hammers needed .
Think the time is ok considering that, have to finish next GOTM faster

T1: Legacies: Science Golden Age, Culture from Relics (+40), 2x Militaristic, 1 Expanionist, 1 Diplo, 1 Economic + Resource Gold (not great), 1 scientific point.
I used one of the wildcard points from last age for +1 pop to all. Converted 4 towns to cities for 300g each after. Huaiyang became Beijing and my new capital.
T2: 22/21 but some of my cities are super-unhappy. Probably because of specialists but game won't tell me. Got my towns new resources by leapfrogging some and made them food towns again.
Was considering Factory towns but not sure about the value, I have 6 factory resources in meaningful amounts. Declared on Augustus right away.
T15: Political Theory. Starting Fascism for the Specialist hammer buff. Razed Augustus' island town and now waiting for ideology to take more.
T17: Mass Production, starting first Factory. Cities except Cap are still building Railroads.
T19: Fascism done for specialist production, first Factory done (bought).

T24: Railroads and Factories take a really long time to build now. Ports, too. Buying them out after a few turns of hammers. Globalist elite incoming for the +1 resource. Realizing I needed Urbanization earlier.
T30: 169 TP. Still buying railroads factories and ports every turn where needed to slot more.
Oxford gamble turned into a fail as I completed Electricity Mastery the same turn and it just completed this again and Mass Production, essentially wasting my turn of science. Seems weird that "free techs" are applied to BEFORE science progress per turn but okay. Won't be able to grab that one science legacy point now.
T37: Banker appears.
T44: Victory. I didn't manage to kill Xerxes in time (dunno why I waited to declare earlier).

Not sure I needed the GA universities, when I could have just spent more gold on railroads/factories/ports and my science was so boosted already. Also underestimated the patch changes a bit.
Also quite bad to not spent all the gold and influence before age transition. However, in modern age I should also been more focused when trying to connect railroad cities (bought in certain towns to connect, but sometimes redundantly).

Overbuilding is superbugged, sadly. You get the +30% (from policy) when you start, but if you remove it from queue you will lose it. Usually a 2-3 turns difference. Why'd you remove from queue anyways? To check the remaining cost to rush-buy, which is not shown otherwise...
I also encountered a bugged CS, tried to befriend him but it wasnt meant to be:

 

[Sullla]

I finished on Turn 47 with 28 total legacy points for an overall GOTM score of 19. I could have shaved off a few more turns and scored an extra legacy point by eliminating Augustus, but deliberately left him with one city alive because I was sitting at 18/20 military score and thought taking his last city would end the game, whoops. The full report for the Modern era is up on my website here: https://www.sullla.com/Civ7/GOTM2-4.html

Some pictures:

 

[Sullla]

Wider metagaming thoughts from reading some of the other reports... If I had one major takeaway observation from comparing with other players, it was that the traditional metrics of strength for a Civilization game (i.e. getting as big and as powerful as possible) were still what led to the fastest finishes. Most of the legacy scoring goals didn't end up mattering very much in the long run; what actually did matter was having more cities and more science and more culture. This was also something that absolutely did translate across ages: the players who had the best science in the Ancient era maintained their lead in the Exploration age and then again in the Modern era. Conversely, players who fell behind in the Ancient era were basically already out of the running for any kind of fastest finish. Civ7's decision to split the gameplay into three separate eras didn't seem to have much effect at all in terms of how the player rankings shook out from this game. That's probably a good thing since it means that Civilization remains a snowball game despite the best efforts of the developers to thwart it, they just threw up a bunch of irritating roadblocks that don't actually work in practice. Anyway, it's clear that if you want to win a fast victory in the Modern era, it very much starts with amassing as much territory / science / culture / gold as possible from the start of the game and never stopping the snowball process. Building or not building 7 wonders in the Ancient era doesn't seem to affect this in any notable way.

If you care about the opinion of someone who probably won't take part in too many of these games, I would strongly recommend evaluating players based on fastest finish and not the in-game legacy points. The best-played games very clearly seemed to be the ones that ended fastest, and in fact playing well in Civ7 gives the player fewer turns before the era transitions or victory condition arrive, thus meaning that more poorly played games get additional time to knock out the various legacies! My personal view is that many of the legacy scoring goals are poorly chosen and do basically nothing to help the player win the game, especially the world wonders and relics in the first two eras. Valuing the ability to manipulate the relic minigame over simply winning the chosen victory condition faster doesn't make much sense to me. And on top of that, the legacy scoring goals start to get really boring after a few games of Civ7 because you're doing the same thing over and over again. If you're interested in an accurate measurement of who played best, it's really hard to choose something other than who could get across the finish line the fastest.

 

[Ballcrusher]

Final score: 36
(modern turn 63 - total of 27 legacies)

Oh, and I played with UI-mods as I forgot to turn them off - I must admit the official UI feels so bad when you get used to playing with UI enhancement mods.

I only completed the economic legacies in modern age. It was my first economic victory and it didn't feel that slow, so it must have been really quick before the newest patch nerfed the factories...

T28: 1st factory
T52: 500 factory points
T63: Economic Victory

 

[shoshonte]

Turn 94 Economic Victory

Final Score:

94 - 20 = 74.

Will do more of a writeup later when not so busy and attach my save.

At a high level I had no idea how the modern economy victory worked and so delayed on accident for a while as I only had one resource per factory instead of using all of the resources slots.

 

[pmarc]

Turn 49 Economic Victory with 8 modern legacy points (3 econ, 3 mil, 1 sci and 1 cult)
(savefile before activating banker last time on turn 49)

Final score: 49 turns - 29 points (12, 9, 8) = 20.

Specialists and great walls respectively were really helping the science and culture per turn at the start of the age, so I just beelined Mass Production, building production buildings, rail stations and factories in that order, bought a few in the end to turn on everything around the same time (turn 29 or so). Then focused on wars to take out Amina and Ibn who were the weakest Civs on their respective continent. The turns - legacy points formula isn't much incentive for the pursuit of other paths in modern, but I think turns / points would encourage getting everything (I was quite close to level 2 science and culture here even while focusing on minimizing turns to world bank.)

 

[pmarc]

Oxford gamble turned into a fail as I completed Electricity Mastery the same turn and it just completed this again and Mass Production, essentially wasting my turn of science. Seems weird that "free techs" are applied to BEFORE science progress per turn but okay. Won't be able to grab that one science legacy point now.

Maybe I'm unlucky, but it seems like "free tech" (from Oxford, city-states, etc.) always gives you the option with the fewest beakers among those not finished, including masteries from old techs. I doubt it's random.

I also encountered a bugged CS, tried to befriend him but it wasnt meant to be:

I also seem to encounter one like this every game, strangely it still appears as a CS rather than IP in the list (under the "heart" icon when clicking the leader) after I befriend it.

 

[pkf]

Maybe I'm unlucky, but it seems like "free tech" (from Oxford, city-states, etc.) always gives you the option with the fewest beakers among those not finished, including masteries from old techs. I doubt it's random.

That's definitely the case! My gripe is with something else: I had 3 techs with the same cost eligible for the free tech, one I was researching with 1 turn to go. When the free tech arrived next turn, it just gave me the tech that I would have already completed the same turn (and my beakers for the turn were gone).
It's been 10 years since I played 5 but I think I remember that Science progress would be calculated at the start of the turn, free techs after, meaning the above (superunlucky) situation could not happen.

 

[Sullla]

Out of curiosity, are we going to get a final leaderboard for this game? The closing date was two days ago. Also, if anyone cares about my two cents, I'd encourage the GOTM staff to consider shortening the game length from 45 to 30 days and going back to the more intuitive "one game per month" setup. There was exactly one finished submission for this game between April 1 and April 15, plus the general unpopularity of Civ7 is leading to very low turnout for the recent games. I think GOTM3 has something like 7 completed submissions in 30 days right now; it doesn't feel necessary to be running two games per month and diluting the submissions even further across multiple games. Obviously this is your call to make but I think you'd attract more interest by having one game at a time that coincides with the actual calendar months.

 

[Sullla]

It's been over a week at this point with no word from the GOTM staff so I went through and tallied up the results myself based on the posts in this thread:

Thanks again to everyone who participated, I learned a good bit by reading and comparing with some of the other submissions!