I must say I had a fun time with this gauntlet. My first try wasn't going so well, so I abandoned it and started this game, which worked out pretty well. I wanted to play through without reading any of the posts in this thread for my first submission. However, I had been reading the ICS strategies from Pi-r8, Alpaca, and Sulla, so I decided to try it out.
As it turns out, an archipelago map is a pretty good place to use this strategy since there are a lot of tiny islands. Plus, there is really no challenge from the AI for expanding since they don't seem to like boats.
My starting position was ok, and there were a lot of hills for some production later in the game. I would have liked a few more river tiles though. Up until about turn 200, I was playing pretty normally (if you can call a peaceful game normal).
I got a few of the naval techs pretty early so I could start exploring with my embarked scout once my small starting island was mapped out. I needed to find some CS to ally and give me lots of food and culture.
I didn't want to expand too fast so I could pick up some key social policies for the ICS strategy. My first focus was Meritocracy for the trade route happiness (I foresaw a lot of harbors in my future). My ICS strategy was going to rely pretty heavily on specialists, so next I went for Freedom for the reduced unhappiness from specialists. By the end of the game I had roughly an average of 5 specialists per city, so this policy alone reduced my unhappiness from citizens by about 200.
Then I went for Secularism to make my specialists more powerful and Free Thought since I planned on having trading posts everywhere. The last policy I was able to take before my expansion vastly outran my culture was Order for the bonus
for buildings. I was hoping to make it at least to Planned Economy for the reduced
and if possible Communism for the extra
per city. Unfortunately that didn't happen. I did manage to get one more policy towards the end of the game for about 15000 culture after building the Cristo Redentor
I started the massive expansion tactics around turn 200. At this point I had five cities producing 68
. Every city started by building Monument, Library, Market and Colosseum. Once the Colosseum was finished, that city would produce settlers, workers, or work boats, with the exception of a few specialized cities that had good sites.
Most of the game was peaceful. Nobody declared war on me. I took out Egypt, Arabia, and Germany after I was able to build infantry. They were still using pikes and crossbows, and they were close to my starting island. I used 2 destroyers to bombard and 2 infantry (which I later upgraded to mech inf). The mech inf didn't even need bombardment support.
I ended up with 5 major production cities: my capital, Egypt's capital, Arabia's capital and two tiny island cities with lots of fish resources. Miami was literally a one tile island that had six fish nearby, and it was producing 92.8
per turn building the spaceship. My best production city, aptly named Portland, had six fish, an offshore oil, and a gold hill. The rest were specialists. Portland was producing 119.25
for the spaceship. The Seaport is terrific for a city like this. Once I built the Statue of Liberty, my millions of specialists contributed
. With Statue of Liberty and the Secularism policy, even unemployed citizens were better than most land tiles.
By the end of the game, I had 72 cities housing 413 citizens. Most cities didn't make it past size 6 or 7. All relied on my three maritime CS for their food, except for my monster fishing cities, and they focused on
and
. I was producing 2208 bpt and 293gpt. The gpt was usually much higher since I spent a large portion of the end game in golden ages.
The ICS worked out very well once the cities started finishing their buildings. I learned a lot about this strategy, and once I fine tuned how to use all the specialists my numbers really started to skyrocket. From turn 370 to 400 my bpt went from 852 to 1526
I finished Rocketry at turn 355, and it took until turn 391 to build the Apollo Program.
. But with my massive science increase, I was done researching the last spaceship tech by turn 399, only a few turns after I finished the AP. All my production cities just worked on spaceship parts until the last one was finished on turn 421, and it got to my capital on turn 426. Victory was mine
I can't wait to try this strategy again and apply all the things I learned on this go. I'll admit it was very tedious for the last hundred turns. I basically had to go through every city about every 10 turns and take all the citizens off tiles and use them as unemployed. This gave me a nice boost in production for the starting four buildings, and it also gave me a nice boost in science.
I included some progress saves for a reference if anyone wants to see how the ICS starts to grow later in the game.
Well done to you and the rest participants. 
!
