Ok, as I said in the first spoiler, the plan was to switch the palace to better lands quickly. The territory between Rome & Greece looked very good, so I persued that plan. Rome was taken in ~350BC with swords and horses, and three more towns were founded close by, to hook up the resources. (My military was too weak to conquer all of Rome, this was probably a big mistake.) It took until 10AD, before reinforments were ready to continue the attack and it took until 300AD, before Greece was gone as well to make room for two nice rings around the new capital.
Perhaps I should have jumped the palace right now, but I waited a bit longer until all towns had reasonable size and until Kyoto had finished its prebuild for the FP. Then I rushed the Palace in Neu Tokyo using a leader I had kept for that purpose, and next turn completed the FP in Kyoto. Man, was that a disappointment! Kyoto kept its strength, but all other cities of the original core went from powerhouse to completely corrupt...
Someone really needs to fix the FP in Conquests...
Sometime when my plan to switch the core to Alpha was already pretty advanced, Amsterdam (size 6) beat beat Persepolis (12) and Alexandria (12) to the ToA!!
So I realized, I had switched my core to the "wrong" continent. (Stopping in my tracks and changing the plan would have delayed the setup of the new core even more than it already was.) So I stopped expansion on Alpha (Persia was still a very good friend of mine, fortunately) and prepared an attack on Beta.
Shipping the units all the way from the new core via Gamma to Beta was quite tedious, but nevertheless the Netherlands and Korea were conquered in the 600s and by that time I was approaching dom limit, so I had to disband a couple of useless towns on Alpha in order to take better advantage of the ToA on Beta. From now on until the end I was always between 23-17 tiles from dom limit... On Alpha I left Persia alone and on Beta I left Russia alone. Both were always quite friendly towards me, as I kept trading luxes and techs. But this setup was far from perfect, I would have liked it much better, if I had a continent to my own and the two "functional" AIs on a separate continent. (We'll see the reason later.)
After getting enough land from the Netherlands and Korea, I cash-rushed settlers until 800AD. When my land was completely ICSed, I switched to Feudalism (first time ever I used this government...!) and pop-rushed libs, cathedrals and colloseums like crazy. Around 1300-1400AD (don't remember exactly) my money ran out, so I had to switch back to Republic in order to maintain all those buildings... With Republic I was still making 250gpt, so was able to cash-rush a few more buildings (also kept building Samurais in the core cities and disbanding them in the towns that still needed cultural improvements), bringing the victory date a bit further down.
Then, 12 turns from victory, the Persians RoP-raped me and burned down 3 towns!!
And next turn the Russians did the same on the other continent! The expected victory date went from 1475 to 1485! (The Russians even took the ToA for one turn, as I didn't pay attention that they had landed an archer next to it
)
Fortunately I still had my Samurai Armies and a couple of units to fend off the invasion and eventually even take the offensive, but I was not allowed to take any Russian or Persian city, because that would put me over the dom limit. (I needed their culture as a "block" to prevent my borders from expanding.) Therefore, after I had fended of the invasions, I moved my Armies into their backyards and burned down a city there as revenge
. Then they were willing to make peace again, and I disbanded most of my military to replace the destroyed cultur improvements. The win date went back to 1475. Uff, this could have turned out bad!
A note for AlanH: I had already noticed in the late 1300s, that CivAssist2 calculates the win date incorrectly. Even if you open the last auto-save (1465), it still shows 1475 as expected win date, even though the culture is already over 80000?!?.
[IMG="http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=209346&stc=1&d=1238753355"]http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=209346&stc=1&d=1238753355[/IMG]
Any chance you can fix that bug?
My first ever 80/100K game, and I must say, it was fun, but a lot of work. I was pretty surprised by my date, because I had certainly commited a couple of strategic errors for this type of game early on and didn't expect a win in the 1400s!
Cheers, Lanzelot
My original Civ 1 floppies have long ago gone the way of all mortal things...)
