Round 10: 1732 AD to 1906 AD
Not much to report other than I did achieve the Cultural victory. Bombay was the first to achieve Legendary Culture, then Delhi followed a couple turns later. It took longer to get Aachen to that point, though, for several reasons.
First of all, I had to turn the slider down at certain points because I was running so far into the red. I was able to get some Great Merchants generated to get some cash from foreign trade routes, and after the last of the infrastructure was built, I set cities to accumulate Wealth. That allowed me to put the culture slider back to 100 percent.
It was a long gap between Delhi reaching Legendary Culture, and then Aachen following suit, but it eventually did happen in 1906 AD.
The saved game is attached from the turn before it finished. Worth noting was my GNP was far ahead of everybody else, meaning I could have probably caught up in the tech race and gone for a Space Race if I wanted to. Of course, that wasn't the purpose of the challenge.
I ended up with the top five cities... Bombay, Delhi and Aachen, of course, were the top three, but Nuremberg was fourth and Vijayanagara was fifth. Nuremberg got there on population alone.
And as for the final score... ended up at 17606. Not as good as my last Cultural victory, but respectable.
Looking at this particular challenge, I believed these were a few things I should have done a better job with.
* Utilizing the Philsophical trait. I didn't use that to its maximum benefit, both in terms of running enough specialists and in terms of picking which cities should house certain Wonders that generate particular Great People. Looking back, Bombay should have housed the Great Prophet wonders with the Great Artist wonders going to Delhi. That would have allowed me to generate more Great Artists, as Bombay couldn't run that many specialists.
* I still need to work on the usage of Slavery to its maximum benefit. As I've said before, whipping is my biggest problem when it comes to my Civ tactics.
* I need to get out of my habit of not wanting to build on resources, unless it's a resource that needs to be mined to achieve it. That alone may have allowed me to get the Cultural victory sooner.
* A minor point, but I probably could have used the Spiritual trait better... as in switching to Slavery long enough to whip out culture generating buildings (particularly in Aachen, although that city had a slow growth rate, even with a Granary) then switching back to Caste System.
* I forgot to skip my tendency to build Libraries for generating culture early and going to Theatres instead once I had Drama.
With all that being said, I really do hope that, if my next challenge is on Hemispheres, that I actually get two continents instead of three when I pick two (and I swear I selected two continents). Of course, in this game, it wouldn't have helped much, given if my hemisphere had been one continent, I would have had both Charlie and Monty as neighbors... true, I could have just adopted one religion to make that guy my friend and take it out the other, but then I run into the problem of not being able to trade for tech. And in this game, it made a difference as Zara was one of my opponents, and his Organized trait meant he teched quite well.
Computer issues aside, I enjoyed this challenge and I'll be looking at starting the other one fairly soon. I'll just need to check into a Photobucket account as Imageshack has become a pain as far as uploading images. Or maybe I need to stop using dialup.
I got lucky with iron close by to the south. Still only need 3 cities. 4 would let me build two cathedrals per religion, but I decided to work on wonders first.
