Delayed bronze working #2: Deity isolated

[Mylene]

I ignore your requests for playing this, cos you are the type of poster who will never take advice from others.
Why spend my time? I know i could win this, it's just not much fun.
You think you invented the wheel, and everybody who tells you "no" = non-believer.
Now you even think that it's valid on Deity, while all players who play on this diff. level regularly question you.
It's not me being the mischief maker here, it's you who puts his little needles like we all just re-roll when we like in every post, and expect only red roses in return. You're just boring.

 

[Revent]

I'll give BW a shot.
I guess this can go into some game I had in mind to test out
By the way, just to give you an indication of RNG, I went worker first, went Myst->Med and founded Buddhism despite my intention being TO

 

[Brennus.Quigley]

I ignore your requests for playing this, cos you are the type of poster who will never take advice from others.

Oh, I'm the first to admit that in my year and a half of playing the game, I've learned a lot from others, strategy articles, discussion threads, Dr. Kossin's bullpen, and AZ's youtube videos.

Why spend my time? I know i could win this, it's just not much fun.

Very convincing.

You think you invented the wheel, and everybody who tells you "no" = non-believer.

I think I did write the first strategy article to highlight the positive aspects of avoiding Bronze Working. That is certainly not "the wheel" as you call it. Casual, unsupportive mentions of the Feudalism and Civil Service bulbs do appear in older discussion threads. If someone doesn't believe in the strategy then they would be a non-believer. That's not an insult. That's English.

Now you even think that it's valid on Deity...

Did you not just see me post a Deity victory utilizing it? So obviously it's "valid" and "viable". Not gonna pull the trigger on "optimal" for this map until I give the better players more time to show me that it is not.

while all players who play on this diff. level regularly question you.

There are Hall of Fame players who have publicly and privately been supportive, so again you are exaggerating and mischaracterizing.

It's not me being the mischief maker here, it's you who puts his little needles like we all just re-roll when we like in every post, and expect only red roses in return. You're just boring.

Keep rerolling your custom settings (no huts, no events—which make Deity easier via no AI hut popping and slavery stronger via no slave revolts) maps if that's your preferred way of playing. I mean that. Not a problem for me. I'm just not interested in that approach to the game. I'll take the default settings and try my best on every map, even with my very limited skills.

 

[Revent]

The same can be said regarding huts and events to you Brennus. 'Keep relying on RNG to have the odds in your favour'. Admittedly, the AI is more likely to get an extra tech or two out of huts but you, the human player is more likely to make benefit of an extra tech. BW early on a map on t1 doesn't mean anything for an AI but for the human, it decides where city 2 is going to be for example As for huts and events, same can be said.

Adding an RNG element that has no indication of skill can be turned either way. You mention academia a lot. For successful articles to be published (and accepted) they should be subject to scrutiny by peer review and any tests should be repeatable and results obtained should be reliable. The first flaw in your games/tests is the idea that huts and events are acceptable. This automatically creates room for error based on the idea that the game is not repeatable and subject to RNG which in academia would be known as random error. There is nothing wrong particularly wrong with random error, hence articles will have small limits of uncertainty. The problem with this is that huts and events are not a small form of random error. The results can be game changing and significant in a game. Reliability is thrown out the window with huts and events.

Secondly, you have done some form of cherry picking. Admittedly, your strategy can be viable on higher difficulties on some starts (there is no proof it is more optimal than going with bronze working yet), but there are only two instances you have given us in which it works. I believe you mentioned 6% of maps generated with all random settings. That means that if each map generation is independent, I can be 99% sure to generate at least one of these maps in a hundred or so (you can use poisson to work out this but I'm too lazy to do the exact). But what you have shown us is that it's not 6% of all maps, but on very few maps with arid settings thus far.

I do applaud your innovation, but what you have shown this map is that arid slows down the AI, not that bronze working is optimal. To show that it is optimal, you should play this map with bronze working and play to the end. But, will you be able to minimise bias just because you favour your own tactic? Having others play will not give a good set of data because no one can compare their skills with yours, everyone has a different style and ability in Civ.

No offence intended of course, and I look forward to seeing further ideas and thoughts, but with some more solid evidence and lack of randomness. I have to say, Mylene is a GREAT player, one of the better players here, she doesn't need to reroll to win the map; it's just that, and I fully agree that winning a map via wiping off the AI on deity is a lot more fun than winning an isolated culture. There is just no personal satisfaction for me. I don't care about percentage wins, I just want to have fun which is why I do welcome new ideas

Revent

 

[ben-jammin]

Whipping and chopping is so crucial at the highest difficulties that I don't actually think you can win a deity game while purposely avoiding it for any length of time without hand-picking or altering a map and replays/map peeking.

Feel encouraged to prove us wrong, so far I see nothing to change my mind.

 

[Mylene]

If you watched some @AZ videos, i am sure you saw him re-rolling Deity starts.
What a bad player, he will not squeeze out hours of thinking and new tactics for every start. Horrible.

 

[ahcos]

I'll fire up a game where i avoid something like Agriculture or The Wheel, which opens up some weird bulbing paths with priests, go for an early religion, set up a spy economy and go for the infamous KNIGHT RUSH to crush my opponents. To prove my point i plan to post one victory screen. If people will be arguing about my misthoughts i'll just keep arguing against instead of providing more data, because arguing without base is certainly the most efficient way. Anyone who refuses to play my Huge/Marathon/Boreal/24civs map is unwilling to stand his/her ground, which makes me right.

Hell yeah i'm exaggerating, but then again ... am i?

Seriously, Brennus.Quigley - i really appreciate that you're trying to open up new strategies and/or new ways of playing, but you seriously need to have at least _SOME_ hard facts before you begin to argue with people who have so much more experience on the highest difficulties than you do. I'm repeating myself here, but you're arguing against one of the most proven and succesful strategies there is in this game. You have to have at least something here before people will discuss further with you. So far you have posted two maps with very mixed results.

Oh, and btw... please, regarding that events/huts thing: just get it over with already, if you want to argue on a solid base you will have to take those RNG luckboxes out of your games. Minimizing the random factor is crucial for any discussion regarding strategy. If you can't agree on that there's no use in any further discussion, as huts/events will screw up your results.

 

[shakabrade]

@Thrar

BW approach. Played sloppy and suboptimaly between mundane tasks so noone can say my skill made the difference.

150AD Samurai. If I had more luck and didn't get GPro instead of GS, it'd be BC samurai.
But it's ok. You can see I have researched far more techs, have an extra city, unused Great Person and one more to come, land is blocked. Also, notice I could have gotten Machinery faster if I didn't self research Aesthetics, Compass, Calendar, Literature, most of the Music and just went for Machinery, but that wouldn't be nothing like normal play here.

Actually, only normal play here is Rexing and trading and not going for samurai rush. When rexing, nothing is as good as a good chop and whip.

Again, BW is better suited.

 

[Brennus.Quigley]

The same can be said regarding huts and events to you Brennus. 'Keep relying on RNG to have the odds in your favour'. Admittedly, the AI is more likely to get an extra tech or two out of huts but you, the human player is more likely to make benefit of an extra tech. BW early on a map on t1 doesn't mean anything for an AI but for the human, it decides where city 2 is going to be for example As for huts and events, same can be said.

Adding an RNG element that has no indication of skill can be turned either way. You mention academia a lot. For successful articles to be published (and accepted) they should be subject to scrutiny by peer review and any tests should be repeatable and results obtained should be reliable. The first flaw in your games/tests is the idea that huts and events are acceptable. This automatically creates room for error based on the idea that the game is not repeatable and subject to RNG which in academia would be known as random error. There is nothing wrong particularly wrong with random error, hence articles will have small limits of uncertainty. The problem with this is that huts and events are not a small form of random error. The results can be game changing and significant in a game. Reliability is thrown out the window with huts and events.

Well, since I play with huts and events, I take the good with the bad. I don't rely on RNG in my favor. And taking out huts and events does make the game more comparable, but you are comparing an alternate reality where slavery is more powerful, the AI is slowed down a bit, cottages can be wisely placed next to mountains, etc... Again, if that's a lot of people's preferred way of playing, I'm fine with that.

And, with all due respect, you don't seem to properly grasp randomization in treatment and control trials. The treatment is distributed in a random manner. But in the final stages of trials (i.e. when they are tested on human subjects) researchers do not stop the subjects from interacting with the randomness of the world. If they did, the results wouldn't be applicable to the real world, only to the artificial setting in which is was tested. That is why an experiment that tests treatments on subjects interacting with the randomness of the world is considered more applicable to those living in the real world than is one in a controled laboratory setting, not vice versa. As Rah stated in an earlier thread, the way that random variance of outside factors is handled statistically is not by eliminating it, but by increasing the N (number of observations).

So, it is the norm in all of the club games etc. to play with huts and events off. Fine. I'm not trying to stop that. But it is a custom setting and you end up comparing games and the viability of strategies in an alternate, custom setting. You never learn (or intentionally choose to ignore) how the effectiveness of those strategies may be altered if they were employed in the default settings.

Secondly, you have done some form of cherry picking. Admittedly, your strategy can be viable on higher difficulties on some starts (there is no proof it is more optimal than going with bronze working yet), but there are only two instances you have given us in which it works. I believe you mentioned 6% of maps generated with all random settings. That means that if each map generation is independent, I can be 99% sure to generate at least one of these maps in a hundred or so (you can use poisson to work out this but I'm too lazy to do the exact). But what you have shown us is that it's not 6% of all maps, but on very few maps with arid settings thus far.

I do applaud your innovation, but what you have shown this map is that arid slows down the AI, not that bronze working is optimal. To show that it is optimal, you should play this map with bronze working and play to the end. But, will you be able to minimise bias just because you favour your own tactic? Having others play will not give a good set of data because no one can compare their skills with yours, everyone has a different style and ability in Civ.

No offence intended of course, and I look forward to seeing further ideas and thoughts, but with some more solid evidence and lack of randomness.

And about the maps. I don't really know what percentage are better played by avoiding Bronze Working. I gave a guess a while back, but that's all it was. But I do see a decent sized minority of them that sync with that approach, and that's all I'm claiming it's applicable for. I didn't have to dig deep for the two that were posted. Before it was that I wasn't playing Deity. Now it's that it's not Hall of Fame or that I've only posted two maps. Whatever. I had to start with two, right? You didn't expect me to post 100 maps on my first posting did you?

To be clear, I can't win this map teching Bronze Working early. I am personally better off avoiding it. I am already sure of that.

I have to say, Mylene is a GREAT player, one of the better players here, she doesn't need to reroll to win the map; it's just that, and I fully agree that winning a map via wiping off the AI on deity is a lot more fun than winning an isolated culture. There is just no personal satisfaction for me. I don't care about percentage wins, I just want to have fun which is why I do welcome new ideas

Revent

And Mylene may be a GREAT player, but in my experience she is one of the ruder posters. I'm also not convinced by the "I'm so good that I already beat this map before I played it" attitude. I'm certainly not asserting that she can't beat it. I welcome her to give it a try. But if she thinks she's too good for the map, then I don't know why she wants to interject, mischaracterize, and insult all the time.

Whipping and chopping is so crucial at the highest difficulties that I don't actually think you can win a deity game while purposely avoiding it for any length of time without hand-picking or altering a map and replays/map peeking.

Feel encouraged to prove us wrong, so far I see nothing to change my mind.

1) The map is not altered. I don't know if anybody can check that in the coding, but feel free to check if that is possible. 2) I got this on a second roll for arid/high sea levels. Again, I have for the better part of a year played with fractal/random terrain/random sea levels. So arid/high sea levels will come up just as much as any other combination and I am therefore not shocked by these maps. They seem rather normal to me. If you've been playing temperate terrain and normal sea levels all the time your experience has been different and therefore this map may be more uncomfortable or unusual. It's not even a perfect delayed Bronze Working map as there are a couple river side forests that would be nice to chop. No cherry picking, but people have asked me to post delayed Bronze Working maps, so it makes no sense for me to post one that is not. And so I played it two times. But even in my first attempt I quickly realized it was isolated and effectively employed the Liberalism bulb.

If you watched some @AZ videos, i am sure you saw him re-rolling Deity starts.
What a bad player, he will not squeeze out hours of thinking and new tactics for every start. Horrible.

For an educational video where you're trying to demonstrate a specific type of strategy and not your overall skills as a leader, then rerolling to get an appropriate map is OK. In fact, I rolled twice to get this map, but I understood that being because I wanted to employ a certain type of strategy.

I'll fire up a game where i avoid something like Agriculture or The Wheel, which opens up some weird bulbing paths with priests, go for an early religion, set up a spy economy and go for the infamous KNIGHT RUSH to crush my opponents. To prove my point i plan to post one victory screen. If people will be arguing about my misthoughts i'll just keep arguing against instead of providing more data, because arguing without base is certainly the most efficient way. Anyone who refuses to play my Huge/Marathon/Boreal/24civs map is unwilling to stand his/her ground, which makes me right.

Hell yeah i'm exaggerating, but then again ... am i?

Yes you are exaggerating. If you play default settings/fractal/random terrain/random sea levels (i.e. NOT TRY TO INFLUENCE WHAT TYPE OF MAP YOU GET) you can get the map I generated. It is very much a "real" map, not a custom, cherry-picked obscure map. I also have provided data about my play through and the rationale behind my strategy and have waited for others to do the same. Go ahead and mischaracterize and exaggerate all you want.

Seriously, Brennus.Quigley - i really appreciate that you're trying to open up new strategies and/or new ways of playing, but you seriously need to have at least _SOME_ hard facts before you begin to argue with people who have so much more experience on the highest difficulties than you do.

I do have some cold hard facts. I beat this default settings/fractal map via 1922 Cultural victory employing a delayed Bronze Working strategy. I don't claim it was the optimal strategy yet as I would like to be patient and give others a chance to play it through and post their results.

Oh, and btw... please, regarding that events/huts thing: just get it over with already

Default settings. You get over it.

If you can't agree on that there's no use in any further discussion, as huts/events will screw up your results.

Feel free to exit the discussion if you like. Huts and events will alter the effectiveness of different strategies, whether you want to admit it or not.

 

[Thrar]

This is interesting. Congratulations. I do see you have a lot of tech, but I don't really see how that is tied to getting BW early, more to going all-out cottages the way you did. Getting out those settlers and workers is, of course.
An issue I see is because of all those cottages and building wealth/research, you have no barracks, no forges, and chopped many forests already for expansion. Production will be low. You may be rather fortunate too that you didn't get any barb axes attacking your cities with warriors only.

Can you elaborate on how you got all those tech? You have more than 8k by turn 120, or an average of about 70/turn, while your sustainable rate is only 120/turn even now. I see your AIs are fairly advanced, I assume you traded plenty? For a military game I prefer to keep my neighbors in the dark so I traded only what I absolutely needed (IW and Math, in my case), as a result they don't even have Monarchy, Currency or MC and certainly no Feud or anything that would give trouble to maces.

As I see it, you have shown that for a quick expansion, nothing beats the chop and the whip. For quick teching, nothing beats cottaging up and brokering with your neighbors.
To do that, however, you sacrificed production potential and military investment (chariots, barracks, forges). Due to all the trading, your neighbors are far more advanced and HC can already defend himself well with Feud.
From a pure military perspective, I'd rather be in my position than yours. For peaceful expansion given the land this save offers, I'd certainly prefer yours. My save is attached for comparison. Given the Bureau revolt you're a single turn ahead, so they compare well I'd say.

 

[shakabrade]

@Thrar

Why would you go to war in position like this? Regarding state of the empire, my humble estimate says it could be 40-50% better if I played anywhere near my possibilities.

Beakers are stagnating in my game for a long time since I was lazy to do anything but hit end turn, and I did trade for a few techs. Far less than you should be able in normal game. Also, I begged and traded for gold. That is why I don't put too much into sustainable bpt. Maximum is what counts (if you don't crash your economy). Forgot to mention that I was in Golden Age. And I Oracled MC.

It is difficult to compare our games since you did some bigger mistakes. For example, you have improved pigs you are not working and didn't utilize opportunity to grow your cities since you are not whipping them. You should have researched Monarchy. Try that and you'll see a great improvement in your game. You also don't have granaries, that is really bad for any game.

Regarding military, only military buildings you need are granary and a forge. I have a food surplus and granaries so my production potential is actually greater. More so with Hereditary Rule.

Barb axes can be dealt with chariots. I did have half improved horses in my land. Also, with slavery, you can easily whip chariot if axe comes too near.

Forges I don't have because I was lazy (hitting end turn). I just wanted to prove BW can make better date. If you pulled out 200BC Samurai, I'd try harder.

Don't be blinded by rushes. Especially with slow units. Peaceful expansion leads to empires capable of taking over the world without crashing financially. You don't want to kill your trade partners when you already have a lot of land you can block. There might be some AI lovefest on another continent running away. Big picture.

Those trees you left have military value only if you have already prechopped them all. Otherwise your build up will be slow.

I gave you a lot of useful tips. Only didn't tell anything about GP generation.
Golden Age and then starve high food cities (Wet corn + pigs city for example). You can get 3 GP in a single GA easily if you plan ahead.

 

[ben-jammin]

1) The map is not altered. I don't know if anybody can check that in the coding, but feel free to check if that is possible. 2) I got this on a second roll for arid/high sea levels. Again, I have for the better part of a year played with fractal/random terrain/random sea levels. So arid/high sea levels will come up just as much as any other combination and I am therefore not shocked by these maps. They seem rather normal to me. If you've been playing temperate terrain and normal sea levels all the time your experience has been different and therefore this map may be more uncomfortable or unusual. It's not even a perfect delayed Bronze Working map as there are a couple river side forests that would be nice to chop. No cherry picking, but people have asked me to post delayed Bronze Working maps, so it makes no sense for me to post one that is not. And so I played it two times. But even in my first attempt I quickly realized it was isolated and effectively employed the Liberalism bulb.

So...like I said, hand picking and re-playing.

 

[shlks]

So...like I said, hand picking and re-playing.

Because the point of his thread is to demonstrate when it would be useful to employ his strategy... Not every strategy is ideal for every map, however delaying bronze working would be most map dependent...

 

[ben-jammin]

Because the point of his thread is to demonstrate when it would be useful to employ his strategy... Not every strategy is ideal for every map, however delaying bronze working would be most map dependent...

Every strategy is map dependant when you get to deity. At this difficulty getting any victory condition as late as the 1900s is an aberation, not a strategy. How one can be convinced that avoiding bronze working was neccessary for an extremely late isolated culture win is beyond me.

 

[Chase_2_Rabbits]

I had a little tinker on OP's map FWIW. I usually play on Emperor.

It was incredibly dull to play: partly because I had too much prior knowledge and partly because the roll created an uneventful map. We're industrious, we have marble. We can't possibly win the game through strength of arms or space, that's clear early on even without OP's play-through info. So we wonder-whore, run specialists, play super nice with the big boys, and try not to give up due to boredom on our way to culture.

I don't think you can beat this map taking BW early because you can't tech BW and get the Oracle out in time; and a free CoL or Aesthetics is pretty essential. Once I missed the Oracle on my early BW effort, the game was up. BW is of limited use on the map. We have no need of copper to defend ourselves or rush anybody. There's a relatively small amount of forest to chop. Once it becomes clear that we have to run a specialist economy, then the whip becomes less useful. We don't need much infrastructure and we have no need of an army.

I didn't finish my non-BW game because I just felt I was re-hashing OP's game and it wasn't very engaging. I've learnt that even if you get pretty crappy land on an isolated start then all is not lost - you can still back-door a cultural win with good diplomacy. Avoiding BW can help with this; but tbh I'd rather just roll a map that's fun to play.

 

[Brennus.Quigley]

I had a little tinker on OP's map FWIW. I usually play on Emperor.

It was incredibly dull to play: partly because I had too much prior knowledge and partly because the roll created an uneventful map. We're industrious, we have marble. We can't possibly win the game through strength of arms or space, that's clear early on even without OP's play-through info. So we wonder-whore, run specialists, play super nice with the big boys, and try not to give up due to boredom on our way to culture.

I don't think you can beat this map taking BW early because you can't tech BW and get the Oracle out in time; and a free CoL or Aesthetics is pretty essential. Once I missed the Oracle on my early BW effort, the game was up. BW is of limited use on the map. We have no need of copper to defend ourselves or rush anybody. There's a relatively small amount of forest to chop. Once it becomes clear that we have to run a specialist economy, then the whip becomes less useful. We don't need much infrastructure and we have no need of an army.

I didn't finish my non-BW game because I just felt I was re-hashing OP's game and it wasn't very engaging. I've learnt that even if you get pretty crappy land on an isolated start then all is not lost - you can still back-door a cultural win with good diplomacy. Avoiding BW can help with this; but tbh I'd rather just roll a map that's fun to play.

Even though you didn't enjoy yourself that much, thank you for sharing the results of your play through and your observations.

 

[vranasm]

well Brennus honestly...WHO is your target audience?

The more I explore your idea (and trust me I gave a lot of thought into this) I start to think that's mostly tied to arid (maybe that rocky/ice) settings we already talked about.

Now the trick here is that even "play a map" chooses "temperate" as default and game promotes the play on such maps in a way, so casuals most probably are not (and even if they were it is maybe totally void since after 7 years there probably aren't any casual players of civ iv when they got civ v and trust me...that game was made for casuals).

Then we change our eyes towards the fanatics, aka most probably this forum. Now let's see typical activity on this forum
1) games/clubs in S&T
2) succession games
3) story & tales
4) HOF game competition
5) xOTM competition
6) SGOTM competition
7) challenger series

well I won't go over every point, but I can assure you that most of the games are without events/huts (even challenger series evolved more into no huts/events games due to the games being more comparable).
The only exception is HOF game competition and we can see there big examples how huts/events can skew the comparison (just check the best dates in most competed categories and you will very quickly see why huts/events are frown upon when forming reliable strategies -the problem here is that best HOF games are games where you got only positive results from huts/events thus negating any kind of bad side you assume events/huts brings, it just took big amount of games to do).

And then there is the map settings and if it wasn't for you I didn't saw in last 4 years map that would be run with arid settings (well I think that WastinTime 5M game was one with arid? would have to check) and that looked like any of those 2 maps you posted.

What I can tell you based on my experience though is that ending game at 1900+ on deity with cultural victory is actually very improbable especially when you clearly didn't got involved actively in any kind of warfare on main land.
Actually you would have trouble with this on Immortal (my first almost win on Immortal was SS loss around 1850) and on some Emperor games.

Seems to me that your strategy is very niche and for very small amount of map types which isn't used anywhere I practice here on civfanatics.

I will agree (as I said before) that on this start seems to be very good to delay BW for getting Oracle, it's needed based on my playtesting, don't see much value to delay it up to Lib, but whatever.

I think a lot of players arguing with you here understand the concept of delaying BW to get something else quicker (writing, oracle techs came to mind very quickly), the problem with your strategy seems to be that you try to delay the BW until like 1k AD... that is very problematic concept.

I remember me posting in your strategy article one of first reactions about using GE from Mids for bulbing Feudalism while avoiding BW with some timeline (you didn't comment at all) and if I remember right I estimated the Feudalism around 200 AD.
The problem with 200 AD Feudalism is that you don't get any real benefit since at least 1 AI even on Immortal should have feudalism at that date.

Much better would be to have academy (if you got cottaged capital) and bulbed Philo which can be used to trade for feudalism and you certainly should be able to generate at least 2 GS up to 200 AD.

You mentioned (again) here that the main benefit is using GM, GE for bulbing some interesting techs, but what you lack to explain is how to fit this in the overall frame (like for example my GE->Feudalism example), if you don't fit your typical dates of techs you acquire through this gambits into some timeline for comparison then it's just void air.

Getting GM/GE is very expensive task and the main benefit is very shady (compared to the typical tech tempo of AI's), one could argue getting GM is easier if you oracle->CoL and switch into caste instead of slavery, but that strategy has it's risk too (oh and was done by AZ for some upgrade cash of warriors into axes if I remember right, was actually very interesting ).

Getting GS otoh is very easy (i kind of don't remember the techs that can be bulbed without BW from GS, if it is the same or not, but I think it will be math, alpha from one of tests I did)

 

[Brennus.Quigley]

@vranasm

Well, that's certainly a long and thoughtful analysis you're sharing. And FYI, from my end, that's certainly more enjoyable than you insulting me and then reporting the thread to administrators simply because you don't agree with it.

—The target is anyone who wants to read it. And anyone who is sitting in front of a map where they may benefit from delaying Bronze Working.

—It was actually me that made the first observation that club games are biased against delayed Bronze Working maps ("note not the first start as we got a plains cow start on first" or "Rolled afew Oasis starts but didn't like any"). So I agree with you there. We just probably disagree about the fact that I don't think that's a good thing and you're most likely OK with it. Huts and events. Well I take the minority position on this forum. For me, the comparability benefit of turning them off is outweighed by the fact that you are no longer playing the game as it was designed and that affects strategy (slavery is empowered over the other labor civics, cottages next to mountains makes sense, bankrupting your treasury makes sense, having no defense plan against a barb uprising makes sense). You and others may disagree. I am, and always have been, cool with that. I just find the effort by many to force and ridicule everyone that likes to play in the default settings into line to be rather unfortunate.

—About Hall of Fame games and their scores. Again, I don't care about Hall of Fame. I just want to win the map in front of me in an assured manner. And because I welcome random settings and play whatever map is generated, the maps I play are a little more varied than most perhaps. But again, some serious Hall of Famers have publicly expressed support and have mentioned that they will keep these bulb gambits in mind when playing those types of games. So they should know better than I. But even myself, with my far from Hall of Fame skills, can imagine that since victory type, map size, and game speed are all desegregated for Hall of Fame games that there could be a lot of instances when early Bronze Working would not be attractive (smaller maps have less forests, space race folks should prioritize chopping universities over chopping axemen, quicker speeds mean that chopping takes more worker effort, etc...)

—If you never get arid, rocky, or cold maps on your own then might I suggest that you start? After playing for so many years (much longer than me), you may now enjoy the extra variation in worlds that random terrain and random sea levels provides. Or maybe not. Just a suggestion. The thing about random is that you can still get those obvious early Bronze Working type maps too. You won't have to say goodbye to them at all.

—I am not against Academy starts at all. In fact I did that in the first map I posted (and still bulbed Lib by avoiding BW). But if your capital is not going to be your eventual science city, then I'd rather not.

—If you're requesting a GE Feudalism bulb map in the future, then great. There are a lot of bulbs mentioned in the article. Thought I'd start with the most controversial (Liberalism because it's the deepest). Your thoughts and healthy skepticism will be welcome for that thread too. And GM should we get around to it.

 

[Mylene]

Huts and Events OFF is standard here, and you are posting your weirdo strats...here.
Seems you missed that in AZ videos as well.
Get over it, if i may quote you, or you may leave this discussion

 

[vranasm]

I would correct you on one thing.
I reported the thread because I disagreed about the placement of the thread since to me it didn't look like strategy article thread (compared to the Horse archer rush thread as an example how I view strategy article, or snaaty's guide for Emperor+ games).

The moderators decided that you formed strategy article (based on the fact that the thread didn't move in strategy & tips section where it should be imo placed) and I obey the decision obviously.

Will look out for the GE bulb map ;-) and please bring something more fun to play the 1/2 world desert maps are not exactly much fun for me .