Earth challenge (huge size)

[guspasho]

6) Warring against Raggie's Berserkers with comparable units is sub-optimal.
7) Warring against Julius' Praets with comparable units is sub-optimal.
8) Warring against Genghis' Keshliks with comparable units is sub-optimal.

Axe rush JC before he gets his Praets, then take out Ragnar. Dealing with Genghis alone shouldn't be too much of a problem. At the very least it's very easy to axe rush Ragnar, and I highly recommend it since his land is so rich.

EDIT: Or better yet, chariot rush.

 

[strijder20]

Ordinarily I'd say dom is the lowest hanging fruit for high score, yes, but Russia is a very special case. Its UB is geared toward space race and its location on the map is ideally suited to runaway teching. I think it's possible to win space even sooner than dom if the teching is done properly. I'm giving that a shot. If it's still a lower score than the doms posted here, I'll go back to dom and unlike my first go-around, won't wait for Cossacks.

I think the best tactic is to conquer 40 % of the world, farm spam everywhere, go representation/mercantilism, get the Statue of Liberty, whip libraries/universities/observatories everywhere, go straight for superconductors, whip the research institutes, research SS techs and leave on your spaceship to Alpha Centaury. In my Noble game as the vikings I reached assembly line in 1400 - which can be done better, but it shows that conquering a lot of land helps your tech rate on the long run instead of crashing it.
But I do have respect for the fact you are trying another victory instead of the endless dominations which get posted.

 

[Skallagrimson]

I think the best tactic is to conquer 40 % of the world, farm spam everywhere, go representation/mercantilism, get the Statue of Liberty, whip libraries/universities/observatories everywhere, go straight for superconductors, whip the research institutes, research SS techs and leave on your spaceship to Alpha Centaury. In my Noble game as the vikings I reached assembly line in 1400 - which can be done better, but it shows that conquering a lot of land helps your tech rate on the long run instead of crashing it.
But I do have respect for the fact you are trying another victory instead of the endless dominations which get posted.

My science nerd efforts didn't gain as early of a space vic as I thought. It was fun, in a way, batting away keshliks with Cossacks on defense (counteroffense) but as you suggest, size wasn't huge enough to let the tech heat go supernova like it tends to do working toward dom.

In my new try I'm "acting as if" doing for dom. Raggie is toast and I'm grabbing easy cities in Mongolia in a sort of conquest-race as China's gobbling them up quickly on his end as well. Soon as China and I meet in the middle I plan to steamroll over China, then turn attention toward erasing Julius off the map, then Suri, secure all of Eurasia land-wise (leave the islands and Australia for the losers), then go grab Africa. If that's not enough for dom, take space. It's already into the 1500s though so I'm a bit behind schedule--Raggie put up a hell of a fight as he's a massive techer (which proves how right it is to axe-rush him first) and the early war fight gave me two economy crashes to recover from. I have some ideas for refining this to get Raggie gone sooner (cheaper) in a future game. It's down to a matter of how fast this can be done rather than "whether" it can.

 

[guspasho]

My science nerd efforts didn't gain as early of a space vic as I thought. It was fun, in a way, batting away keshliks with Cossacks on defense (counteroffense) but as you suggest, size wasn't huge enough to let the tech heat go supernova like it tends to do working toward dom.

In my new try I'm "acting as if" doing for dom. Raggie is toast and I'm grabbing easy cities in Mongolia in a sort of conquest-race as China's gobbling them up quickly on his end as well. Soon as China and I meet in the middle I plan to steamroll over China, then turn attention toward erasing Julius off the map, then Suri, secure all of Eurasia land-wise (leave the islands and Australia for the losers), then go grab Africa. If that's not enough for dom, take space. It's already into the 1500s though so I'm a bit behind schedule--Raggie put up a hell of a fight as he's a massive techer (which proves how right it is to axe-rush him first) and the early war fight gave me two economy crashes to recover from. I have some ideas for refining this to get Raggie gone sooner (cheaper) in a future game. It's down to a matter of how fast this can be done rather than "whether" it can.

Did you cottage spam? Russia's riverland is ripe for cottage spamming (especially if you're Ragnar...)

 

[Skallagrimson]

Did you cottage spam? Russia's riverland is ripe for cottage spamming (especially if you're Ragnar...)

I was Cathy (renamed Ivan the Terrible). Moscow is an obvious production city, with one good river grass city to the north, a few in the Baltic coast, and the rest are either prod or AI commerce to be taken. Marginal tundra crap to the east.

My latest approach as the Russians was "all war all the time" from the very first axe-rush to push Raggie into the sea all the way until I got dogpile-DoWed by Genghis and Shaka and drowned in a sea of knights and war ellies.

Had two economy crashes (deficit at Strike) to recover from while fighting Julius (the second war after taking Scandinavia), and then decided to take out Ramses due to him sitting on the Christian holy city and most of the civs in Eurasia and Africa were Christian. That went well, particularly because Chin Shi Huang wanted that shrine too and so it was a war-race to the shrine, which I won (sacrificing the taking of Thebes to get there first).

My biggest military mistake was going after Mansa's lands assuming that Genghis and Shaka would keep fighting each other. They didn't. They took one look at some of my rich and not-too-heavily-defended cities and put two and two together and decided it was time to dogpile me while most of my army was off in West Africa. I held off Genghis for a few turns using terrain and pikemen against the first few waves of his knights, but the second through fifth mega-stacks were just two much. And when Shaka wrapped up everything I'd taken in Africa, that was just irreparable damage.

Point learned from that go-around was that economy crashes are killer, especially when it allows even the backward psychos to get to on-par tech with you, then they win by numbers.

I want to see a detailed walk-through by one of the players here who say they won Dom on Monarch by 1300. I'm not calling you guys liars but there's just SO many cities to take, so much economic impact to try to absorb, I need to find out what part of the dom-rush strategy I'm doing wrong.

Meanwhile I'll fall back to my usual REX-tech-attack strategy, get a late-game dom victory, and post a lower point score and take my medicine.

 

[guspasho]

I finally finished my domination game with Ragnar. 22 hours. How some people manage it in under 4 hours is beyond me. There's just too much worker management.

Anyway, 1665AD, Noble, 171782 pts. See here for details and screenshots.

I thought I'd try to do this with several different civs but the time commitment is just too big. It's just too tedious to finish a game when you know you've won long before. I usually just quit rather than waste the several hours that it takes me.

Matrix, the save I submitted is from the turn before the game gave me a victory. Just hit end turn. I hope that is sufficient.

 

[Skallagrimson]

1665 may be doable on Noble. I've also found from experiments that Asoka has a much better trait fit to the huge map: organized lets you REX with impunity to fill in the tons and tons of open land and still tech. Spiritual allows fickle religion and civic switches to enable fine-tuned optimization of the economy for the situation (war-peace-war-peace, etc.)

I'll make a run for it on Prince first and if I don't make it by 1665, drop down into nobleville see if that helps the speed of conquest.

 

[GandalftheWhite]

Vikings
Immortal Difficulty
Domination Victory
1465 AD
615551 score

Spoiler :

Started by migrating. My scout got some gold from the hut near the Viking start. Didn't explore any more huts the entire game (except one on a Pacific island in the 1400s which yielded some hostile villagers). Settled first settler one spot southeast of the copper allowing access to copper, silver, stone and two fish. Settled the second settler at north end of the Gulf of Finland granting access to fur and deer.



Built up some basic infrastructure, then built some axemen. Herbalist event (testing herbs on your people) led to one extra happiness for ten turns. Only got two other events the rest of the game. In 975BC (near the end of my war with the Romans) a volcano exploded near my capital wiping out my only connected copper mine, my only silver mine and my only stone quarry. That meant I couldn't train any more axemen until I managed to rebuild, but fortunately I had already built enough axemen to finish off the Romans. I got a Great Spy around 1300 AD; don't remember seeing the event, but he suddenly showed up in my capital. Didn't end up using him.

2800 BC. Egypt finishes the Great Wall; this was one of the three wonders I wanted for the game. Fortunately Egypt is not too far away. I'll deal with the barbarians until then.

Russian War (2325BC-1925BC)- conquered Russians with axemen. Unfortunately they already had archers, but I overwhelmed them with numbers.

Roman War (1500BC-925BC) - conquered Romans with axeman.

I finished The Great Pyramids in Moscow (1375BC) allowing me to switch into Representation for an early happiness boost. I finished the Great Lighthouse in Nidaros in 1200BC giving me a financial bonus.

Joined the Hindu religion along with Ramses, Mansa Musa and Shaka; Shaka had feudalism (and likely longbowman) and Mansa had skirmishers. Buddhist block of China, Khmer, Mongolia and India does not seem to have feudalism, which should make the Buddhist block easier targets

Attacking Egpyt with axemen would be suicidal, so I started building horse archers.

Egyptian War (260BC-80BC) - I whipped some horse archers and attacked Egypt. They built the Apostolic Palace in 245BC. I whipped a few more horse archers before they got a chance to use the AP. I didn't whip anything for the rest of the game

Indian War (40AD-100AD) - India only had three small cities left as the Mongols had taken over the rest of their cities

1st Khmer War (145-280)- I was waiting for knights to attack the Mongols and the Khmer didn't have many cities, so I figured I try to take them over in the meantime with horse archers. I knew it was didn't make sense to attack them, but at the time I just felt like attacking. I took over one city and them watched my horse archers get bogged down in the uncleared jungle and a bunch of them were killed by spearmen. I made peace because I was not making any progress and I started getting a bad feeling about leaving my other cities exposed.

I switched to mercantilism and caste system in 340AD.

Mongol War (385-700) - I had recently finished researching knights when Genghis declared war. It would have made sense while I was stuck in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but at this point it was just stupid. His stack of doom was massacred by my stacks of horse archers along with a couple of knights I had managed to upgrade from horse archers. After that it was knights killing archers. Mansa and Shaka joined the war near the end.

Switched to mercantilism and caste system to go with representation

1st Zulu War (715-910)- I was planning on attacking China as soon as the Mongols were subdued, but Shaka changed my plans. His stack of doom that was advancing to Mongolia must have been upset when the Mongol War ended because on the next turn they took over several of my cities in the Middle East. I had to redirect my knights and lost a bunch of knights in suicidal attacks in an effort delay the horde from advancing on Thebes (renamed Cairo), which contained the Great Wall, Apostolic Palace and several other wonders. I wasn't really worried about retaking any cities, but was worried Shaka would raze them. Took over about one third of the Zulu cities before making peace.

2nd Zulu War (1070-1110)- I took over all the remaining Zulu cities with cuirassiers with exception of one on Madagascar (didn't have a navy at the time)

Mali War (1220-1290)- conquered Mansa with cavalry

3rd Zulu War (1285-1290)- conquered the last Zulu city

2nd Khmer War (1310-1320)- conquered the Khmer with cavalry

Chinese War (1335-1400) - conquered with cavalry

Maya War (1410-1440) - bombarded costal cities with frigates; conquered cities with cavalry; left Pacal with the Falkland Islands

Inca War (1440-1460)- bombarded costal cities with destroyers; conquered cities with cavalry; made peace leaving Huayna Capac with one small city

View attachment Gandalf the White AD-1465.CivBeyondSwordSave

 

[Skallagrimson]

Two wars complete by 925 BC? What is that, one axeman per city all at the same time?

WTF...

 

[GGracchus]

Two wars complete by 925 BC? What is that, one axeman per city all at the same time?

WTF...

Tons of chopping, I imagine... Chop chop chop!

 

[GandalftheWhite]

Two wars complete by 925 BC? What is that, one axeman per city all at the same time?

WTF...

I believe I had 6 axemen when I attacked Moscow (5 next to the city and 1 two turns away). I had about nine axemen when I attacked the Romans. They had just settled a city on their copper source, so I wanted to attack before they had a chance to link up copper to all their cities. I had to wait until I had about 14 axemen before attacking each of their last two cities as they had 6 archers in one and 7 archers in the other.

 

[Skallagrimson]

I believe I had 6 axemen when I attacked Moscow (5 next to the city and 1 two turns away). I had about nine axemen when I attacked the Romans. They had just settled a city on their copper source, so I wanted to attack before they had a chance to link up copper to all their cities. I had to wait until I had about 14 axemen before attacking each of their last two cities as they had 6 archers in one and 7 archers in the other.

I need to try that. Previously I'd been building up 10 to 12 axemen before starting, but that just gives Cathy more time to turtle up too.

 

[Skallagrimson]

Tons of chopping, I imagine... Chop chop chop!

Worker worker worker (instead of axemen).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm thinking about running this on settler and still getting a top 5 score just for the lulz.

 

[Infantry#14]

Can I win domination on the world map with just Europe, Asia and Africa? Or do I need Australia and Philippines too?

 

[Skallagrimson]

Can I win domination on the world map with just Europe, Asia and Africa? Or do I need Australia and Philippines too?

My final decision to give up this challenge was when I saw I had Europe and Asia, glanced at the vic screen, and it said I still only had about 20% of the world's land mass. There's just no way. Those people who grab the entire world with a few horse archers are completely out of my league here.

 

[GGracchus]

Can I win domination on the world map with just Europe, Asia and Africa? Or do I need Australia and Philippines too?

You need to have almost every single inch of Eurasia+Africa covered. Going by GandalfTheWhite's post, you probably do need it or conquer a bit of America.

 

[Infantry#14]

You need to have almost every single inch of Eurasia+Africa covered. Going by GandalfTheWhite's post, you probably do need it or conquer a bit of America.

I got all victory types on the world map except domination and time. The game becomes a chore after I win the first major war. I never use the city governor.

 

[GandalftheWhite]

Can I win domination on the world map with just Europe, Asia and Africa? Or do I need Australia and Philippines too?

You can win a domination victory with just Europe, Asia and Africa assuming you have conquered/settled almost all of those continents. If you look at screenshots that people have posted after their domination victories (for example posts 202 and 207), you can see exactly how much land area you need. My game isn't a good example because I didn't bother to settle most of Siberia or the interior of Australia.

 

[strijder20]

I think it's easier to stick with Europe-Asia-Africa than go conquer the Americas, as you'll need ships.
And it's very possible, so do so.