Isabella, leading Maya, Abbasids and Meiji Japan. Deity, Standard speed, standard size Pangea+ map, Deity no customization, played on 1.2.2.
t93 Antiquity, t40 Exploration, have not played Modern. All legacies in Antiquity, all legacies minus economic in Exploration (only got 1 economc point in Expl). Clearly a Huge map would help but I wanted to see what could be done at Standard size and Himiko is better but I wanted to see what Isabella could do.
I could try to play Modern on 1.2.3 as the legacy option allows me that, but cannot go back to 1.2.2 and I dont want a speedrun over 2 different updates. To make matters worse, I missplayed the last Exploration turn as I had to rush the last turn of Exploration which is a really important turn to set up overbuilding in Modern for the Japan ability (as you will finish all buildings in all cities every time you get a future tech, and I got 8-9 future techs in the last turn and a couple more on the previous one, 13 repeats of the Diplo cap and 4 repeats of the science cap). I wanted to get my Modern save in before the update so did not play it optimally.
Posting anyway as I got far enough to draw some conclusions, I played a few turns of Modern just to get a feeling of what it would look like.
Caveats, pretty huge.
- I rerolled the map until I got map where I discovered 2 NW in the first 10 turns.
- I replayed turns to my hearts content, not just reloding any mistakes but even worse I reloaded for optimal play. I would be unable to reproduce anything close to this result under GoTM rules.
- I tried to avoid civ wipes in Antiquity as I wanted to check if a peaceful run could be as fast as a warry one. I believe a peaceful run is faster or at least equally fast but whats more important peaceful sets the slingshot into Exploration and Modern much better.
- I played in 1.2.2 before age transitions etc. 1.2.2 is no longer available so cannot do Modern.
TL;DR, Himiko>Isabella for a complete game, but Isabella>Himiko in Antiquity and Exploration. The main issue is the diplo cap. If you check
@Salamis game, he gets 13 diplo caps, same as me plus but I also have 5 science cap repeats. The difference is that he is able to have 6 alliances by t7 due to Himiko's ability, while I was only able to get 2 by t3. That's a killer and shows why Himiko is the optimal leader for fast science. I think there may be a strategy where I use the science cap which I could repeat 17-18 times I think, but the lack of diplo cap repeats would hit my money and production. Production would not be that much of a problem as I have 4 military IPs in the map, and that + bulbing some masteries through overbuilding will be enough to 1 turn the last three projects. But money is almost certainly an issue, as in this strategy you turn money into overbuilding production and that into science and you need tons of money. Culture, may also be a problem, you can get to Communism pretty fast but not sure whether i could get there in less than 15 turns.
I estimate I could have done Modern in 20 turns or so, maybe a little faster, but I can see I will not get close to the t12 Modern with Isabella to beat Salamis speedrun or even to t15 to tie. I may even still try to finish Modern for the learning experience, but I am a little disheartened by being caught by the update, I thought I would have 3-4 more days. I would also like to take a crack at the GoTM, and I am running out of time.
If I get time, I will expand this post to go deeper into strategy and tactics, and complete it with screenshots and saves, because I think in our write ups we tend to take a lot of knowledge for granted and that does not help as much the new players.
@Manpanzee thank you so much for starting this thread, I had a blast, I learned a lot from you and learned a ton with my Isabella experiment and reading all the contributors.
@Salamis, your ever improving runs have been an inspiration. I hope you play the GoTM one of these days. Thank you also to all other contributors. All of your posts make this game a lot more fun to play.
