Fastest RV/tiny world

GalleySlave

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 5, 2021
Messages
60
While I don't relish micromanaging medium-to-large empires, in a smaller setting it can be interesting working out how to optimize things. For instance, I was wondering how quickly I could manage a Religious Victory on a Tiny map, and after a few tries I came up with about as good a start I could ask for, in context:

rushing russians.png

(If you're wondering how the warrior got so far to the west, I was using the "Faster Starting Settler" mod, and my settler spawned 2 tiles to the west of St. Petersburg. I settled on a dye, which is where the extra faith in the cap comes from.)

I've played it out several times from this position, the best I've managed so far is turn 39. I can have a +9 Lavra built by turn 12, latest; from there I've tried different approaches, but in the end the key bottleneck is faith production. It takes 480 faith to buy 3 missionaries (unless I take Holy Orders, but then I lose Missionary Zeal), and even with Russia's tundra abilities that's a lot of faith for the early game.

Ultimately what controls the speed of victory is what I get from the goody huts - there are 3 that can be reached by turn 10. Getting +1 population cuts the lavra/shrine production down by 1 turn each; a builder can chop the woods SW of the city and cut 2-3 turns off the shrine (can't research mining soon enough to chop the lavra); but the real prize is a relic, which provides a significant boost to faith production - the turn 39 victory was fueled by a relic. Now, if I could get all 3 of those things (or maybe +20 faith) from the huts, I might be able to get it down to turn 35 or so.
 
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