Hello.
For those who havn't read the whole other thread (it's long and boring), I've been practicing 20K cultural HOF games at all different difficulty levels, with great success, partly because of some great comments by some posters there.
I just used some of these ideas to do a Deity level game, and thought that since this is the first such game I have heard of, I thought it might merit a separate thread, which I will try to make more interesting.
First the main idea : to achieve a true earliest date possible, this is not a "destroy the AIs and then start building up" but a "rush culture from the start and hope that the AIs don't reach a domination victory. The main idea is to use Babylonians, with their cheap culture buildings, get a good starting location, use SGL when possible, and make as many wonders as possible in the capital.
Now the details :
Map Settings : the idea here, as opposed to milking games, is to get the WORSE map possible, because I mostly care about my capital, so the worse the AIs are, the easiest for me.
So I am using tiny archipelago, 80% water, no barbs, arid, cold and 3 million years old.
In those settings, no river exist, and barely a few lakes. Many times, this is enough to slow even the crazy Deity AIs to a crawl.
The Civs : Babylonians, for Religious (smaller anarchy, cheaper temp and cath.) and Sci (cheaper Lib, University) and greater chance of SGL.
Nothing else comes close, as the UU is not important, as we will have a wonder based GA anyway.
Ennemies : Mongols and Zulus. this has become a tradition for me. First they are expansionnist, which is the worse trait in this setting, and militaristic, which while it increases their chance of attacking me, at least doesn't increase their wonder-building capabilities. They also start with the same techs, which reduces slightly (maybe?) their trading capacities when they meet each other.
I put them on least aggressive although they still are very aggresive, also since they always have 20x my military.
Default rules apart from that.
The start : The absolute minimum I needed was fresh water (which means a lake in this case) for irrigation and free aq., and coast for Colossus. I also need at least a cow, or 2 wheats, or a wheat and ivory (for SoZ).
The key : this was actually an idea that I originally heard from Punkbass (see other thread), I NEED a masonry SGL (this is my first tech). Although this greatly increases the amounts of start to do, it DRAMATICALLY helps the date, on all difficiculty levels. I have gotten the Pyramids as early as 3200 in some lower difficulty levels, 2850 in this particular game.
This gives a great early culture boost, stops the AI from starting projects for a while, and boosts growth in all city. The impact of this is huge.
Of course that means 20 starts on average played this masonry. In this particular case I had to do something like 30, because my first Masonry SGL I was on same island as Zulu
So on total something like 500-700 manual restarts (mapfinder is not really good for this).
Next : The actual game
For those who havn't read the whole other thread (it's long and boring), I've been practicing 20K cultural HOF games at all different difficulty levels, with great success, partly because of some great comments by some posters there.
I just used some of these ideas to do a Deity level game, and thought that since this is the first such game I have heard of, I thought it might merit a separate thread, which I will try to make more interesting.
First the main idea : to achieve a true earliest date possible, this is not a "destroy the AIs and then start building up" but a "rush culture from the start and hope that the AIs don't reach a domination victory. The main idea is to use Babylonians, with their cheap culture buildings, get a good starting location, use SGL when possible, and make as many wonders as possible in the capital.
Now the details :
Map Settings : the idea here, as opposed to milking games, is to get the WORSE map possible, because I mostly care about my capital, so the worse the AIs are, the easiest for me.
So I am using tiny archipelago, 80% water, no barbs, arid, cold and 3 million years old.
In those settings, no river exist, and barely a few lakes. Many times, this is enough to slow even the crazy Deity AIs to a crawl.
The Civs : Babylonians, for Religious (smaller anarchy, cheaper temp and cath.) and Sci (cheaper Lib, University) and greater chance of SGL.
Nothing else comes close, as the UU is not important, as we will have a wonder based GA anyway.
Ennemies : Mongols and Zulus. this has become a tradition for me. First they are expansionnist, which is the worse trait in this setting, and militaristic, which while it increases their chance of attacking me, at least doesn't increase their wonder-building capabilities. They also start with the same techs, which reduces slightly (maybe?) their trading capacities when they meet each other.
I put them on least aggressive although they still are very aggresive, also since they always have 20x my military.
Default rules apart from that.
The start : The absolute minimum I needed was fresh water (which means a lake in this case) for irrigation and free aq., and coast for Colossus. I also need at least a cow, or 2 wheats, or a wheat and ivory (for SoZ).
The key : this was actually an idea that I originally heard from Punkbass (see other thread), I NEED a masonry SGL (this is my first tech). Although this greatly increases the amounts of start to do, it DRAMATICALLY helps the date, on all difficiculty levels. I have gotten the Pyramids as early as 3200 in some lower difficulty levels, 2850 in this particular game.
This gives a great early culture boost, stops the AI from starting projects for a while, and boosts growth in all city. The impact of this is huge.
Of course that means 20 starts on average played this masonry. In this particular case I had to do something like 30, because my first Masonry SGL I was on same island as Zulu
So on total something like 500-700 manual restarts (mapfinder is not really good for this).
Next : The actual game
)
