Hello, all. I am a newbie to this forum, but have been playing various iterations of Civ since 2000 (when my best friend got me hooked on Civ II Test of Time).
I nearly pulled an all-nighter and finished the G-Major 12 game, and submitted it early this a.m. (My second game submitted to this forum.) I picked Elizabeth as the best bet for a space race victory, and managed a launch by 1934. I am sure some of you hard-cores won't have any trouble beating that, given some of the launch dates I see on the Hall of Fame. But I do not see going back and trying to do it faster now -- been there, done that.
Monarch is tough -- I used to play that level all the time, but it has become much more difficult since the last patch, so I have largely been relegated back to Prince. The AI starts with too many cheating advantages -- hopefully that will change with BTS.
I had several "false starts" with different maps, but could never get a third city built before the AI took most of the land around me, and I did not want to devote resources to an early war -- wanted to build early wonders instead, to maximize use of Elizabeth's philosophical strengths and crank out the great leaders. I finally resigned myself to only have two cities to start with, crank on the research, beat everybody else to Astronomy by a long shot (via Liberalism feebie), and completely conquered the barbarian cities and settled most of the "americas" in the terra map before the other civs had the chance. (Go England!) This approach let me build my empire to the extent necessary to keep the research pace up in the later game. I even brought over a great artist to set off a culture bomb in one of those cities to take over as much land as possible. (And my strong culture at home finally took over enough land to make room for a half-way decent third city on the starting continent.)
While I had more than my fair share of "bad luck," I also had some good luck too. I was beat out to Hinduism by three turns, so I continued on to find Judaism. For some strange reason, Judaism spread out like wildfire to all of the other civs, and they started converting, notwithstanding the other religions already founded. At one point, all but one civ was converted to Judaism. So everybody was pretty friendly to me, and I did not go to war with any of the civs (except the barbarians in the americas) during the entire game. (Well, I declared war on one when another civ asked me, but did not actually fight.) The Temple of Solomon yielded a lot of gold, and with only two cities early on, I was able to keep research cranked to 100% and still build up over 2000 gold over time until I started taking over the americas. Elizabeth's financial strength, together with the Great Library, the Oracle (used to obtain Metal Working), and extra gold from Colossus, helped me keep ahead of the research curve early on with only two cities -- something I am not usually able to do at Monarch level early on. (I was also helped by my unusually friendly relationship with most of the AI civs, who were more willing to trade tech with me.)
Now I will try the Conquest challenge with the Incas -- should be cathartic after all that peaceful building. Go Quechas!
-- I needed some resourses for a war, but I'm all done now.
