[BTS] G-Major 191 - Celts, Monarch, Cultural - Deadline October 28th 2024

[Noble Zarkon]

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While the general Hall of Fame is an ongoing competition, we like to run time-definite competitions between updates that we call Gauntlets. Standard Hall of Fame rules still apply, but any games meeting the settings will be counted towards the Gauntlet.

Settings:

• Victory Condition: Cultural (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Monarch
• Starting Era: Ancient
• Map Size: Large
• Speed: Normal
• Map Type: Great Plains
• Required: No Tribal Villages, No Random Events
• Civ: Celt
• Opponents: Must include America (Franklin Roosevelt), Arabia (Saladin), Carthage (Hannibal), Egypt (Hatshepsut), Germany (Bismark), Greece (Alexander), Mali (Mansa Musa), Netherlands (Willem Van Oranje)
• Version: 3.19.005
• Date: 3rd August to 28th October 2024

Must not play as Inca.
The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker.

 

[Lcpl Jack Jones]

OK, I'll put my neck on the line, one of the goals for September is to submit a descent entry in this Gauntlet. So my question is where will I find the best advice on how to get a result?

At Monarch level is it still 'worker first' or do I steal them?

And what is Mapfinder looking for?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

At Monarch level is it still 'worker first' or do I steal them?

The AIs won't start with Workers but will build them fairly quickly so I'd be looking to steal, watch out for the AI's wandering Archers though! Really for HoF it's steal a worker or restart I guess.

And what is Mapfinder looking for?

Some kind of Commerce because the Celts are weak in that area.

 

[Lcpl Jack Jones]

At the moment the only gold I'm finding is surrounded by hills and lacks food.

I've had 4 attempts so far each ending with an unprovoked attack by Alexander. I'm currently in the 1600's and yet again the Greeks (despite being at the bottom of the table) have attacked! I'm still 50+ turns from a win; the sensible thing to do is quit but I've invested a whole morning into the game and would like a result.

 

[Lcpl Jack Jones]

I've thrown the towel in ... even with a dun and castle fortress my muskets & longbows were no match against Alexander's knights ...

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Oh wow, that's a shame.

 

[antimony]

You should open some great plains map on World Builder. The eastern part is full of grass, forests, and most importantly two resources (deer,fur) that work with the Celts starting techs.

 

[Lcpl Jack Jones]

You should open some great plains map on World Builder. The eastern part is full of grass, forests, and most importantly two resources (deer, fur) that work with the Celts starting techs.

I guess it makes sense; Workers have something to do which allows researching Medication first followed by Monotheism. I will see what Mapfinder turns up ~ 4+ fur with deer & stone in the "fat cross", what could possibly go wrong!

At present I'm trying a 'beefed up' start, i.e. an abundance of cow, which worked well for Catherine in a Space game I submitted the other day. I'm at 500 AD but the map lacks marble meaning some Wonders are an age to build.

 

[antimony]

There are so many cows on this map script! Sometimes you get oddities like forest cows or hill cows too. The middle of the map could give you a cows + floodplains + gold start which would be nice, it's always a tradeoff between having some production for the wonders but also enough food/rivers for a large bureaucracy capital.

I might try that in the next weeks, don't usually do HoF competition but Cultural games tend to be shorter.

I'm not sure it's worth rushing the early religions at the expense of development. Code of Laws and Philosophy are easy to get and don't require sacrificing your early game. And on a map like great plains, you tend to meet lots of neighbors and the other religions will come to you eventually.

 

[antimony]

I submitted a game that beat the current best time in that HoF slot, but it should be possible to do much better. It was a start on the eastern edge of the map with wet corn + 3 furs, so a great commerce capital, plus more pigs and corn for other cities, and marble not too far. I put the minimum required AIs to do a totally peaceful game.

However, the first 3 religions were built on the other side and never got to me, and I took Christianity without stone so that set of cathedrals took a while to build. I also spent a lot of time in OrgRel, which I realize now isn't that good for Brennus, since you already get +100% on temples and +100% on most cathedrals / wonders with the resource, so +25% only brings you from 200% to 225%. I should have spent more time in Caste/Pacifism to put the extra food to good use.

In any case, I since saw a former G-Minor writeup from @Kaitzilla here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/g-minor-112.407399/post-10110628, which shows you can get extremely strong multi-cow starts on this map script, so I'm generating map finder saves along those lines. It seems however that marble only appears in the grass part of the map, and it's quite important for a cultural victory. Maybe looking for saves that combine cows with resources from the grasslands (e.g. gems, deer, pigs) can produce something at the plains / grasslands boundary, putting us closer to marble.

 

[nocho]

After some trials I also concluded that the best start would be a fur-start in the eastern green part of the map. I rolled a triple silver start in the south western floodplain area with a corn on a FP which was a great capital, but just too few other nice city sites available in that area and indeed a lack of marble which only seems to spawn in the east, so abandoned that one.

I went with a start with just one fur but 2 corn, pig and deer and lots of river. Gems could be picked up with the 3rd city and eventually both marble and stone with like city 7 and 10. I did eliminate one AI with chariots that added 3 cities so I was at 13 cities at 1AD, eventually expanded even further to no less than 27 cities including conquests. That partly had to do with Saladin growing relatively powerful and eventually declaring on me with 2 of his vassals, so grew an army for defense that eventually went on a rampage. I don't feel it was expanding too much, I had no trouble maintaining 100% culture and like with space games I reasoned that running wealth in the outer cities should be at least commerce neutral if not beneficial. It of course also relaxed the trouble of religion spreading and temple building. The 3 first religions were also founded abroad, but I did get a hindu spread, so I had 5 religions to work with.

I also got the victory well within the current best HoF time, but it seems I'm second of five submissions (nice to see some activity for this gauntlet btw!) so might try again. I took 2 extra AIs which maybe I shouldn't have done (though like I did, I did count on chariot rushing someone). An extra fur or gem in the capital would have been nice I guess.

There seems to be something odd with the mapscript though. The amount of food around seems to vary quite a bit. I was also quite astonished to find out that in my game with 10 AIs, 8 out of those 10 didn't have a food source in their capital. Of the other 2, I eliminated one of them with the chariots and the other one was Saladin, who not so surprisingly quickly came out on top of the other ones.

 

[Conquistador 63]

I decided to take part in this nice gauntlet. At first, I tried running mapfinder, and let the game run for a night, but to my surprise, after 999 runs no save was generated.
Not sure if I need to adjust the rules or something else is wrong with my settings.

Spoiler :

Anyways, even without mapfinder I did start and managed to submit a couple of games. In both we had western starts.

In the first run I tried the old fashioned 9 cities totally peaceful strategy. My army consisted of 9 warriors for MP. Not brilliant but got the best of my 2 results.

In the 2nd run I had horses in the capital and WvO to my East, so rushed him and then attacked Alex (with Cats and Swords) who was further East, already in the grassland area with corn and marble. Eventually got up to 14 cities and 5 religions to work with, but then at some point I must have misclicked and selected to research Nationalism when what I really wanted was to research Lib to get Nationalism. When I realized that I still had to self tech Machinery to get PP from Lib instead. Must have cost me at least 5 turns on my finish date, which would be enough to beat my previous attempt.

I might try starting on another attempt.

 

[antimony]

@Conquistador 63

1st rule group: In great plains, corn is found only in the eastern pure grasslands part, so the settler on plains hill might be a problem here. Mining resources are rare on grass (some gems), you might have more chance with furs on this map. Corn/pigs/deer are the most abundant food in the grass part, with fur for commerce. In the plains it's all cows and some wheat, paired with gold and gems. There are silver and sheep in the mountains to the west but food is pretty bad there.

2nd rule group: There is seafood in the bottom-right corner but very few, wouldn't recommmend it.

3rd rule group: I suppose that one should work, I have definitely seen some 3 food 2 commerce starts from 1000 maps, but maybe relax it to 2 food 2 commerce.

4th rule group: I would pair cows instead of farm resources here, again it would be just wheat and it's more rare than cows. You can also get a floodplains cow that is a pretty good tile!

 

[antimony]

I got it down to 1400 AD with a 3 cow + 2 gems start at the plains/grass border, which is nice because I got a 2nd production city in the plains and then a GP farm in the grasslands. 7 cities, 4 self-founded religions. For some reason the 3 AI-founded religions did not spread to me in this game either even if Mansa was really close, maybe I should slow down the spread of my own if they're more likely to spread to cities without one.

 

[nocho]

I got it down to 1400 AD with a 3 cow + 2 gems start at the plains/grass border

Dang, I got it down to 1410AD. I had a similar start in that it had 4 cows and 2 gems, but a bit further to the west. My other two LCs were also cow based, one of them with 5 cows, 2 of which on floodplains. Still a real good GP farm wasn't available so I do think that indeed a start on the brown/green frontier with good commerce should be optimal on this map type for a cultural attempt. I had stone available closeby enough, marble I had to get from Hannibal, who did live on that brown/green border and had the closest marble to my territory, although unfortunately not a good enough capital to be a potential LC. In any case, I got all his terrain including the marble in the BCs with horse archers. Religion wise I got quite lucky, Saladin started right north from me and founded hinduism and judaism, which both spread to me. Hannibal had some buddhist cities from living next to the founder Hatty. So I did get to work with all 7 religions and my LCs got full multipliers in the end. Also conveniently Alex lived further NW from Saladin, so they battled it out during the whole game. In other attempts these two were also the most battle prone.