G-Major 29

[FiveAces]

I am thinking about a different strategy for this: OCC + PA and play GPFarm for my ally.

I do have a couple of questions, however:
1: Which AIs are good at getting an early cultural victory?
I played a test game with Asoka as my PA, and I couldn't get him to touch the slider or spread his religions around at all.
Will the AI recognise that my city will become Legendary, and so only focus on two culture cities?
If I gift the GAs instead of settling them, will my PA culture bomb them in those two cities, or waste them on golden ages and such?

2: Which AIs are easy to get in an early PA?

3: Which map settings make it easiest to get gold or gems at the start? I am all for using MapFinder, but I don't want to run 7000 regenerations to get a good start.

I'm glad somebody's testing this to see how fast it can be done, but I really hope it's not the optimal way for a cultural victory in BTS. We already have space for OCC PA.

1) from posts in the OCC PA gauntlet (you might want to look at this one), ramsees, ghandi, prob some others. IIRC that was before BTS, so don't know about those leaders. Note vanilla/warlords won't work on deity since someone will launch well before your team wins as the AI won't touch the slider. On vanilla, the AI will not bomb a city unless they have <60% culture in it (condition of the SDK). Don't know about BTS.

2) ones whose favorite civics are the ones you will be in at the time: HR, beauo, caste, etc. since it will be easier to get them Friendly. Then those like Cathy, Roos etc. that make a DP only at Pleased. but really you should be able to make it easily with almost anyone. you could even do mutual war and start working on it before MilTrad

3) Actually I've gotten 2commerce starts fastest on fractal, but it's not really that good a script. GP Sea and Pangea seem to be ok, though on GP you are in the mountains, but that's ok for OCC.

 

[ssjos]

I think that if you get Sistine Chapel, the GP farms will ultimately become Legendary faster than the cottaged cities. Especially if you have a GP farm with a couple of early wonders. All of the artists produce culture afterall.

This is not true at all. GP farm will have low production so it will be hard to build cathedrals and such for multiplyer. My GP farm sucked hard because of lack of population as well, its hard to find a really good spot on a small map.

Also specialist artist = 6 culture/turn, cottage = up to 9/10 gold per turn (with or without press), and cottage also produce food.
Anyway, the base culture of GP farm even with sinistine chapel will be alot worse than your cottage cities.

 

[WastinTime]

It will be extremely hard to get a cultural win via OCC + PA at Deity level.
Getting the PA will require mutual war or DP (Military Tradition), followed
by either Communism or Facism to allow the Permanent Alliance.

A date less than 1800 AD will be extremely difficult via OCC + PA
and the top dates for this gauntlet will likely be < 1300 AD.

I disagree. This was going to be my secret strategy. Have you ever tried a Space Race in BTS? It's hard cus someone will win culture around 1500. With the help of an OCC PA I think 1300ish is possible. (EDIT: Since we're forced to play normal speed, 1400ish.) I'll need to go back and read your proposed strategy, ZPVCSPLFUIFDPEF, and make comments. Have fun with it, I won't be able to join you until July.

 

[FiveAces]

BTW how the heck did you land on ZPVCSPLFUIFDPEF as a forum name? Wouldn't QWERTY have been easier? Or is it the English keyboard equivalent of something in another alphabet? Just curious.

 

[WastinTime]

up to 9/10 gold per turn (with or without press), and cottage also produce food.

10 ? Are you building cottages on gems/river tiles?
Or am I counting wrong?

 

[jesusin]

If I gift the GAs instead of settling them, will my PA culture bomb them in those two cities, or waste them on golden ages and such?

Wasted, unless under severe cultural preassure.
You can settle your GA in their cities after the PA, though.

Since Vanilla AI wouldn't touch the slider, cottages are useless while hammers aren't, so I send my workers to watermill/workshop over their towns.

 

[WastinTime]

Since Vanilla AI wouldn't touch the slider, cottages are useless while hammers aren't, so I send my workers to watermill/workshop over their towns.

This should only be attempted in BTS. In vanilla, it would be 1800's before you win. The BTS AI will crank the culture slider and use FreeSpeech. They even do it when you want them to build spaceship parts, so it's important to know which AI get distracted by culture and which will focus on the space race if that is your goal. (I've done a lot of BTS space race lately which is why I planned to try the OCC PA on this gauntlet.)

 

[WastinTime]

Ramesses II will enter into an early DP. Do almost anything to make him pleased and he will be ready to enter a PA when it is available.

Ramesses could be a good choice, but IIRC I found a bug in the code for Industrious leaders that make them less likely to go for culture wins than the programmer intended. Normally I like to play by intuition and not spoil the mystery behind the AI by reading the code. It's disappointing to find out exactly how dumb they really are, but I didn't want culture wins to interfere with my Space Colony.

 

[ssjos]

10 ? Are you building cottages on gems/river tiles?
Or am I counting wrong?

Im pretty sure that my Towns at river tiles(without gems) generated 10 gold. Without the river it would have been 9. (This was after I had traded for printing press)
Didnt check all that careful, maybe I was in a golden age or something

 

[ZPV]

Thanks for the input, guys.

I will only be trying this with BTS, and have done some looking at the code to see when/if an AI will go for a CV.
The main factor seems to be a pseudorandom number based on the capital's placement, with a substantial boost for economic traits and a small one for owning holy cities. (Good spot on the industrious bug, WastinTime, it only has half the effect.)

I also found that the BTS AI can use GAs to bomb/settle in its Legendary cities, but only in the 3rd one, so this is quite possibly useless here.

With the help of an OCC PA I think 1300ish is possible. (EDIT: Since we're forced to play normal speed, 1400ish.)

I agree with this. Based on my test game, I decided that 1500AD would be more than feasible, and 15-1600 would make a sensible first goal, before trying to push it earlier.

BTW how the heck did you land on ZPVCSPLFUIFDPEF as a forum name?

It is a secret code, rotate the letters one back in the (English) alphabet.
I stole it from It was inspired by a crossword puzzle I saw a few years ago.

 

[WastinTime]

The main factor seems to be a pseudorandom number based on the capital's placement, with a substantial boost for economic traits and a small one for owning holy cities. (Good spot on the industrious bug, WastinTime, it only has half the effect.)

Right, then leaders that prefer Theocracy (no religion spread) lose some incentive to go for CV.

Checking Aggressive AI has a similar effect for everyone (but who would check that?)

 

[Lexad]

10 = town (4) + river (1) + financial (1) + PP (1) + FreeSpeech (2) + GAge (1)

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

It will be extremely hard to get a cultural win via OCC + PA at Deity level.
Getting the PA will require mutual war or DP (Military Tradition), followed
by either Communism or Fascism to allow the Permanent Alliance.

A date less than 1800 AD will be extremely difficult via OCC + PA
and the top dates for this gauntlet will likely be < 1300 AD.

Sorry, the above comments were meant to refer to OCC + PA on Vanilla/Warlords.

I disagree. This was going to be my secret strategy. Have you ever tried a Space Race in BTS? It's hard cus someone will win culture around 1500. With the help of an OCC PA I think 1300ish is possible. (EDIT: Since we're forced to play normal speed, 1400ish.) I'll need to go back and read your proposed strategy, ZPVCSPLFUIFDPEF, and make comments. Have fun with it, I won't be able to join you until July.

Remaining comments on strategy refer to only OCC + PA on BTS:

Good point about normal speed making the winning date more like AD 14xx
rather than < AD 1300.

So some BTS AIs are winning Culture victories around AD 1500? Mmm,
maybe a Deity Cultural win via OCC + PA is more viable than I thought.
Since I haven't tried OCC + PA on BTS, I will defer to the judgement of
who have.

However, it seems that it would be a disadvantage to have to tech to
either Communism or Fascism just to have the chance of a PA. That's
a lot of researching when a high culture slider would be preferable.
On the other hand, our PA partner is not saddled with Deity handicaps,
so perhaps it is a possible winning strategy for this gauntlet after all.

Sincerely,

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[FiveAces]

However, it seems that it would be a disadvantage to have to tech to
either Communism or Fascism just to have the chance of a PA. That's
a lot of researching when a high culture slider would be preferable.
On the other hand, our PA partner is not saddled with Deity handicaps,
so perhaps it is a possible winning strategy for this gauntlet after all.

Ah, but you don't have to tech to communism/fascism. As long as your partner has one of the techs, you can still make the PA.

 

[ssjos]

When going for OCC cultural the AI needs to control all 3 legendary cities right? (you cant use your own capital?)

 

[Lexad]

If you're in PA, you should have 3 among the two of you - that allows to include your capital.

 

[Pious_Pete]

Well, despite all the excellent advice, I´m afraid my third attempt ended in a defeat with a 1660 diplomatic loss to Cyrus.

I´m not too downhearted since I was playing quickly (therefore sub-optimally) to see what would happen. The game seemed to go quite well with only 4 cities so I will try that again. I had a number of problems as follows:-

a) I didn´t get to Liberalism until 450AD (losing the race with Gandhi in 150AD). Clearly there is some room for improvement there. Does anyone have any views on what a reasonable target date is to acheive a win? (Any win, not necessarily a super-fast win).

b) I didn´t concentrate enough on my second cultural city early on. I don´t think I had even a single cottage before 500 AD (doh!).

c) I built the Hermitage in the capital city on the grounds that it is best to maximise culture in your best city. Unfortunately, the capital went ledgendary when the other two cities only had around 15,000 culture each, so there was obvioiusly too much of an imbalance there.

d) I mistakenly (I think) built one GS in the GA farm to start things off, and two more in the capital city. Unfortunately, once the second of these had been built, I was still a little way off liberalism, but didn´t want to run anymore scientists in the capital (wasting GP points and all that). I guess this contributed to my slow time to Lib.

BTW. I am convinced about the secondary GP farms. My fourth city was a bit feeble, but it did manage to pop two GAs, which I thought was quite neat.

I shall try again.

 

[Pious_Pete]

For my fourth try, I rang the changes and went via Parthenon.

Fat lot of good it did. Another loss in 1660. This time a space race defeat to Mansa.

Basically, I made a pigs ear of this - I suspect since I didn´t really know how to adjust to not having representation so early (for the extra happiness and the extra research).

I think I am going to go back to what I know in order to try to post a win.

 

[Pious_Pete]

Lost to Gandhi Space Race 1700
Lost to Gandhi Space Race 1635

I´m going to bed.

 

[ssjos]

The games I played I got to liberal by 150 AD and 175 AD I think. My opponents were nowhere near beating me as I was the only one with education (which I traded away a few turns before I discored liberalism).
- Can AI bulb liberalism btw? then maybe this is not such a good idea.

After I reach liberalism trade/tech for music drama and start building cathedrals, hemeratage, sinistine and tach mahal. It helps to chop alot of forests down in this "phase".

Only wonder I build during tech phase is Mausuleum of M, mostly because capital hasnt got so much to build when it comes around and because AI dont get it before me. 1st game I tried for temple of aritmetis as well(had marble) but failed it with 3 turns, I did not however rush for it, I only built it when I had nothing else to build.

TIP: If you have trouble getting a win then maybe you should get worse opponents. While mansa musa and ghandi may tech very hard which allows for faster tech trade possibly, they also achieve faster wins.
You could try playing with bad opponents like Gilgamesh, he just sits all game, sucks at tech and doesnt go to war. Isabella and justitin may work as well. - just a thought