G-Major CXXII

[aafritz17]

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.

(*) Please read the >> HOF rules << BEFORE playing!

PLEASE NOTE - ONE-CITY CHALLENGE​

Settings:

• Expansion: Brave New World
• Victory Condition: Culture (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Deity
• Map Size: Tiny
• Map Type: Archipelago
• Speed: Quick
• Leader: Shoshone (Pocatello)
• Required: One City Challenge
• Opponents: Any
• Version: SV8
• Date: 8th to 30th April 2022

The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker.

 

[zenmaster]

I have to be honest - the settings here are extremely unfortunate: This is barely winnable; I gave sincere efforts, but have just decided to skip this one after having felt I wasted my time in my efforts:

One City challenge makes it difficult to get the science to get to Internet in a reasonable time while still keeping up a military strong enough to hold off the Deity competitors.
Building a strong enough military with One City to fend off your rivals is virtually impossible if you are building the necessary culture wonders to get tourism.

One City leaves you in a quandary over starting land even. Food for growth? Hammers to win the necessary wonders? Jungle for culture/science? Even a balance of all three is not ideal.
Deity is so random as to the AI wonder focus and culture runaway.

I had a game where I had balanced land. Amazing culture with great diplomacy and maritime allies. I got many/most of the culture wonders to Internet and then Airport to crank out 1000 tourism a turn.
I still was behind having about 10000 tourism when TWO other civs had 30000+ culture. While waiting for tourism , 1 of those got wiped out. The other was Denmark, which I had been friends with basically the entire game.
Despite ships two deep in my narrow port and a wall of infantry/machine guns and time enough to tech to sneak in a couple rocket artillery and nuke subs and being friends all game, once I got to the high tourism, Denmark declared war took me out in like 4-5 turns. I had only 1 fighter, and their air superiority and special amphibious ability walked through my wall of infantry in mountains like butter.

Also noted that my 1000 tourism a turn reduced to 350 or so after Denmark declared war and I lost all the bonuses.

I had maritime allies and used research agreements to the max. Teching is still slow via 1 city.

In hindsight I would have delayed my hopeful win by dozens of turns to go for key military techs and buildup before going for the Internet. It took way too long to get there

In other tries though, I would lose out on too many wonders for tourism and have terrible city-states/growth/culture with a runaway AI dominating city states and science so they beat me to wonders.

I think you either A) need to get some reasonable tourism, and then try to go whole hog on military to try to wipe out two of your foes and have the last one be a nonrunaway culture civ
B) go max tourism to a degree with as friendly AIs as you can get and either hope they don't attack even when faced with 1000 tourism
or else B2) divert to key military techs and building military before going for Internet, which will drag your win into the near turn300s or 300s.
C) would be hope there is only one friendly runaway culture civ who won't wipe you out while you culturally dominate the other two and hold them off and eventually beat that last friendly AI with 1000 a turn.

My desire to spend the time to achieve this has dwindled to zero. I have wasted enough time already.

All of this presupposes you don't have a runaway civ who dominates city-states and tech, beating you to just about every tourism wonder and stunting your growth.
The waste of time trying to get good starting land and playing into the game only to continuously find there is a runaway civ beating you to every wonder is crushing. With One City, it does no good to even try to wipe them out - those tourism wonders are gone forever. You simply can't ramp up enough to take them out earlier.

If you choose superfriendly civ opponents, they are almost invariably wonder-builders and you are almost assuredly getting beaten to the tourism wonders and will be facing cultural juggernauts. If you choose non-Culture, non-wonder Civs, they are almost all warlike and will likely overrun you sooner or later. I tried a mix and that did not work out.

I am not sure whose idea this one was, but it should have been France for the chateaus/theme bonus and not the Shoshone.
The pathfinder ability and One City quick land grab is a negligible benefit when tasked with the odds against you in this one.
The Chateau would have made up for the fact that you will likely miss out on some/many tourism wonders.
I am guessing there will be 0-1 entries on this. Odds favoring zero.

I have to say these settings are the first gauntlet settings I have actively hated. The One City Challenge absolutely beckons. Made me go for it and not just ignore it.
I can easily ignore a Gauntlet which I feel will be a slog, but the One City Challenge is truly throwing down the gauntlet.
However... the Deity One City Culture Challenge needs far too much luck to win.
Deity has a large random element to begin with and the One City Challenge almost eliminates your ability to exploit or mitigate that.
The One City Challenge eliminates your ability to ramp up. Your build queue only has 1 item.
If you spend time building culture/science wonders/buildings, you have little military. If you build military, you lose the wonders and science/growth is slowed.
It is almost impossible to build your military fast enough to take anyone out even reasonably early on Quick and Archipelago.

Deity level and One City Challenge and Quick setting gives you no margin for error or bad luck.
The AI opponents can literally take away your ability to win the game no matter what you do.
Hurling yourself against the wall time and again with best efforts to 100+ turns to find you get no tourism wonders and basically zero chance of winning is such a waste.
This is not fun.

I devoted a reasonable amount of time to this. Any more would be unreasonable.
The time spent is not worth it, in my opinion.

If you truly want to beat this, go for it - it is possible, if the randomness of the AIs allows... but keep in mind all I found above.
Choose your AI opponents wisely and be forewarned of a likely late game attack.

Request: DO NOT extend this gauntlet time period, please. I think there will be 0-1 entries no matter how long it stays open.

 

[rickyvaughn]

Can you take the world out at frigates minus 1 AI cap and then build tourism up late?

 

[vadalaz]

First attempt has 2 barb camps on my island throwing hand-axes at me non-stop. Compbow upgrade might be a decent 1st or 2nd ruin here to deal with this kind of thing. I imagine there are lots more annoyances down the road.

E: Second attempt has no barb camps on my island, but it's turn 50 and CSs have Galleasses. Trade route menu reveals that Bismarck is 11 techs ahead of me. Yeah this will be an uphill battle.

E2: Right, you can't send any trade routes on Archipelago. Barbs plunder everything.

In my experience in OCC gauntlets you want to focus on science and food first, then after you've built NC and Hanging Gardens or whatever, you really need to get high gold per turn. The idea is to build wonders only and just buy everything else.

Island maps make it trickier and quick speed even more so. Might need a few Galleasses first to keep the TR paths clear. This slows down everything else though...

E3: I reckon a good strategy might be:
- play peacefully at first, get some tourism
- go Autocracy, take Futurism and Cult of Personality
- pick the AI with the lowest culture
- bribe the other two against it, then DoW them to get a +100% bonus
- eliminate the two stronger AIs (probably w/ Battleships? need Oil though...)

Edit 4: I had a good game going with the Autocracy strat. I went for the final military push in the end and captured a city, but instead of being insta-razed, it gave me the options to puppet or annex. Apparently I forgot to select OCC in game options, or the game didn't save my settings... Not sure what happened. Played on one city the whole game and didn't notice. Such a shame. It was a very nice Petra city. Don't know if I want to roll another map after this.

Ideally I think you want to win with just Futurism and Hotels. I planted 3 academies in my game and saved up a few scientists for bulbing towards Internet or Radar, but I think I should've planted just one academy and started bulbing aggressively after Sci Theory. Key techs are Refrigeration for Hotels, Electronics for Battleships (assuming you can get Oil which isn't guaranteed at all), potentially Dynamite and Plastics for a land unit invasion. Military Sci is nice for Brandenburg if you need it. Internet and Radar seem to require too much science, although in my game I didn't have an observatory, so maybe that would've helped.

 

[aafritz17]

Yeah, sorry. I rarely play OCC, and I rarely play Deity (just can't get good enough to not be max-frustrated). Reckon I just didn't understand the limitations these settings impose.

Hmm... Perhaps there is a better way to apologize...

 

[lionelion]

Am playing atm, Modern era, hold on the gauntlet closing for today if you can!

 

[lionelion]

I completed it turn 233! 1926AD (I'll post a story later on; am knackered!) - The comments above came in handy when thinking strategy for it! View media item 6849

 

[vadalaz]

Nicely done.

 

[lionelion]

HOF Entry link
In this game I spawned in the middle of a H-shaped island, where one half was nearly all desert hills and the other half had some salt and deer
Chose random civ's except Ethiopia (no combat bonus over me with me on one city)
The others turned out to be India & France!
When I explored I was fortunate that the other civ's hadn't explored navally - so I got a lot of ruins for population
France had largest army, and me the least for most of the game - but he hadn't found my city till mid-way through, when he did I bribed him against ethiopia, which was a backstab for him, then I denounced him! So Ethiopia (& India; who is naturally very friendly) were good friends for most of the game, and gave me a number of research agreements (All until I started surpassing them culturally, being a threat with tourism then they turned on me) and because I'd stolen tech's from Ethiopia enough times (despite saying I wouldn't) for them to hold a grudge
After Ethiopia & France made peace France came looking for me - and I saw him coming with my Galleasses
Seemed clever bribing him against India, except I'd made a defensive pact with India! so bribed him to attack early basically
Thankfully there was little-to-no iron in the game so they only had privateers, which I dealt with with a few C-bows, before he turned his sights to India
Made peace with me & he was friendly with me for the rest of the game
France was liberty, but thankfully - due to all the bribes - he hadn't expanded beyond 3 cities till the mid-game - so I was able to surpass his culture first
Ethiopia & India were Piety - so despite desert folklore & faith from world wonders I didn't manage to make much use of Tithe which I picked - as soon after I'd converted the C/S they'd convert them back. But my faith was enough to send out a few prophets to fulfill C/S quests - and I became allied with all city states by the late game.
Key wonders built - hanging gardens, petra, artemis, mausoleum (gold for C/S allies), sistine chapel, uffizi, louvre, broadway, eiffell tower & Built ALL national wonders
Policy choices - Tradition > Aesthetics 3 (Flourishing) > exploration opener > Rationalism 3 (Free thought) > Aesthetics full > Patronage full > Rationalism Full
Freedom - had a lot of key policies - +culture from works +34% tourism + happiness + golden ages + food
The faith allowed me to get GWAM works out to fill my slots - and I traded for full theming bonuses
Switched spys to diplomats in late game for influence - as they had differing ideologies (france was the same as me)
My C/S allies gave me a monopoly in world congress - so I passed world religion (& idelology), & India proposed +GWAM generation early on
Unsurprisingly (for their tendencies) they all got full Aesthetics.
In the early - mid game India was the runaway culture civ, I slowed that by taking the cultural C/S as ally for myself
but in the late game India was tech leader like 10 ahead of everyone else - and matching my tourism in culture
So I took out Mumbai with battleships, their 2nd city, but largest population & where most of their wonders were
This allowed me to start gaining an edge culturally
Tried to also take Delhi but was losing units to bombers so had to retreat - there was little oil in the game also, for me from C/S or my friend France, so I could only build a few battleships & one tri-plane for interception.
Got a musician ready for the peace treaty to expire - they were popping out space-ship parts - but I got Beethoven there in time!