Pretty dreamy map. Settled on Gems, with Bananas in the first ring. Three unique luxes and seven sea resources in the capital*. Kiliminjaro in my second city.
*Although I realize just now that I forgot to buy one of my Fish. So clearly there's room for improvement here. :\
My science was very strong and I got to Compass at turn 74 without closing Liberty. I had a Cultural ally, Kiliminjaro, AND built the Writer's Guild (in city 2, interestingly), and still my science was too fast. Took 32 turns from Compass to victory. Sweep time seems like it should be pretty consistent for Polynesia, since you move so freely. I feel like getting that down under 30 wouldn't be too hard with practice. Experience helps a lot with estimating how big your navies need to be and how fast cities will fall.
Polynesia seems pretty OP for water maps, overall -- Get ALL the ruins! Find ALL the wonders! Meet ALL the CS! Plunder ALL the trade routes!
Speaking of trade routes, I think they're one of the most interesting things about this sort of game. Cargo ships net 200 gold apiece, and with Polynesia you really can plunder every single one on the map... But I don't think you want to do that. Trade route science is a very real bonus for the development stage, so you want to keep at least one civ friendly for trade routes.
Trade route possibilities are maybe the most important consideration in settling a second city. In this game, I settled toward Venice and was rewarded by him sending me three of his trade routes. Of course, if those routes weren't going my way there would be double trade routes to plunder instead. Enrico is a cash cow either way.
I'm interested in seeing what people turn up on Pangaea. I haven't tested it, so I don't know how much of a pain the forests are or are not.
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.
