Trying my first gauntlet. Going with a sacred sites approach but think im doing something wrong. I was able to get desert folklore, pagodas and mosques and the sacred sites policy. I went straight piety and was able to ally 1 cutlure city state and friend another to help get through the tree. I'm currently on turn 143 with 20 tourism, 8 cities, and at war with my neighbor Austria. I don't yet have crossbows, which I think was a mistake not getting the tech earlier because my CB are having trouble taking first austria city strength 19. Other mistake is I opened Aestheticsw and I think instead I should have went honor for 2nd tree and ramp up the war effort. Probably should have started the wars about 40 turns ago too i'm thinking.
Yeah, my SS run ended up not going so well... like, the worst SS game ever: t299.
I went warlike early, opened Liberty to the Free Settler, spammed archers and took out my two neighbors by like t100. I used the great generals that spawned from that to ally cultural 3 CS, but I missed Oracle by a few turns and didn't get Sacred Sites until like t120 as a result.
I went Liberty first so that I could get extra happiness/production in each city, esp for building settlers, thinking it would be better to get more cities out quickly while the religious buildings were cheap. You don't need Sacred Sites to get the happiness, was my logic.
So, as a result, when I did get sacred sites I immediately jumped to 50 tourism or so. The problem I ran into was the compromise of SS, war and technology. I got machinery late because of a late NC. As a result, my war crawl stalled after 2 opponents until I could get XBs. After 3 opponents were down, I had two cultural runaways left... and the accessible one had focused on defensive wonders. XBs don't do crap against a strength 80 city. So I had to pause until artillery. Which took even longer because I hadn't been focusing on education. All those cities without universities really hurt. And I somehow lost World's Fair despite having like 30 cities... Brazil invested 1250! I thought I had it won at 1100 so I stopped.
SO that delayed things further. Eventually I stopped caring about efficiency and just went ICS:
When I finally got artillery, I took out the 2 runaways, but it was sooo late by then. Basically, I bottlenecked myself tech-wise. 500 faith/turn is useless when each new city only adds 4 tourism.
That's the trick. Sacred Sites is good ROI until about 10 cities. At that point, a new city is only +10% tourism. An archaeologist is +5% tourism, (if you're at 40) and doesn't hurt your tech or happiness. So you have to get those cities up FAST and get SS fast too, so that you're pushing 40 tourism early enough to win. With cultural runaways though, it's too risky.
For my second attempt I'm just going to go back and do a traditional warmonger-assisted cultural victory... ie focus on tech, capture all the great works and cultural wonders, spam archae-lol-ogists and rely on eliminating the cultural runaways. Cultural victory is my weakness, generally, but with all opponents easily accessible, I think I can clear the map of all runaways by t180 or so without sacrificing tech growth, which (for me) will be faster than a peaceful CV.
The only downside is that because it's emperor, the AI won't have many great works by the time I get artillery... On Deity you can steal tons of wonders/great works. I'm thinking sci theory->artillery->archaeology->refrigeration->radar... and with any luck I won't even get to radar.
It's refreshing to have an HOF game on Emperor... Unless you get lucky, CBs aren't good enough to clear the whole map.
I'm also tempted to try peaceful to see how effective 6 DOFs for +60% GS/GA/GW/GM generation might be. I've never really tried Sweden for peaceful CV, and it would be fun to try that.
I'm also tempted to start with Full Liberty->Left side honor, for tons of great generals to gift once the warpath starts. Hmmm, decisions decisions!
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.
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