Turn 319
Had a lot of fun with this one, tried a liberty start a few times with 6 or 7 high population cities for extra faith bonus but found that the early game was quite painful(couldnt get national college under 100 turns) so once getting a pretty ridiculous start on a non-archipelago style map(settler from first ruin to settle kilimanjaro pre turn 20 I believe into finding great barrier reef while also having an observatory capital)
I decided to try for a tradition start with 3 cities into great library into national college rush, then settling 2 more cities for a total of 5, maybe could have gone for more but not too familiar with the multiple city science debuff so thought id play it safe, then I left my cities on science production unless there was a science, production or faith building was tempted to go for a stupid amount of wonders but resisted and just built the science wonders plus sistine chapel, globe theater and collosus(had no desert for petra) to fill out the policy trees
got an early militaristic state so thought it might be a good idea to puppet some city states with 2 catapults and a few spearmen then fill them with trading posts for the science, this got a bit sketchy towards the end as I think I almost got a diplo victory by accident, the ai cities had very little population but I puppeted them anyway a little later for a tiny sci increase. This helped with public schools, research labs and late game production buildings as I could just purchase them with excess gold
I chose to go with order for the factories produce science and spaceship parts can be finished with engineers tenets, later thought the liberty spaceship purchasing might have been a decent strategy as well if production had been an issue
Wow, going tradition only and order, this is an extremely impressive game!
I am surprised how quickly you got all the parts built with order. Very well done!
Yes, lower level games are almost always a lot of fun, as you can usually shape your empire-building however you wish. Spain is especially crazy with the extra wonder production. Your wonder discovery outshone mine for sure. Looks like you took excellent advantage.
On Settler level, as long as you have a couple cultural city-states on the map, culture is so easy to come by that you are usually best off going Liberty first down to Collective Rule for the free Settler before launching into Tradition. You can usually even finish Liberty later for a Scientist or Engineer as the finisher if you need to. I was poised to do it in this gauntlet if needed, but did without it.
Puppeting city-states seemed to work out OK for you. Interesting strategy. I was a bit surprised you conquered Ragusa and bullied the other Maritime city-state. Allying with them for food for growth is usually best, especially on Settler, where happiness issues are almost non-existent.
You put up two excellent gauntlet games this month. Thanks for sharing!
