G-Minor LXXXVI

T273, 177 cities. Score is 15500 and it began to slow down. It increased around 150 points per turn. Now sometimes 50, sometimes 100. That's Order limit. Resettlement gave me 450 free pops but in the end, my cities are limited in growth. Main cities start to starve.
I only have my last cities which growth. 8 CSare alive (cultural and maritime). I wonder if I'll take maritime ones and loose their food.
World's fair is on : 9 000 cpt. A policy each 5turns. I have 360 points, right now from future tech. Each one are reached each 3 turns (28000 bpt). I only have 8points in great works but musician's guilds are not up.

I wonder what is the best : end Rationalism and pump future tech or end Aesthetics and pump GW - GM - GA for great works ?
My last civs is not a good cultural producer. So, I'll have to stock each GP to make great works last turn (T329).

I missed a couple of cities (5 to 10). I realize to late I can settle a city 3 tiles away on an island.

I still have many hours of play. But I begin to be bored.
 
T273, 177 cities. Score is 15500 and it began to slow down. It increased around 150 points per turn. Now sometimes 50, sometimes 100. That's Order limit. Resettlement gave me 450 free pops but in the end, my cities are limited in growth. Main cities start to starve.
I only have my last cities which growth. 8 CSare alive (cultural and maritime). I wonder if I'll take maritime ones and loose their food.
World's fair is on : 9 000 cpt. A policy each 5turns. I have 360 points, right now from future tech. Each one are reached each 3 turns (28000 bpt). I only have 8points in great works but musician's guilds are not up.

I wonder what is the best : end Rationalism and pump future tech or end Aesthetics and pump GW - GM - GA for great works ?
My last civs is not a good cultural producer. So, I'll have to stock each GP to make great works last turn (T329).

I missed a couple of cities (5 to 10). I realize to late I can settle a city 3 tiles away on an island.

I still have many hours of play. But I begin to be bored.

Yeah, I bet it's boring. Man this one is time consuming. I'm on vacation until the 13th so I might not be able to finish my game in time. :-(

Order is tricky. Freedom is generally the better choice IMHO because of the specialist food. A city with a granary and hospital can support 8 specialists without using any food tiles.
 
@Memoryjar, 4 hours for 14 turns! I admire your patience. My game was slow but not nearly as much as yours. Do you micromanage a lot or are the loading times that long?

As for Rationalism vs Aesthetics, a future tech is worth 10 points. If one GS gives you 2 future techs that's 20 points per GS. Great works are 4 points each, so you'd need 5 GWAMs to get the same 20 points. Point-wise, Rationalism is the clear winner here (finishing it also gives you a free tech for another 10 points). Surely with 9k cpt you can finish both though? Get as many GSs as you can and buy GWAMs with what faith you'll have left.

@Cromagnus, I like your strategy. It'll be really unfortunate if you don't manage to finish the game... I'm interested in how the delayed expansion works out for you.

Order vs Freedom is interesting. Skyscrapers&Resettlement allow faster expansion and initial growth, so perhaps it'd suit a late rapid expansion strategy better? I can't imagine growing my worst (snow) cities to a decent size with Order though.
 
@Memoryjar, 4 hours for 14 turns! I admire your patience. My game was slow but not nearly as much as yours. Do you micromanage a lot or are the loading times that long?

As for Rationalism vs Aesthetics, a future tech is worth 10 points. If one GS gives you 2 future techs that's 20 points per GS. Great works are 4 points each, so you'd need 5 GWAMs to get the same 20 points. Point-wise, Rationalism is the clear winner here (finishing it also gives you a free tech for another 10 points). Surely with 9k cpt you can finish both though? Get as many GSs as you can and buy GWAMs with what faith you'll have left.

@Cromagnus, I like your strategy. It'll be really unfortunate if you don't manage to finish the game... I'm interested in how the delayed expansion works out for you.

Order vs Freedom is interesting. Skyscrapers&Resettlement allow faster expansion and initial growth, so perhaps it'd suit a late rapid expansion strategy better? I can't imagine growing my worst (snow) cities to a decent size with Order though.

I'll definitely finish but perhaps not in time to be listed in the gauntlet results. I'll post my results either way.

More benchmarks and conclusions:

~t165 Satellites. (After ecology) Thinking it would take longer to research Ecology, I tried to squeeze in International Games before World's Fair. This was a mistake. First, I underestimated cultural output. I was hitting close to 1 social policy/3 turns. So I had all culture-generating policies by t160 or so. Second, my tech rate after labs was higher than I had estimated.

However, had I found all the other Civ's by t100 PP (a totally reasonable time frame), I could have squeezed in IG easily. As it happens, with t128 World congress, it delayed things. I'm now looking at a t190 World's Fair completion, which would delay expansion until t210, very late. :-(

So, lesson learned: All useful techs/policies can be had by t165. Heck, I could have had Nanotech by t165 if I wanted, via bulbing. If timed with a second vote World's Fair, (20 turns starting at ~t150) you can start one-turn city captures and settler expansion on t170. And it could be 10-15 turns earlier on an ideal map.

I now firmly believe that it is best to start small and focus purely on science, and I believe this holds true for all Time Victories at King or below. On Emperor or above, there's a significant upside to eliminating AIs early, mainly Wonder and CS competition, and of course the difficulty of clearing the map if the AI gets advanced tech.

However, war on high difficulty levels kills science. So peaceful science rush might be the best approach even on Deity. Simply put, getting all the cultural policies before worlds fair (to get enough culture to get all the happiness policies), all before expansion, gives maximum efficiency in tech and social policy rate, and prevents you from ever stagnating. Unrestrained population growth with 100 cities demands this approach I think.

I'm going to play this one out, despite my mis-timing of world's fair. I'm building 4 settlers/turn, so I'll have 80 ready to plant by t210... :lol:

But, sadly, that's very late compared to the t170 it could/should have been. I'll probably finish with stupidly high levels of happiness. :(

Oh, and taking over the entire world in a few turns is fun. I have a spy in every capital so I can DoW and capture all capitals (but one) in 2 turns. But first I'm going to take all their other cities in peace deals. ;)
 
Oh, and taking over the entire world in a few turns is fun. I have a spy in every capital so I can DoW and capture all capitals (but one) in 2 turns. But first I'm going to take all their other cities in peace deals. ;)

As promised I am following the thread. Extremely interesting. And I take my hat off to you guys.

A little off topic, apologies, but how do you conquer caps in 2 turns. I have never played a domination end game, just bailed out of the GOTM because I could not see a fast way to finish off in spite of huge tech lead and almost infinite gold. I am obviously missing something.
 
Nanotechnology... ;-)

XCOM units can airdrop into enemy territory if there's line of sight. A spy in the capital gives line of sight. On chieftain, one XCOM can take a city solo. It *might* take two turns with one XCOM but you can easily drop in 3 units on each capital. The AI doesn't have enough units to form a human shield.
 
Finally submitted an entry. I hope it will be accepted...

At turn 322 I interrupted my play and made a save. The next day I was unable to load this save on my desktop (i7 with 4 GB). The load process itself took nearly one hour! I finally got it loaded again on my laptop (i5 with 8GB) and succeeded in playing the last 8 turns.

The game itselft was boring, especially the last 200 turns. In the end I had 200 cities - only 1 AI capital and 2 merc CS left. The rest of the land was filled with cities - even the worst icy spots.

To avoid a culture victory just place a crappy city somewhere, buy some culture buildins, put the writers/aritsts/musicians inside and grant the city to the AI, who immediately razed it. I have done this 4 times and had no conquered works left.

Ideology was order and i choosed the "start with 3 additional citizens" as a priority

religion: all possible "growth" options for pantheon and beliefs.

I tried to get the important national wonders before spamming cities.
 
@Memoryjar, 4 hours for 14 turns! I admire your patience. My game was slow but not nearly as much as yours. Do you micromanage a lot or are the loading times that long?

As for Rationalism vs Aesthetics, a future tech is worth 10 points. If one GS gives you 2 future techs that's 20 points per GS. Great works are 4 points each, so you'd need 5 GWAMs to get the same 20 points. Point-wise, Rationalism is the clear winner here (finishing it also gives you a free tech for another 10 points). Surely with 9k cpt you can finish both though? Get as many GSs as you can and buy GWAMs with what faith you'll have left.

Yes, I do. I micromanage all my workers until all tiles was improved for food. And I have big lag between turn, when I settled or capture cities.
Now, I finished to improve all tiles, so turn are quicker. But it's still laggy between them.

Thanks for futur tech points. I will have one tech per turn until the end. T300, score is 17 500.
Holyhandgrenade disappoint me. 200 cities. :eek:
I only have 181. I choose to let maritime CSalive. They are 5 and I have many starving cities.

I had one bug when I bulbed some scientists : negative science.

Do this is know ?
 
It's possible you reached too high a number which couldn't be accurately represented by whatever variable type is being used in that process (not enough memory allocation for it). Therefore the game does what it can with it and read a wrong value for that variable when it tries to do some calculation. It's possible that 8 times 30K is too big a number for a GS bulb to be handle correctly.
 
It's possible you reached too high a number which couldn't be accurately represented by whatever variable type is being used in that process (not enough memory allocation for it). Therefore the game does what it can with it and read a wrong value for that variable when it tries to do some calculation. It's possible that 8 times 30K is too big a number for a GS bulb to be handle correctly.

The limit is somewhere around 220k. Anything above 220k flips and goes negative. It's a long-standing science bug. Usually it's not an issue, but people have run into it when trying to exploit the science "catch-up" bug. 30k beakers/turn is nuts. :lol:

200 cities, by the way, is an 11x science cost... So 30k is like 3.5k with 4 cities. Crazy.
 
It's over.

Spoiler :


Now, I hope my game will be accepted.

I had Science boost bug. So I missed 5 or 6 futur tech. I ended with 183 cities. I let 3 maritime CSalive because many cities began to starve.

I wonder if Freedom is better. I wait for your submission Cromagnus.
 
It's over.

Spoiler :


Now, I hope my game will be accepted.

I had Science boost bug. So I missed 5 or 6 futur tech. I ended with 183 cities. I let 3 maritime CSalive because many cities began to starve.

I wonder if Freedom is better. I wait for your submission Cromagnus.

Given your happiness score, I think it's clear Chieftain makes food the limiting factor, not happiness like usual. A city with lab/school/uni/factory/workshop/market/bank/stock exchange consumes 22 food with Order, 11 food with Freedom. That means a hospital and granary (+capital tile) can support 10 citizens with Freedom, 5 with Order. Any additional food surplus is roughly 1:1 after you account for the last specialist and/or a windmill. So, basically, freedom = +5 population. On chieftain the math seems to favor Freedom.
 
Meritocracy sky-rocketed my happiness. Without, it was a little bit tricky to stand happy.

I wonder what is better, civil service or ressetlement. Free food vs free pop. I began to starve around T290 in my five first cities. T300 in the rest of the empire.

Vadalaz went order or freedom ?
 
Well done, Memoryjar :)

I took Freedom. I think it was one of the few right choices I made that game. It's the first time I'm playing a Time VC game, and I almost feel like retrying this, but standard size maps are just so huge. Perhaps I'd give it another shot if it was tiny or small.

Never played this map type before either. It seems to generate pretty nice land for science games, at least from what I've seen.
 
Finally submitted an entry. I hope it will be accepted...

At this moment, I'm leading with 19393 points. Was your game accepted ? With 200 cities, you should be higher than 20 000 points. Or my 5 maritime CS made the difference.

Acken : I don't know how to say it in English, so in French : Bon courage ! :)
 
At this moment, I'm leading with 19393 points. Was your game accepted ? With 200 cities, you should be higher than 20 000 points. Or my 5 maritime CS made the difference.

Acken : I don't know how to say it in English, so in French : Bon courage ! :)

Yeah it's different on Standard/Chieftain. On Prince the limiting factor is happiness. But on a map with 200 cities and excess happiness, with each maritime CS providing 201 food/turn, that's 100+ population. Given that you're never going to get that CS to 50 pop, let alone 100 (or 99, factoring in score from number of cities) and the fact that you can steal tiles from the CS, it's absolutely worth leaving them alive. If you had 5 maritime allies, that's 500 extra population, a huge amount of points. (5000?)

I think I only have 2-3 maritime CS in my game. Now I'm really wishing I'd taken +food from shrines/temples instead of +happiness from temples. Happiness has been a complete non-issue in my game due to my early world's fair. I'm also wishing I'd gone with 6-7 cities initially instead of 4. Even if it had delayed Education 10 turns, I would have made up for it from sheer population by t160, and my culture is overkill, so more cities wouldn't have hurt me. Delaying World's fair by 30 turns was a huge miscalculation. I should have been planting settlers the moment I researched Satellites. (T100PP, second-vote world's fair and ecology on t140, bulb writers on t155)

Of course, not meeting the last civ until t128 really really hurt. I'd start over but I don't have time to complete two games. Besides, given the randomness of low sea level, the final number of city spots can influence final score more than any one decision you can make. Same with number of maritime CS. Blah. :p
 
I was progressing nicely, but it was taking 20 turns to get my settlers to the far reaches of the pangea, so to speed that up, hey I will build a couple of airports... totally forgetting about the tourism bonus, I place one airport in my capital... and one in my farthest outpost city.... opps, with only 75 turns left, I now only have 8 turns until influential with all civs.. sell airport, but the damage is done... no way to prevent a culture victory before time is up... The ONLY tourism I have is from the effiel tower, and that is being doubled by the tech tree...

not playing again.
 
I'm still trying to finish this. But it is very frustrating considering the time it takes to not know if I'm doing well or not. What kind of score are you expecting in the early 200 ?

I'm really wondering if I got a bad map or something, you guys claim to have 200cities I'm at 135 and I doubt I'll get more than 150 running :/ But can't restart I'm already doubtful I'll finish since I'm doing around 6 turns per hour god. And still 100 to go.

This will probably be my first and only time victory lol
 
In early 200, I was around 3 000 in my two games. I settled all my cities around T260. So score began to upgrade 150 points each turn until my cities began to starve.
Low sea is nice to have land. Also, settle all spots, even those polars tiny island. And remember you can settle three tiles away on islands.
 
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