jesusin, contender. New goal, experimenting cultural hammer city. Result: I did
Having read
WastingTime's idea about "the hammer city" as one of the 3 Legendaries and having seen
Gosha's 1AD BOTM11 save, fully civ-wide hammer oriented for a fantastic cultural date, I wanted to try it in one of my games. And since I don't play anything else apart from XOTM... this was the game to do it.
There was no 3 good sites for culture closeby. My plan included taking two AI capitals, but after having seen how poor their land was, I only killed JC (wiht Axes). That was a huge mistake, marble is mandatory in a fast-finishing cultural game. First thing I learnt.
So I used the capital (in place), the NE copper site with a few FP and the Gems site E.
As I was experimenting, I used Rome as a GPFarm and didn't make it Legendary, as I normally do. That meant going for 9 cities and buidling tons of temples. It was the wrong map to do so, my 3rd city was lacking, could have worked in another map.
CS sling T66, Academy T71.
1AD stats: 7cities, 178sust bpt, 15cottages, 2temples, OR+slav, 23GPPpt.
I researched fast, 100AD Liberalism after a detour to Music and another to Theology. That was a big mistake, hammers was the critical path of my game, not research, so I shouldn't have put all my effort into research. I remained in slavery+OR till 1000AD, I think I lost focus this part of the game, the additional time made me get my 5th religion (something I never do) so that put even more preassure on my hammer capacity.
1000AD started to run CS and Pacifism, so too few GAs. By then I had saved 4000g, which allowed me to run 100% culture for the rest of the game... and for 100 additional tunrs of my next game
The second city got Hermitage. It had built Oracle, Parthenon and a medieval WW, so it had the same culture output as the capital.
The third city was sad to look at.
1000AD: 8 cathedrals, 800cpt.
1100AD, 11cath.
1500AD 12 Cath, 1900cpt, PP researched.
1580AD WON
1GS for Academy, 1 stupid GPro for a silly shrine, 2GA settled, another 10 GA bombed (1-1-8). Not bad, having such a pitiful GPFarm and having started to grow GPs at 1000AD.
Conclusions:
- Want a faster cultural finish? Go grab Marble.
- The hammer city works. It can keep the pace with a capital as good as the one we had (with the help of Hermitage).
- Only if you have 3 outstanding cottage/hammer cities, go for 9 cities and don't make your GPFarm Legendary.
- Go for 4 religions if you only lack the resource for 1 of the cathedrals. Go for 5 religions only if you have all the resources for cathedrals.
Quite akward game, lots of important strategic mistakes, I've learnt a lot