The-Hawk
Old Original Geezer
In the thread on HOF Gauntlet G-Minor 12 link to Gauntlet, some folks asked me for a write-up on my top scoring game. I thought Id post it in the strategy forum so it might get more visibilty. For those who don't know, this Gauntlet was defined as follows:
Critical stats of my game:
Score:
Cities: 136
Techs: Researched 509 Future Techs.
Wonders: Built all but one (not sure which one I missed, it was a pure oversight)
Great People spawned: 57
I made two attempts at this gauntlet. The first (Warlords - Mehmed) scored 16,671 and taught me some lessons I was able to apply in my second attempt (20,961). Unfortunately, I was coming to the deadline of the Gauntlet, was running out of time. This meant I was not able to play an optimal game. While 20,961 won the Gauntlet, this score could have been higher if I had time to micromanage better. However, here are some major learnings and strategies:
The biggest factor in time score is techs. Second is population. Wonder production and land were not all that important to the final score. As a result, I decided to go for a specialist economy (SE). A single sci specialist is worth 6 beakers. A single cottage ultimately will be worth more, up to 7-8 with a financial leader. However, I thought there were two major considerations that voted against a cottage strategy. First, a sci specialist gives you all 6 beakers immediately. It takes a long time to grow a cottage to a town. With the lightning tech pace possible at chieftan, I knew I could be running many, many sci specialists at 6 beakers long before my cottages have grown up to towns. My belief was that even with top production of 7-8 beakers, cottages would never catch up to the quick start from the sci specialists. Second, and more important, while tech is the top scoring factor, population is still important as well. After biology, with a SE, each grass tile gives me a double impact. With a farm, each tile supports 2 population (the citizen working the tile and a sci specialist). A cottaged tile only supports 1 pop (the citizen working the tile). Even if the science from cottages eventually catches up to the specialists, a specialist strategy provides way more population.
Happiness and health are complete non-issues. Yes, for a short time you might be constrained by happiness in one or two cities. However, at chieftan, you can go for a long time before happiness becomes an issue. And, once you are into future techs, happiness and health concerns are over forever. Over the course of a 1200 turn game, the time period where you might have one or two unhappy citizens in one or two cities is trivial. As a result, I did not waste hammers on happiness or health buildings. The only exceptions: every city got a granary (for the growth bonus, not for the health) and a few cities got markets and groceries (for the commerce multiplier, not health or happiness). However, remember that I was not building cottages, so most cities did not produce much gold. Therefore, most cities did not get markets/grocers (or banks).
I thought the choice of leader traits was obvious. No reason to take Financial no cottages. No reason to take Aggressive given the tech advantage no reason to worry about a free promotion (that Modern Armor really doesnt need a bonus to kill a longbow
). No reason for Expansive health is not an issue. No reason for Spiritual dont plan to budge from my key civics. Certainly dont want Creative last thing I want is more culture. The two that stood out were Organized and Philosophical. With the massive population I intended to build, the civics cost reduction from Organized seemed like a good idea. At the end of this game, I was saving almost 600 gold per turn in civics cost. Philo for the obvious reason
it would lead to more Great Persons, especially more Great Scientists. I wanted lots of Academies! What about Industrious? I could see some value in the faster wonder production. Not because there was any concern about the AI getting one first, just to minimize the time spent building it (detracting from research). However, I didnt really care much about wonders. Also, I usually only built them when there was nothing else useful to build. So faster wonder production time was not all that appealing, the best I could have done was produced research in those extra turns.
Given these traits, there were two candidates to lead my effort: Mao in Vanilla and Freddy in Warlords. I decided on Mao Freddys special building was a complete waste and Warlords has nerfed chopping somewhat. I think either choice would work equally well.
Civics were as follows: I built Pyramids and ran Representation all game. I used Oracle for CS for early Bureacracy, then ran it all game. After CoL, I ran Caste System all game. After Banking, I ran Mercantilism all game. I think all of these civics are very obvious for a SE strategy. The only civic I changed mid-game was religious. For a while, I ran Organized Religion for the building bonus. However, once I had UN, I voted in Free Religion for the tech bonus. I never ran any other civic other than these.
Techs: My rough path:
CS slingshot
Literature (Gr Lib)
Metal (forges)
Currency (+1 trade route times many cities)
Education (Oxford)
Banking (Mercantilism)
Democracy (Statue of Liberty)
Astronomy (Observatory)
Corporation (another trade route times many cities)
Biology (pop)
Computers (Labs)
Liberalism for Future Tech
Some more Future Techs
Everything else I skipped
Many, many more Future Techs.
Early focus was on the techs that provided research buildings, Democracy for Statue of Liberty, and Biology for massive population. Once I had these, I beelined for Future Techs. I took my first FT from Liberalism in 1378 AD, then researched 10-15 more FTs before going back and picking up the crappy techs I had skipped. I did this to eliminate any remaining concerns about happiness or health asap.
As far as starting location, going for time victory on a great plains map, this is obvious. In an SE strategy, teching is dependent on specialists and specialists are dependent on food. Of course, population is also dependent on food. Food is dependent on grassland farms. Bottom line, the eastern part of the map (grasslands) is the only place to be. By the end of the game, every tile that could be a farm was a farm, and every tile that could be a windmill was a windmill. I even farmed over many of my special resources. Who needs spices when you have 509 smilies from future techs? Id rather have an extra science specialist by farming the tile. Every forest was chopped to build science buildings. The only resources I remotely cared about were coal, stone, and marble. Coal for railroads, stone and marble to minimize lost hammers building wonders. Obviously iron or copper was nice to allow some early protection, I also took advantage of horses for some early conquering. However, I could have done fine without any of these.
I think the most critical learning from my first attempt was that more cities is always better. You cant build too many cities. Why? Every city starts with a citizen. With Mercantilism and Statue of Liberty, every city also starts with 2 specialists. The total food across the map is fixed, regardless of number of cities. So, I concluded that (in general) 2 smaller cities would be better than 1 large city. Id have the almost the same amount of food to support population, but Id have 2 starting citizens instead of 1 and Id have 4 free specialists instead of 2. One exception I knew I could only build a limited number of academies. To take advantage of these relatively scarce academies, I wanted to build some large cities to house them. (If I could have built academies in every city, then I would have built all small cities.) Ultimately, I built 20-25 cities with full fat crosses. 18 of these ended up with Academies and were allowed to use all of the tiles in their fat crosses (at the expense of neighbors). The rest of the cities were packed as tightly as possible, usually two tiles apart. This meant many cities were only able to work 6-8 tiles. However, with all tiles farmed and the extra food used for sci specialists, these tiny 6-8 pop cities were still very effective. My WORST city was researching 88 beakers per turn. Bottom line, 136 small cities will greatly out-tech 50-60 large cities
133 of my 136 cities were pure science cities. Three (including my capital) were science cities that doubled as production cities. Every single city got the following buildings: forge, granary, courthouse, library, university, observatory, laboratory. For 90% of the cities this is all they got. Some cities had enough gold to warrant banks/markets/groceries. Since I wasnt building cottages, this meant they had one of three things: a gold/gem mine, lots of river tiles, or a religious shrine. My coastal cities got a lighthouse. The three production cities got barracks (in hindsight a complete waste of hammers).
Obviously, I wanted to build as many wonders as possible. However, because wonder scoring pales in comparison to tech, wonders were a secondary priority. With a few exceptions, I wouldnt be concerned about missing one or two wonders (especially the religious shrines). City build order would always focus on research I would only build a wonder in a city if there were no research buildings I could build. This also meant I would not worry about founding religions or spawning Great Prophets. If I missed one or two religious wonders, so be it. There were only three wonders I thought were worth an early beeline Oracle, Pyramids and Statue of Liberty. Oracle for early Bureacracy, Pyramids for early Representation, Liberty for the free specialists.
Wonders were mostly spread around to random cities. My capital ended up building several wonders, mostly because it had decent production and I wasnt worried about one city reaching legendary culture. The only wonders I directed to a specific city were as follows. Gr Lib, Oxford, and National Epic all went into my capital. The capital had three food bonuses and Bureacracy, so it was going to be a science powerhouse (hence Oxford). It also was my primary GP factory because of the extra random wonders and extra superspecialists (hence Gr Lib and Epic). West Point and Heroic Epic were built in one of my two prod cities, this city built most of my military (not that I built much military many of my cities had no units protecting them). Ironworks went into the other prod city. Finally, Wall Street went to the city with the Buddism shrine. With all the missionary spamming I did, this shrine was generating a boatload of commerce. Other than that, I didnt really care where I built wonders, I spread them around. By the way, as I mentioned before, in spite of putting low priority on wonders, I ended up with all but one (the mystery wonder I somehow missed along the way
).
I spawned 57 Great People (6 prophets, 4 Engineers, 3 Artists, 3 Merchants, 41 Scientists). I used one artist and one merchant for a GA. I used 5 Prophets for shrines. All other early non-scientist great people became superspecialists in my capital, just for the beakers they produced. The beaker value of the superspecialists in my capital always outweighed the value of rushing a wonder or doing a trade mission. My first 18 Scientists became Academies in fat cross cities. I never used any scientists as superspecialists, they were always worth more as Academies. Of course, at some point, the value of the lightbulb exceeds the value of an Academy or superspecialist. Since you know exactly how many turns are left in the game at any point, this math is very easy to do. Many of my Great Peeps became lightbulbs.
I knew that unless I severly mismanaged the game, there was no way an AI could win. The biggest concern is accidently triggering domination, so I needed to manage the size of my empire carefully. See this post for how I did this post on managing expansion I suppose there was a slight chance I could have triggered culture win. However, this seems very unlikely. I spread around my wonders to be safe.
As far as religions . I ignored the three early religions, they were founded by AIs. I did found all of the later religions (given my tech pace, I couldnt have avoided founding them if I tried
). In fact, I discovered Confucianism 35 turns before Judaism was founded! However, in spite of missing three early religions, I ended up with all 7 religious wonders by capturing cities. Early on, I adopted the most prevalent religion in the world (Buddism, one I captured). For a long time, I spawned missionaries like crazy
I wanted all my cities to get the 25% production bonus. This also meant my Buddism shrine was very profitable. Once I switched to Free Religion, I obviously stopped spamming missionaries.
I fought several wars. In the early part of the game I stole workers from a few AI (I also built a ton, I ended up with over 100). I then had early wars of conquest against three AIs who had the bad luck of starting on MY half of the map
. I starting these wars around 900 BC, a bit earlier than I would have liked (using horse archers). My initial plan was to allow the AIs to build cities for me. However, I did not have stone nearby, so I needed to find someone who did (goodbye Izzy). Izzy also had founded Buddism, which became my religion. After Izzy, I decided to take the AI on the coast so I could build Colossus and Lighthouse before they became obsolete, which happens very quickly with this tech pace (goodbye Cyrus). I also went after Julius early on. He was on prime grassland, and is a bit of a psycho, so I decided to conquer him while I was in a warring mood and my horse archers were still dominant. 
After this period of conquering, I hunkered down for some serious Settler spamming . Settler, settler, settler, settler zzzzzzz As mentioned, these settlers were filling every nook and cranny on my half of the map.
After I had filled up as much open land as I could, I conquered Mansa and took some property from Saladin (around 1450 AD). Mansa was also on my half of the map, holding down nice grasslands to my north. Mansa quickly went bye-bye. Saladin was further west, on the southernmost part of the plains region. He had some cities with lots of nice floodplains. He also had founded Hinduism (in fact, he was nice enough to build the shrine for me). I didnt kill him off, just took 3-4 cities (didnt want his crappy plains land, besides, didnt want to risk triggering domination).
At this point, early 1500s, I had stablized my land at about 45%. I went to war with all surviving AIs one after the other. I was using gunships and Modern Armor, the AIs were defending with longbows and an occasional maceman. Consistent with my domination prevention strategy, I did not take or raze any of their cities... I wanted the AIs to maintain a solid border with me. However, I razed almost every tile improvement theyd made. This totally stifled their tech pace. After these wars, Id never have to worry about spaceship launches or an AI attacking and pillaging any of my border cities. The only improvements I didnt raze AI cities near my cultural borders got to keep their farms and pastures. I wanted them to keep building population because I expected to conquer them on the last turn of the game for a population boost. However, I razed any cottages in these cities. By 1550 I was done my pillaging wars. One side note I generally consider gunships to be pretty useless. However, they were superb for pillaging improvements in the mountainous part of the map (especially since the AIs couldnt shoot them down).
Shortly after my pillaging wars, I went after Saladin for a few more cities to take my land closer to the domination limit. I also flipped a couple from culture. I ended up with 52.42 % land (dom limit 56%). If I had more time to play the end game better, I would have cut it closer to the dom limit...
At the very end of the game (maybe 10 turns left), I fought a couple of wars. One was to make a beeline deep into Cathys territory to grab the city that founded Judaism. The others were capture those fat border cities I mentioned earlier.
One final caveat: If you look at my final save (posted in the HOF), you might be confused about the location of my capital. Up until the last turn of the game, Beijing was my capital. However, on the second to last turn, I built a new capital in a prod city because I thought it might have been my missing wonder (it wasnt). There was no other reason for moving the capital. Before I moved the capital, Beijing was an monsterous city, teching well over 900 per turn.
- chieftan level
- time victory
- ancient start
- great plains - huge map
- marathon speed
Critical stats of my game:
Score:
- 7,206 from population (2962/2055)
- 1,037 from land (1909/3680)
- 25,627 from techs (3857/301)
- 978 from wonders (225/230) <- one missing!
Cities: 136
Techs: Researched 509 Future Techs.
Wonders: Built all but one (not sure which one I missed, it was a pure oversight)
Great People spawned: 57
I made two attempts at this gauntlet. The first (Warlords - Mehmed) scored 16,671 and taught me some lessons I was able to apply in my second attempt (20,961). Unfortunately, I was coming to the deadline of the Gauntlet, was running out of time. This meant I was not able to play an optimal game. While 20,961 won the Gauntlet, this score could have been higher if I had time to micromanage better. However, here are some major learnings and strategies:
The biggest factor in time score is techs. Second is population. Wonder production and land were not all that important to the final score. As a result, I decided to go for a specialist economy (SE). A single sci specialist is worth 6 beakers. A single cottage ultimately will be worth more, up to 7-8 with a financial leader. However, I thought there were two major considerations that voted against a cottage strategy. First, a sci specialist gives you all 6 beakers immediately. It takes a long time to grow a cottage to a town. With the lightning tech pace possible at chieftan, I knew I could be running many, many sci specialists at 6 beakers long before my cottages have grown up to towns. My belief was that even with top production of 7-8 beakers, cottages would never catch up to the quick start from the sci specialists. Second, and more important, while tech is the top scoring factor, population is still important as well. After biology, with a SE, each grass tile gives me a double impact. With a farm, each tile supports 2 population (the citizen working the tile and a sci specialist). A cottaged tile only supports 1 pop (the citizen working the tile). Even if the science from cottages eventually catches up to the specialists, a specialist strategy provides way more population.
Happiness and health are complete non-issues. Yes, for a short time you might be constrained by happiness in one or two cities. However, at chieftan, you can go for a long time before happiness becomes an issue. And, once you are into future techs, happiness and health concerns are over forever. Over the course of a 1200 turn game, the time period where you might have one or two unhappy citizens in one or two cities is trivial. As a result, I did not waste hammers on happiness or health buildings. The only exceptions: every city got a granary (for the growth bonus, not for the health) and a few cities got markets and groceries (for the commerce multiplier, not health or happiness). However, remember that I was not building cottages, so most cities did not produce much gold. Therefore, most cities did not get markets/grocers (or banks).
I thought the choice of leader traits was obvious. No reason to take Financial no cottages. No reason to take Aggressive given the tech advantage no reason to worry about a free promotion (that Modern Armor really doesnt need a bonus to kill a longbow
). No reason for Expansive health is not an issue. No reason for Spiritual dont plan to budge from my key civics. Certainly dont want Creative last thing I want is more culture. The two that stood out were Organized and Philosophical. With the massive population I intended to build, the civics cost reduction from Organized seemed like a good idea. At the end of this game, I was saving almost 600 gold per turn in civics cost. Philo for the obvious reason
it would lead to more Great Persons, especially more Great Scientists. I wanted lots of Academies! What about Industrious? I could see some value in the faster wonder production. Not because there was any concern about the AI getting one first, just to minimize the time spent building it (detracting from research). However, I didnt really care much about wonders. Also, I usually only built them when there was nothing else useful to build. So faster wonder production time was not all that appealing, the best I could have done was produced research in those extra turns.Given these traits, there were two candidates to lead my effort: Mao in Vanilla and Freddy in Warlords. I decided on Mao Freddys special building was a complete waste and Warlords has nerfed chopping somewhat. I think either choice would work equally well.
Civics were as follows: I built Pyramids and ran Representation all game. I used Oracle for CS for early Bureacracy, then ran it all game. After CoL, I ran Caste System all game. After Banking, I ran Mercantilism all game. I think all of these civics are very obvious for a SE strategy. The only civic I changed mid-game was religious. For a while, I ran Organized Religion for the building bonus. However, once I had UN, I voted in Free Religion for the tech bonus. I never ran any other civic other than these.
Techs: My rough path:
CS slingshot
Literature (Gr Lib)
Metal (forges)
Currency (+1 trade route times many cities)
Education (Oxford)
Banking (Mercantilism)
Democracy (Statue of Liberty)
Astronomy (Observatory)
Corporation (another trade route times many cities)
Biology (pop)
Computers (Labs)
Liberalism for Future Tech
Some more Future Techs
Everything else I skipped
Many, many more Future Techs.
Early focus was on the techs that provided research buildings, Democracy for Statue of Liberty, and Biology for massive population. Once I had these, I beelined for Future Techs. I took my first FT from Liberalism in 1378 AD, then researched 10-15 more FTs before going back and picking up the crappy techs I had skipped. I did this to eliminate any remaining concerns about happiness or health asap.
As far as starting location, going for time victory on a great plains map, this is obvious. In an SE strategy, teching is dependent on specialists and specialists are dependent on food. Of course, population is also dependent on food. Food is dependent on grassland farms. Bottom line, the eastern part of the map (grasslands) is the only place to be. By the end of the game, every tile that could be a farm was a farm, and every tile that could be a windmill was a windmill. I even farmed over many of my special resources. Who needs spices when you have 509 smilies from future techs? Id rather have an extra science specialist by farming the tile. Every forest was chopped to build science buildings. The only resources I remotely cared about were coal, stone, and marble. Coal for railroads, stone and marble to minimize lost hammers building wonders. Obviously iron or copper was nice to allow some early protection, I also took advantage of horses for some early conquering. However, I could have done fine without any of these.
I think the most critical learning from my first attempt was that more cities is always better. You cant build too many cities. Why? Every city starts with a citizen. With Mercantilism and Statue of Liberty, every city also starts with 2 specialists. The total food across the map is fixed, regardless of number of cities. So, I concluded that (in general) 2 smaller cities would be better than 1 large city. Id have the almost the same amount of food to support population, but Id have 2 starting citizens instead of 1 and Id have 4 free specialists instead of 2. One exception I knew I could only build a limited number of academies. To take advantage of these relatively scarce academies, I wanted to build some large cities to house them. (If I could have built academies in every city, then I would have built all small cities.) Ultimately, I built 20-25 cities with full fat crosses. 18 of these ended up with Academies and were allowed to use all of the tiles in their fat crosses (at the expense of neighbors). The rest of the cities were packed as tightly as possible, usually two tiles apart. This meant many cities were only able to work 6-8 tiles. However, with all tiles farmed and the extra food used for sci specialists, these tiny 6-8 pop cities were still very effective. My WORST city was researching 88 beakers per turn. Bottom line, 136 small cities will greatly out-tech 50-60 large cities
133 of my 136 cities were pure science cities. Three (including my capital) were science cities that doubled as production cities. Every single city got the following buildings: forge, granary, courthouse, library, university, observatory, laboratory. For 90% of the cities this is all they got. Some cities had enough gold to warrant banks/markets/groceries. Since I wasnt building cottages, this meant they had one of three things: a gold/gem mine, lots of river tiles, or a religious shrine. My coastal cities got a lighthouse. The three production cities got barracks (in hindsight a complete waste of hammers).
Obviously, I wanted to build as many wonders as possible. However, because wonder scoring pales in comparison to tech, wonders were a secondary priority. With a few exceptions, I wouldnt be concerned about missing one or two wonders (especially the religious shrines). City build order would always focus on research I would only build a wonder in a city if there were no research buildings I could build. This also meant I would not worry about founding religions or spawning Great Prophets. If I missed one or two religious wonders, so be it. There were only three wonders I thought were worth an early beeline Oracle, Pyramids and Statue of Liberty. Oracle for early Bureacracy, Pyramids for early Representation, Liberty for the free specialists.
Wonders were mostly spread around to random cities. My capital ended up building several wonders, mostly because it had decent production and I wasnt worried about one city reaching legendary culture. The only wonders I directed to a specific city were as follows. Gr Lib, Oxford, and National Epic all went into my capital. The capital had three food bonuses and Bureacracy, so it was going to be a science powerhouse (hence Oxford). It also was my primary GP factory because of the extra random wonders and extra superspecialists (hence Gr Lib and Epic). West Point and Heroic Epic were built in one of my two prod cities, this city built most of my military (not that I built much military many of my cities had no units protecting them). Ironworks went into the other prod city. Finally, Wall Street went to the city with the Buddism shrine. With all the missionary spamming I did, this shrine was generating a boatload of commerce. Other than that, I didnt really care where I built wonders, I spread them around. By the way, as I mentioned before, in spite of putting low priority on wonders, I ended up with all but one (the mystery wonder I somehow missed along the way
).I spawned 57 Great People (6 prophets, 4 Engineers, 3 Artists, 3 Merchants, 41 Scientists). I used one artist and one merchant for a GA. I used 5 Prophets for shrines. All other early non-scientist great people became superspecialists in my capital, just for the beakers they produced. The beaker value of the superspecialists in my capital always outweighed the value of rushing a wonder or doing a trade mission. My first 18 Scientists became Academies in fat cross cities. I never used any scientists as superspecialists, they were always worth more as Academies. Of course, at some point, the value of the lightbulb exceeds the value of an Academy or superspecialist. Since you know exactly how many turns are left in the game at any point, this math is very easy to do. Many of my Great Peeps became lightbulbs.
I knew that unless I severly mismanaged the game, there was no way an AI could win. The biggest concern is accidently triggering domination, so I needed to manage the size of my empire carefully. See this post for how I did this post on managing expansion I suppose there was a slight chance I could have triggered culture win. However, this seems very unlikely. I spread around my wonders to be safe.
As far as religions . I ignored the three early religions, they were founded by AIs. I did found all of the later religions (given my tech pace, I couldnt have avoided founding them if I tried
). In fact, I discovered Confucianism 35 turns before Judaism was founded! However, in spite of missing three early religions, I ended up with all 7 religious wonders by capturing cities. Early on, I adopted the most prevalent religion in the world (Buddism, one I captured). For a long time, I spawned missionaries like crazy
I wanted all my cities to get the 25% production bonus. This also meant my Buddism shrine was very profitable. Once I switched to Free Religion, I obviously stopped spamming missionaries.I fought several wars. In the early part of the game I stole workers from a few AI (I also built a ton, I ended up with over 100). I then had early wars of conquest against three AIs who had the bad luck of starting on MY half of the map
. I starting these wars around 900 BC, a bit earlier than I would have liked (using horse archers). My initial plan was to allow the AIs to build cities for me. However, I did not have stone nearby, so I needed to find someone who did (goodbye Izzy). Izzy also had founded Buddism, which became my religion. After Izzy, I decided to take the AI on the coast so I could build Colossus and Lighthouse before they became obsolete, which happens very quickly with this tech pace (goodbye Cyrus). I also went after Julius early on. He was on prime grassland, and is a bit of a psycho, so I decided to conquer him while I was in a warring mood and my horse archers were still dominant. After this period of conquering, I hunkered down for some serious Settler spamming . Settler, settler, settler, settler zzzzzzz As mentioned, these settlers were filling every nook and cranny on my half of the map.
After I had filled up as much open land as I could, I conquered Mansa and took some property from Saladin (around 1450 AD). Mansa was also on my half of the map, holding down nice grasslands to my north. Mansa quickly went bye-bye. Saladin was further west, on the southernmost part of the plains region. He had some cities with lots of nice floodplains. He also had founded Hinduism (in fact, he was nice enough to build the shrine for me). I didnt kill him off, just took 3-4 cities (didnt want his crappy plains land, besides, didnt want to risk triggering domination).
At this point, early 1500s, I had stablized my land at about 45%. I went to war with all surviving AIs one after the other. I was using gunships and Modern Armor, the AIs were defending with longbows and an occasional maceman. Consistent with my domination prevention strategy, I did not take or raze any of their cities... I wanted the AIs to maintain a solid border with me. However, I razed almost every tile improvement theyd made. This totally stifled their tech pace. After these wars, Id never have to worry about spaceship launches or an AI attacking and pillaging any of my border cities. The only improvements I didnt raze AI cities near my cultural borders got to keep their farms and pastures. I wanted them to keep building population because I expected to conquer them on the last turn of the game for a population boost. However, I razed any cottages in these cities. By 1550 I was done my pillaging wars. One side note I generally consider gunships to be pretty useless. However, they were superb for pillaging improvements in the mountainous part of the map (especially since the AIs couldnt shoot them down).
Shortly after my pillaging wars, I went after Saladin for a few more cities to take my land closer to the domination limit. I also flipped a couple from culture. I ended up with 52.42 % land (dom limit 56%). If I had more time to play the end game better, I would have cut it closer to the dom limit...
At the very end of the game (maybe 10 turns left), I fought a couple of wars. One was to make a beeline deep into Cathys territory to grab the city that founded Judaism. The others were capture those fat border cities I mentioned earlier.
One final caveat: If you look at my final save (posted in the HOF), you might be confused about the location of my capital. Up until the last turn of the game, Beijing was my capital. However, on the second to last turn, I built a new capital in a prod city because I thought it might have been my missing wonder (it wasnt). There was no other reason for moving the capital. Before I moved the capital, Beijing was an monsterous city, teching well over 900 per turn.
, but that wouldn't have been enough to cover costs. Did the cities build wealth to help even things out or did they stick to research?
. I think you are correct... the capital should have been cottaged. My Wall Street city (with the Buddist shrine earning 95 gpt) should have been cottaged as well. They were outstanding cities, but could have been better.
