HK Level T160 tech tree win. Share your sub 150 secrets :)

[Cherenkov]

So finally got this down to T160 on HK difficulty at normal speed with the following cultures: Harappans->Celts->Khmer->Joseon->France->Turks.

Yea Khmer is OP but really need that production boost at that point in the game. I tried an alternative using Siam instead of France and was surprised I only lost 5 turns on the win. Turks seems a must and as long as you have setup your research clusters ahead of time and drop in your Public Schools I reached 60k science in the end with just 6/9 cities.

I was at war either with civs or indys almost the whole game to keep those easy military stars flowing. With almost 50 territories no other civ had much room lol. I actually didn't use CM that much either, just 1 city usually while I was building all the mindless number of research quarters. Seemed to work a lot better than going CM early in most cities like I did in the past. A lot of passive science has its merits.

Also had a little fun on the side completely eliminating my early neighbor Egypt who declared war on me around T30. That was satisfying killing his last unit after taking all his cities.

Tech tree

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Capital city

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[NombreyApellido]

the playstyle i'm enjoying now is valid for this sort of goals so here it goes:

-i aim to time it so i can go 2 and 3 cities over limit relying on EQs, inf infrastructure and civics. a fourth one is sustainable but pushes aesthete stars out of reach. toward the end game it's possible to stay 5 over limits with ease

-i start with cities with of only 2 territories to save INF, add a third one once ancient is mostly done and all i have left are the merchant stars

-yes, i'm doing the very OP egypt-achaemenid-kmer combo, but i'm also going for every star for monster fame score

-i also aim to build giza and halicarnasus

-full disclosure, this is done in a custom map i know to a tee and i'm just on final stages of testing but i believe the general idea should work most everywhere else

 

[Cherenkov]

I was surprised how much I liked the Celts. I almost always go Achaemenid or Greece but Celts were available which is rare and having monster size cities with Harappans->Celts ties in well with Khmer Barays. However I really missed those Immortals. Gaesati are decent but can't one-shot cavalry. Egypt kept throwing wave after wave of swordsmen/EU combo at me and it got really annoying until I got pikemen but was great for farming military stars. Lost a lot of Gaesati in the process but they are so cheap to make it didn't matter. If Egypt had gone Huns it would have been extremely painful until pikemen.

I built Halicarnasus in this game but missed Giza.

Think I'm going to play around more with Joseon and France and see what other combo might work better. However Joseon is a great way to boost science passively and actively at the right stage of the game. The Seowon district is a lot better than it advertises. I put it down and it says 11 sci but it ends up being 40-50 because of other modifiers it has. Joseon is great for picking up techs quickly that are helpful for more production, money and science. With jist one city on CM I was hitting around 7k science with Joseon, only 3k less than with France.

Instead of Joseon I might go Ottomans and do a really aggressive expansion to see how it compares.

 

[Cherenkov]

I cut this down to T159. Went a rather different path midway with Harappans->Celts->Umayyads->Mughal->Siam->Japanese. Umayyads let you push your science so that when you go Mughal you are ready for the EU which is deadly. I screwed up though and finished a war too soon and took too long to finish my military stars to get to the next era. Had to spend 5 turns finding a new victim for those stars. I think if I go back to an earlier save and fix that blunder I can cut this down to T152 or so.

I had 10/9 cities this time and after spending a few turns making some Japanese EQs I went full CM and disbanded my entire army to avoid going gold negative. Japan with 30k science is just as good as Turks with 60k. That 20% reduction to research techs is powerful. And it also saves you the pain of having to building a bazillion clusters of research quarters for the public schools.

I'm now over 500 hours playing this game according to Steam lol.

 

[EscapedGoat]

Finished the tech tree (last 4 techs) in 77 turns. Using simply the "going to mars in 76 turns" strategy, (Egypt-Persians-Khmer-Joseon-French-Japanese) but not building nor launching the mission, I just reloaded a few turns before my turn 71 mars win and just hard researching to the end using collective minds, something like 60K science output at the end (using Japanese for the last age merely for the science reduction, did not build a single research lab as the game was ending so soon anyway. Let's see if the patch will shake this up a bit, focusing production then going collective minds is severely OP.