How to win the game with one city size one

[la fayette]

At long last my connection to Apolyton is working fine today. This gave me access to samson's great thread about 'OCC size 1'.
Here is the link:
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=65421

I WOULD ADVISE ANYONE TO READ THIS THREAD

(it shows you what can be achieved, even if you have no hope of becoming such a great player as samson definitely is)

 

[B52]

Thanks for this link. I am going to try this, and I have a few questions:

1) how can you set science so high without running out of money?

2) how can you build wonders so fast with such a small city - don't the other civs beat you to it?

3) This strategy hinges on being close to another civ's capital - might this sometimes take a prohibitively long time to find? Do you have to keep re-starting until you get an "ideal" start location?

4) How do you keep the city at size one (I guess this is a dumb question, but am I missing something?)?

Thanks!

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Here's a thread where a couple of us played a size 1 OCC game.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=46059

 

[la fayette]

B52

1) The trick is to beg (the AI civs are willing to give you LOTS of gold when they see you so tiny and defenseless).

2) You get so much money from them that you can rushbuy caravans and build wonders with those.

3) Yes, OCCers use to restart a lot until they find a satisfying starting point (but this is almost less important when playing OCC size1, since you only have 2 squares to care about )

4) City size is down by one anytime you build a settler

 

[ElephantU]

Re: 4) The basic idea is to plant the city on a tile that yields only one Food, and the single citizen works a square with only one Food too. Your objective is to maximize the amount of Trade Arrows from the two tiles. The best you can do is founding the city on Gold (6T,+1Food for city square); others worth considering are Ivory, Gems (both 4T), and Silk (3T). Your secondary consideration is Shields, so you could use an Ocean as your second tile for the Trade, but a Bridged River Forest would do as well in Trade but yield more Shields. It is not possible to build a city on one "special" tile and work another unless you find some "DateLine" anomaly, but the map generator does not seem to put land across the DateLine very often.

A good starting location is critical for any OCC game, but more so for Size1 because of the need for a nearby neighbor and decent specials. Most Comparison Game posts are from people who have restarted dozens of times and played a bit (I usually figure past 3600BC is too long) before retrying. Aside from begging gold and techs off the AI, you need to maximize your research, and you will not get decent research without good trade routes. Your commodities will probably get stuck, so delivering for beaker bonuses will not help you much. There is one point when you pass 32techs that your wildcard commodity will change, and several commodities have partial dependencies on numbers or types of techs, but that is very difficult to exploit. High trade routes and the key OCC Science Wonders (Colossus, Copernicus, Newtons) are the keys.

The good news is how much city development issues you can forget about. You dont even need a Temple! Deity is a breeze with only one citizen. Most of the time after you get Democracy you will need to keep 100% Science setting, so Bank/StockExch are of no use either. Marketplace is probably worth it early on, and not worth selling off later except in an emergency. Superhighways is probably the only other thing worth doing, and that is for the trade route effects (+50%). It is nearly impossible to get the AI to build Airports, so dont bother with that one either.