Ignas has been a player of Tiny and Small maps with several top entries. Most outstanding though, in my opinion, is his Tiny Chieftain 60k game. If you check many, if not also most, of the other multi city cultural tables you will see that their empires never learn Education, or what may be called the ToA strartegy: the strategy of using the Temple of Artemis for its free temples.
Ignas's 60K entry on the other hand uses the power of rails, and I think the power of migrant workers joining towns. This challenges the previous position that not learning Education was optimal. Though it still can get argued that on non-Chieftain maps the Temple of Artemis strategy has more potential than the railroad strategy, because of the auto-selling of buildings if an empire spends more gold than it has it's treasury, his entry suggests that the rail strategy may be more powerful. Perhaps the increased gold requirements on non-Chieftain games can get compensated for, though perhaps they cannot.
Though I have not talked to ignas, I will conjecture that the rail strategy in practice has a few components:
0. Expand to a safe number of tiles below the domination limit.
1. Create several worker pumps. Having rails is convenient for making worker pumps.
2. Take a group of workers to a city which does not have cultural buildings.
3. Join those workers into a city.
4. Pop-rush cultural buildings into existence.
5. Once a city has all the cultural buildings it can except wonders, have it train workers also.
And do more pop-rushing after that.
His 60k entry also has gifted cities to the AIs, apparently to ensure that the domination limit is not tripped over. Forests, jungles, and marshes aren't cleared, because apparently workers are better spent to poprush than transforming the land. I did a little playtest using his 10 AD save and poprushed a coloseeum in a town by first poprushing a musketman, then adding more workers, and finally poprushing the colosseum. I believe I did not know that possibility before.
His game, again with a contrary approach to the more common approach, also got accepted in 2020, 15 years after the release of conquests and the start of the Hall of Fame!
To have an entry that provides empirical evidence for a contrary position to what many top players apparently believed for years, and thus deepens interested players understanding of the game, makes for an achievement of the first rank. The level of achievement here I think is so high that no chart is adequate to measure.
Congratulations ignas!
Ignas's 60K entry on the other hand uses the power of rails, and I think the power of migrant workers joining towns. This challenges the previous position that not learning Education was optimal. Though it still can get argued that on non-Chieftain maps the Temple of Artemis strategy has more potential than the railroad strategy, because of the auto-selling of buildings if an empire spends more gold than it has it's treasury, his entry suggests that the rail strategy may be more powerful. Perhaps the increased gold requirements on non-Chieftain games can get compensated for, though perhaps they cannot.
Though I have not talked to ignas, I will conjecture that the rail strategy in practice has a few components:
0. Expand to a safe number of tiles below the domination limit.
1. Create several worker pumps. Having rails is convenient for making worker pumps.
2. Take a group of workers to a city which does not have cultural buildings.
3. Join those workers into a city.
4. Pop-rush cultural buildings into existence.
5. Once a city has all the cultural buildings it can except wonders, have it train workers also.
And do more pop-rushing after that.
His 60k entry also has gifted cities to the AIs, apparently to ensure that the domination limit is not tripped over. Forests, jungles, and marshes aren't cleared, because apparently workers are better spent to poprush than transforming the land. I did a little playtest using his 10 AD save and poprushed a coloseeum in a town by first poprushing a musketman, then adding more workers, and finally poprushing the colosseum. I believe I did not know that possibility before.
His game, again with a contrary approach to the more common approach, also got accepted in 2020, 15 years after the release of conquests and the start of the Hall of Fame!
To have an entry that provides empirical evidence for a contrary position to what many top players apparently believed for years, and thus deepens interested players understanding of the game, makes for an achievement of the first rank. The level of achievement here I think is so high that no chart is adequate to measure.
Congratulations ignas!
