As some people here know, I like to invent my own victory conditions aside from the predefined ones. Or, if you prefer, just have different goals to min/max depending on the starting point.
This time I endeavoured to see how quickly I could reveal the whole map. It had to be Huge with max water Archipelago to make it a fun enough challenge, of course.
I'm quite glad I chose to do this for this map as it turned out my start position was really dire and boring anyway.
My initial 5 starter boats couldn't find much and soon had the locality as much explored as possible & then all died in suicide runs to nowhere.
Just before AD I had 5 or 6 Galleys scootering around with the help of the Great Lighthouse. And you find quite a lot of map with the GL!
There's little to be gained by suiciding Galleys at this point as the distance they'd have to travel to get to the lost spot would negate any benefit, might as well just search everything I can & wait those few turns to Navigation.
On the turn I discover Navigation I can fill in all those gaps in the islands with map trades. Just a matter of filling in the gaps now:
(You'll also notice I got one of those rare Pompey events as Dover got completely annihilated by a Volcano, lol. Unrelated to the thread, but I thought it was fun, a perfect direct hit!)
After adding a couple or three Caravels to the search party, the entire world was revealed to me about 25 (?) turns later.
Ironically, this particular map had almost zero spare islands anyway, which is very unusual, almost never seen it before. One largish one just above grey India & one 2 square Volcano was all. Tons of red-herring sea squares leading nowhere though, lmao.
1150AD & still learning Chemistry was quite satisfying at the end of the day. Especially considering the tough-to-explore map.
