Marathon Speed - Tradeoffs

[vorlon_mi]

I could've sworn that CivBE follows Civ5 in ejecting foreign units from your territory when war has been declared between you and those units' owner.

And yeah, that ridiculously high health is normal for me in the late game. I honestly wonder if it's working as intended, because it's several times more than what one could possibly need even while waging war.

They were ejected diplomatically. When I downgraded the relationship to Neutral, that act removes the "open borders"/"right of passage" status. Kavitha's units were ejected outside my borders. The tank ended up in a small cluster of 3 hexes of open territory, not claimed by my cities. The immortals ended up on the coast, in territory not claimed by my cities.
But in one of my early games, I was invaded by Hutama while cooperating. I had the sense that his units in my territory stayed after he declared, but that was almost 4 years ago. I may be misremembering.

I think that the high health must have a multiplicative factor in there somewhere that doesn't scale well.
In addition, I've got the "Joy from Variety" virtue (+1 health for every improved basic resource), +1 health for every city from the Prosperity synergy (with at least 30 cities), and "Public Security" Might virtue for +0.25 health for every military unit (probably 50 of those). Every city has 3 basic health buildings; many also have Gene Gardens, Tidal Turbines, and a few Bionic Labs and Gene Smelters.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Postscripts: My Beacon connected on turn 848. That's roughly 2.5x the turns of my usual games. Marathon, indeed. I looked into the "Economic Summary" and found that I had founded and conquered more than 60 cities, much more than I remembered. That's my favorite kind of empire! Final score of 9253.

Kavitha wisely never declared on me, but kept teching towards affinity 15 in Supremacy. The NSA/PAU alliance reformed, and they tried to make war on KP. Mostly skirmishes of a few boats near Deepcastle and the perpetual pecking at Demut. Founded by INTEGR, it was conquered by NSA around turn 250. When Kavitha took 3 of NSA's cities in a war, she got Demut as part of the peace settlement. But PAU could never quite figure out how to conquer it, despite having lots of units.

Only one tile access via water, but all of those Xeno Swarms. If only they could swim, to get up and surround the city... LOL. Despite having a bias for aquatic cities, NSA didn't plant any. In the last 20-25 turns, both NSA and PAU sent out colonists. But NSA planted cities in the northern wilderness near me, ON LAND. Not in the water, near Deepcastle, where they could be easily defended. PAU, on the other hand, looked far away to the south, rather than the north country, closer to their last remaining city.

I would choose different personality traits in my next Marathon game; speeding up the spy missions would be very desirable. I might follow Potato McWhiskey's advice and beeline down to the bottom of the Prosperity virtue tree for health. Even though spy missions are slower at Marathon speed, they are still very valuable.

 

[MarqFJA87]

At least in my previous game, I gave myself some breathing room by picking Developer as my Domestic personality trait early on and maximizing ASAP, allowing me to focus on getting more tier 1 virtue synergy; my previous approach of beelining for health-boosting virtues meant that by the time I could think of turning to the other virtues, the tier 1 ones and even some tier 2 ones have lost much if not all of their utility to me, whereas they could've been very beneficial to me in the early and early-mid game. Once my teching has progressed enough and I managed to build a big enough military to capitalize on Public Security's boost, I could then invest the tons of diplomatic capital I have to ditch Developer and pick something else more pertinent to my current priorities.