BlackBetsy
Warlord
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2005
- Messages
- 250
Well, pending acceptance of my games (fingers crossed), I think I just finished the Quartermaster's Challenge after a break of 19 years. Assuming they are accepted, my Standard Chieftain 20k game and my Huge Monarch SS Game would complete everything on the Quartermaster's Challenge (Octathlon, Machiavelli, Pentathlon) except for a Regent win for the Octathlon and a Historigraphic win. So looking at the tables we saw only 9 slots on Tiny Regent Historigraphic, so here we go.
It's fun after 19 years and remember concepts. The Historigraphic game is just a Fast Domination game where you stop short of the Domination limit and "milk" your territory for happy citizens. My first effort failed miserably - not because I lost to the feeble Regent AI, but because I generated way, way, way, too much culture and hit the 60k culture limit many turns early. I felt like it wouldn't be right to disband 7+ wonder cities to avoid the limit and go back to a save, so I just started over, convinced that you should NOT build Temple of Artemis like you would in a fast domination game.
I went Inca for Agricultural characteristic - more food, faster spread, and expansionist to get the early techs and free settler or two. Cuzco had a grassland cow, forests, and three grassland BG for a perfect 4 turn settler factory. I popped the settler with my scout as hoped and picked up CB, the Wheel, Mysticism, and Bronze Working from huts while trading for the Sumerian and Indian starting techs. Annoyingly, our nearest lux would take a bit to hook up so I had to use the lux slider more than I wanted in the early game. Our closest AI was the Indians, who only beat me to Math, which I thanked Gandhi for before declaring war. A few veteran swords and archers and 5 catapults were enough to wipe out the Indians and their 6 cities. Unfortunately, their last 2 cities were in a vast swamp/marsh that slowed movement and eliminated catapults, so I had to slog through that to finish them off and had to wait 15 turns as my building up armed forces circumvented the Great Dismal Wetlands on a sparse road network and reached my far borders with the Sumerians. The Sumerians didn't stand a chance against a combined MI+Catapult +Horse onslaught and there wasn't even a question where their prison would be - the pointy tip of the Northwest Peninsula of our Pangaea. Conquest was done by about 500 AD - still a little slow for a domination game on tiny Pangaea, although I did go with 60% water, making it bigger and my Pang was irregularly shaped.
Teching was a breeze by this point and we had 70 workers and untolled numbers of slaves watering and roading and railroading our continent. Thats when the settler boom started again, and we squeezed every tile out of our domination limit, choosing fertile grasslands and abandoning the plains. I saw a post somewhere where someone forested all the empty land and I liked that concept- our world would be dominated by railroaded, irrigated (or mined) territory with wild and planted forest everywhere else. After I had to fight too many wars with Gilgamesh as he sent settlers out of his prison (more slaves), I moved him to a more appropriate setting befitting the second civilization sharing a world with a democracy (Sumerian Prison Camp island). It took me long enough to learn that I needed to give him a Mutual Protection Pact to get a Right of Passage, and that lesson was the last moment Gil sent a unit outside his city walls.
Scoring is interesting- I knew that it was an average score so the priority was to hit the domination limit early and then max a happy population as soon as possible. I lost points where I didn't have aqueducts built fast enough and by having content / angry citizens when I didn't need to. I put least 3 cities in places that hurt my score (they didn't have any working citizens since only the city square was available, and that city square could have been worked by another city's happy citizen.
I THOUGHT I was on a trajectory for the #3 score in Tiny Regent Historigraphic based on my early scores / calculation of score per turn. But the actual calculation, I've learned, is more asymptotal. Between turns 229 and 241, I was adding 12 points to my score per turn. By turn 366. that was down to 8 points per turn....declining to 5 points per turn by turn 491 and just about 4 points per turn at the end. At my finish, I wound up with 4014 points, which, if accepted, will put me at #6. I am happy to get over 4000 but I really thought for a bit that I would wind up over 5000. Lots of Maya on milk runs...and I won't deny that Industrious trait saving worker turns seems mighty appealing.
It's fun to think that I finally did something I wanted to do after 19 years. I still love this game more than any other version and just wish it didn't basically own my existence for hours at a time while I was playing it.
It's fun after 19 years and remember concepts. The Historigraphic game is just a Fast Domination game where you stop short of the Domination limit and "milk" your territory for happy citizens. My first effort failed miserably - not because I lost to the feeble Regent AI, but because I generated way, way, way, too much culture and hit the 60k culture limit many turns early. I felt like it wouldn't be right to disband 7+ wonder cities to avoid the limit and go back to a save, so I just started over, convinced that you should NOT build Temple of Artemis like you would in a fast domination game.
I went Inca for Agricultural characteristic - more food, faster spread, and expansionist to get the early techs and free settler or two. Cuzco had a grassland cow, forests, and three grassland BG for a perfect 4 turn settler factory. I popped the settler with my scout as hoped and picked up CB, the Wheel, Mysticism, and Bronze Working from huts while trading for the Sumerian and Indian starting techs. Annoyingly, our nearest lux would take a bit to hook up so I had to use the lux slider more than I wanted in the early game. Our closest AI was the Indians, who only beat me to Math, which I thanked Gandhi for before declaring war. A few veteran swords and archers and 5 catapults were enough to wipe out the Indians and their 6 cities. Unfortunately, their last 2 cities were in a vast swamp/marsh that slowed movement and eliminated catapults, so I had to slog through that to finish them off and had to wait 15 turns as my building up armed forces circumvented the Great Dismal Wetlands on a sparse road network and reached my far borders with the Sumerians. The Sumerians didn't stand a chance against a combined MI+Catapult +Horse onslaught and there wasn't even a question where their prison would be - the pointy tip of the Northwest Peninsula of our Pangaea. Conquest was done by about 500 AD - still a little slow for a domination game on tiny Pangaea, although I did go with 60% water, making it bigger and my Pang was irregularly shaped.
Teching was a breeze by this point and we had 70 workers and untolled numbers of slaves watering and roading and railroading our continent. Thats when the settler boom started again, and we squeezed every tile out of our domination limit, choosing fertile grasslands and abandoning the plains. I saw a post somewhere where someone forested all the empty land and I liked that concept- our world would be dominated by railroaded, irrigated (or mined) territory with wild and planted forest everywhere else. After I had to fight too many wars with Gilgamesh as he sent settlers out of his prison (more slaves), I moved him to a more appropriate setting befitting the second civilization sharing a world with a democracy (Sumerian Prison Camp island). It took me long enough to learn that I needed to give him a Mutual Protection Pact to get a Right of Passage, and that lesson was the last moment Gil sent a unit outside his city walls.
Scoring is interesting- I knew that it was an average score so the priority was to hit the domination limit early and then max a happy population as soon as possible. I lost points where I didn't have aqueducts built fast enough and by having content / angry citizens when I didn't need to. I put least 3 cities in places that hurt my score (they didn't have any working citizens since only the city square was available, and that city square could have been worked by another city's happy citizen.
I THOUGHT I was on a trajectory for the #3 score in Tiny Regent Historigraphic based on my early scores / calculation of score per turn. But the actual calculation, I've learned, is more asymptotal. Between turns 229 and 241, I was adding 12 points to my score per turn. By turn 366. that was down to 8 points per turn....declining to 5 points per turn by turn 491 and just about 4 points per turn at the end. At my finish, I wound up with 4014 points, which, if accepted, will put me at #6. I am happy to get over 4000 but I really thought for a bit that I would wind up over 5000. Lots of Maya on milk runs...and I won't deny that Industrious trait saving worker turns seems mighty appealing.
It's fun to think that I finally did something I wanted to do after 19 years. I still love this game more than any other version and just wish it didn't basically own my existence for hours at a time while I was playing it.
