National College by turn 80 or 90

[lindsay40k]

@Buccaneer: if your start was crying out for an early pantheon (loads of desert, gold, etc), would you modify your timing of the shrine much?

 

[Plumfairy]

@Buccaneer: if your start was crying out for an early pantheon (loads of desert, gold, etc), would you modify your timing of the shrine much?

If you look carefully, his start basically includes a shrine already. (His Ethiopan Stele serves that function.) In my Aztec game, I built a shrine after my 2 scouts and then more-or-less followed Buccaneer's build list. The Aztec UA helped speed adoption of Tradition, though, so not building a monument didn't hurt at all.

I suspect that for most civs, late adoption of Tradition might slow you down a little, but not enough to matter. All civs can probably afford to follow my build order & do fine.

 

[lindsay40k]

Ah, right. Not played Ethiopia, yet - if I'm going really tall I like to be France.

 

[Buccaneer]

Plumfairy is correct, the early Stele gave me +2 culture and +2 faith, a pantheon at turn 12 and religion at turn 81 - all without a faith ruin or faith pantheon (I did eventually get 100 fpt). Going science, I wanted to focus on growth and faith (for GS). Anyway, I would have gone for any early shrine (apart from Ethiopia) if I would get a solid faith pantheon (6 fpt); otherwise, not until after granary, library and trades.

 

[isau]

I almost never get the NC by turn 80. More often its turn 90 - 100. Doesn't matter that much if you still win though, which I usually do. I can get it super early if I get a great start but that's very map type dependent in my experience. I also don't play Pangeas, which IMO makes the game play very very differently because your early gold supply is very volatile.

 

[Deau]

The reason it doesn't matter nearly as much as pre BnW is because of trade route beaker yield at higher difficulty.

If you are on a fully isolated start, getting at or sub T70 NC and expanding after will get you into renaissance much earlier than going wide and being forced to delay NC until T100 for expanding a little too much.