Standard Regent 100k victory in
610 AD
Civ: Celts
Opponents: 4 (Arabia, Aztecs, Mongols and Zulus) (There's probably a reason for these but I can't seem to remember it..)
Landform: Standard 60% Pangaea
Other settings: Warm, normal, 5b years, no barbs
Dom limit: 1487
I was playing starts with 2+ cows aiming for an early SGL. I actually played a lot of these early in the spring
and eventually gave up after getting just one with an SGL but where the landscape just wasn't good enough. Sparked
by the discussion in the latest gauntlet-thread I decided to play some more of those maps I had generated earlier.
I would set research to Masonry, build one or two warriors and then a settler timed to complete around the same
time as Masonry. Here's a start where I finally got an SGL.
I didn't initially like it very much as I thought plains cows aren't good for much. Played it until Masonry regardless
and here things started looking brighter. I rushed the Pyramids and started my GA with two cities at size 1. Here's my
empire at the start of the Golden Age.
I actually think given enough food it's not too bad to have the GA this early, since it's possible to have 4-turners very
early to jumpstart expansion. By the end of the GA I had managed to expand quite a bit, up to 7 cities and 2 settlers,
although I was lacking workers. Four of these early cities would later become 4-turners while the other three would be
5-turners. If you look closely you can see that Entremont could actually be a 4-turner at sizes 2 and 3 during the Golden Age
while Alesia needed sizes 3 and 4.
I used A'AbarachAmadan's 870 AD finish as a model for my strategy. I thought the finish date in that game is rather impressive
considering it features hand-built Pyramids and ToA. After all you have to dedicate cities to both of those
somewhat close to the core which means two less cities available for settlers, not to mention having
to build granaries in your settler factories. So having even just one SGL for the Pyramids should get me
ahead early.
I divided the plan into four steps:
1. Get to Republic as soon as possible while expanding as fast as possible.
2. Get to Feudalism as soon as possible while expanding as fast as possible.
3. Get to the domination limit as quickly as possible, use extra population to whip settlers and
workers.
4. Once out of room to expand, whip for culture.
As far as I can tell this was exactly what A'AbarachAmadan had done as well. In 1200 BC they only have 12 cities
and a couple of settlers. In 30 BC they are in Feudalism and suddenly have over 100 cities, but no culture
built. The only way to achive that seemed to be to use the whip rather liberally to get more settlers out.
In 560 AD they are up to the domination limit with 250 cities and a good portion of the culture already
built.
(Addendum: After reading Aigburth's write-up for the 670AD finish on higher difficulty I'm no longer quite
sure my analysis was correct here. I was way ahead of Aigburth in 1000BC, actually by over 100% counting
cities+settlers (35+19 vs 22+1) but by 10 AD I had lost my advantage. I did also run into the jungle around
this time which might have slowed me down somewhat.. Aigburth seemed to have a little less of it.)
Given my early Pyramids I was already well ahead of A'AbarachAmadan's game by 1200 BC. I had 21 cities, 14 settlers
and even 50 workers. On top of that I had received a second SGL from Philosophy which meant I could rush ToA as well.
In 1000 BC I had 35 cities and 19 settlers and was already researching Feudalism. In
950 BC I emerged in Feudalism and
started to rush out settlers and workers.
At first I planned to whip settlers only every 10 turns with 10 shields in the bin. I quickly decided that's just too slow
and started whipping them as soon as cities reached size 5 which would take them back to size 1. I also whipped workers
at size 3 if the city didn't have proper tiles to work. Having access to 7 luxuries probably helped quite a bit with
the unhappiness. I quickly realized micro-managing all of my cities would drive me crazy and probably wasn't
even going to make that big of a difference. I decided it's best to let the governors manage the happiness in all cities
except the very core which still had several settler factories. I also enabled the "Emphasize food"-option.
Around
600 BC it had become apparent that I didn't have enough space and needed to wipe out the Aztecs. I had been
building some maces and horses but it wasn't even enough to cover the whole front I had with them. I happened to
notice though that my military of 4 maces, 3 horses and 2 warriors made me strong or average against all the other civs
so I decided to just declare on the Aztecs even though I was still weak compared to them. I figured they couldn't
possibly take so many cities that it would really hurt me. It worked out alright, although they did manage
to burn or capture a couple of my cities which in turn caused some rather unwanted war weariness (I had forgotten
Feudalism has that as well...).
Around
300 BC I slowly started whipping culture in cities that were too far away from any settleable space. I was up
to about 120 cities with another 25 settlers en route by this time (280cpt, 7200 total), still well ahead of my
reference game. This is what my empire looked at this time. I already control (in the sense that AI won't settle it)
something like 1300 tiles, less than 200 short of the domination limit.
After this I slowly reduced the number of settler builds in favour of culture builds. My rule of thumb was to whip
two pop at size 4 since it meant a little less work than whipping one pop at a time. In practise that meant
using longbows or maces as a short rush target for cathedrals and libraries. It seemed to work well enough.
With colosseums I tried different things. Eventually I decided it's best to let colosseum cities grow to 6,
use a musket for short rushing and then let them grow once more and finish the job at size 4 using market.
Alternatively if the city was on fresh water I'd just let it grow straight to 7. This was because I seemed
to run into some unhappiness issues if I tried to partly rush them earlier causing the growth to stop. It
might have been due to my worker and settler rushing. Towards the end I also used most of my workers for
rushing colosseums.
By
300 AD I had finally managed to kick out the rest of the Aztecs and claimed enough land to be within about
dozen tiles of the domination limit. I had also settled just about all of the available city locations
for a total of 255 cities (1500cpt, 32000 total). By this time CA2 was predicting a 760 AD victory, but I still
had plenty of culture left to build.
By
late 400s I had managed to build most of the culture available and the estimated win date started to stabilize.
Finally I reached a cultural victory in
610 AD after spending about 48 hours.
Here are some images of my progression:
