Quest for Glory - Deity Challenge #1

[billby]

Unfashionable I know, but went with Tradition because (two salts aside) this didn't look like a fast start map and anyway Janissaries are a long way down the road from turn 1. So is the Ottoman's navy potential. My heart said try Honour, but I don't think I had seen more than a couple of barbarians by the time I needed to pick the first social policy.

Had Aztecs declare war on me twice. The first time was when I stole two workers. Then again around turn 50. Slogged it out, reached Tenochtitlan with composites at around T100, the captured it with crossbows on T107. Have a healthy looking three city homeland with city pops 11, 9 and 6.

Game crashed at that point.

 

[billby]

This game crashed a lot... an awful lot.

Overall I'd say it happened about 20 to 30 times in total. I've seen crashes before, but they are relatively rare. I wonder if there was something in the map causing the problem?

Eithe way, it's a pity because it was an enjoyable map with some knotty challenges. In the end I felt I just had to complete it.

One specific problem was if I razed cities after capture, that seems to trigger crashes. Which meant I was carrying a higher burden than I'd like. Also the game was unstable if, after taking a city, it was recaptured, there was a huge wave of crashes when my army landed on the other continent.

Another oddity was I completed the Patronage tree quite early on, but never saw a single gifted great person despite having 15 allied city states for most of the game.

After a lot of persistence, I managed to complete this game, taking Vienna on T284.

Sure that's slow by the standards of other people on this forum, but I needed to finish for my own satisfaction and the only way I could complete the game was to slow things down. I knew it was going to slow down further when we hit ~200 or so and aircraft began appearing in enemy cities.

After my first attempt, I reloaded from t90, played much more aggressively and cut through most of the home continent like a knife through butter:

T100 - Tenochtitlan
T121 - Constantinople

Then another set of crashes plagued me around T150. Reloaded from 140 and moved on"

T156 - Rio

So far so good. The next set of crashes meant I could only deal with the Maya by laying siege to strong cities with crossbows. which start to lose their potency at around turn 150, especially given Palenque had the Red Fort and Himeji Castle making it a tough nut to crack that way. Still...

Palenque - 183

The game and my master plan were still more or less on track at this point, perhaps a few turns behind the pace, but doing whatever was necessary to stop the game from crashing meant I lost a lot of momentum and couldn't take Ulundi until 240.

I could have moved faster during the next phase, but hit another spell of crashes, so moved cautiously taking Assur on T274 before wrapping up on T284.