SE2 - Gandhi

Joined
Nov 11, 2009
Messages
523
"Snack Economy" is a series of games in which we try to learn how to best make use of food, with emphasis on the specialists which food allows us to employ.

The rule is that we are not allowed to own cottages, EVER. :) All of our commerce must be from resources, rivers, trade routes and other such things, but never cottages. If we ever capture a city with cottages, we must pillage/destroy the cottages. (pillaging before they come into our possession is the most profitable way of getting rid of them, though ;))

Our leader for this round is


Gandhi - the dubious chef



The traits of our leader are
Philosophical - which means that great people will express themselves more often in our empire, thanks to +100% GPP
Spiritual - which means that we can very easily and anarchy-free switch religions and civics, helping us earning more diplomatic points with our neighbours, and also with switching between economic civics and war-time civics

Our Unique Unit is probably one of the best, a worker with one extra movement point :D


Our Unique Building is very relevant to our kind of game, since, as Mutineer aptly says, we can never have too much happiness in such a game


A jail which, on top of the war weariness it reduces, also offers 2 happy faces :D

Our starting location


The map is
Spoiler :

Continents and Islands, which is similar to Big and Small, but allows for islands of greater sizes. This particular map has both continents and islands the size of snaky continents.
I've added one extra AI, since the last map had too much land.


That's just a great capital spot. :D Let's just hope the land around it isn't terrible, to compensate. :)

Your stories
Please let us know how your game is going, and please break your reports into rounds, following more or less these checkpoints:
Round 1 - start till discovering writing
Round 2 - writing till discovering code of laws or drama
Round 3 - until liberalism
Round 4 - rest of the game
Note that these aren't strict, don't stop telling us about how you're winning the war just because in the middle of it you discover code of laws :)

The archive contains saves for noble (prince), monarch (emperor), immortal and deity difficulties, with monarch AIs having archery, immortal AIs having archery and hunting and deity AIs having archery, hunting and agriculture, as bonus techs along with whatever they were already starting with. For each difficulty, there is one version with goody huts and one without, since this is the only setting which you can't really change if you play a custom scenario. They all have events on, so if you wish to play without events, choose "custom scenario".

If you want to play monarch or emperor, you should add archery to the barbarians, using the WB.
If you want to play immortal, you should add archery and hunting to the barbarians, using the WB.
If you want to play deity, you should add archery, hunting and agriculture to the barbarians, using the WB.

View attachment SE2 Gandhi.zip

~~~
And a bit off topic, how do I get that nice frame around the attachment? :|
 
So what do you mean by 'snack economy'?
Must we use specialists at all times, or can we use a different economy?
Without rules, it just seems like a normal game :(
 
looks promising :)
the gold will be big boon for our non-cottage economy. i think I will SIP.

worker first (we already have mining), teching AH+Aggri

Not that heavy with forrests so probably BW wouldnt be THE priority (that can change) and instead I almost see it as WRI first.

To the rounds...lately I am a bit postponing CoL, usually trying to get Lit for GL first, or currency, but caste should be big for us... so wouldnt be usual time frames better?

I suppose everything should be nicely spoilered though...
 
I suggest you also get a defensive tech. BW has that role, but I really really doubt we have copper, seeing how great our capital is. It would be just too much if we had copper near us. After reading Snaaty's guide for emperor+ games, I think archery is the answer to most of my problems, and I'll recommend it as well: get archery if you're playing monarch or higher. You might want to gamble with BW, to see if there's copper, but if there's no copper, get archery. Also, get it before writing.

As for the rounds, I'm trying more formats, to see which works better. I tried to focus on some techs which are important to this kind of game.
 
Hmm, gold and some floodplain is great in the BFC, desert and foodless coast are not so great. Looks like a good early capital but maybe not great down the stretch. Hopefully there's seafood in that mystery tile...

I'm looking forward to trying Gandhi. Very nice traits indeed.

edit - regarding a strategic resource, let's hope AH (for sacred cow steak) turns up a horse somewhere nearby.
 
Nice starting location, and I haven't played Gandhi for quite a while, so I'll probably give this a whirl starting in the next couple of days. I can rotate it with Mao, Mehmed, Brennus, and Churchill. I'm sure I've got more in progress, too, but I like the early-mid game better than the late game. :)
 
Monarch/Epic played to 2550 BC, 1T away from Writing

I have to say CT your PC have talent with creating games...

Spoiler :

Ok clearly I have to say I have no clue how to catch this game. I would settle 1 city east between wheat and cows.

south is jungle, west brown, north egypt.
No strategy resource for city 2... and add to that I already met 5 AIs..

After writing it's for sure Archery no way around it. But the question remains... WHERE to expand?
View attachment 255060
View attachment 255061


edit:
my early expansion dotmap
 
Way too easy to raise happy caps here.

Spoiler :

Was tooling along on monarch. Founding religions, building shrines, Wonderspam in Dehli. Hatty builds AP, forces war on Mehmed. I vote no. 2 turns later Hatty makes peace but I cant. Mehmeds SOD gets kicked out of her lands and is placed 3 tiles away from my cap. My troops were on the border, too far away.

Hatty, set me up big time.

 
you should add archery to the barbarians,

Higher level barbs are supposed to get more added than just archery.
 
Deity/normal

Spoiler :

Settled in place, love the extra gold! I scouted a bit and found myself boxed in. And then I noticed that Mao didn't have iron... at circa 1500 BC... So I figured he lacked metal at this point and decided to go after him via a classical war :lol: I'm currently in the process of steam rolling him:



Tech situation doesn't look great though, as the Hindu lovefest is definitely speeding up the tech rate.



Then again, it looks like there's an isolated Buddhist civ out there, so if I pick up Mao + Mehmed's land and hit the isolated civ, I may be able to do something about that tech hole.

Incidentally, what map script is this? I haven't seen such a large lake in a while now.

 

Attachments

  • Gandhi the dubious chef BC-0100.CivBeyondSwordSave
    236.4 KB · Views: 45
Higher level barbs are supposed to get more added than just archery.

Thank you for pointing that out! :D Even the archery thingy is new for me, I saw it mentioned in TMIT's guide for map modifying.

Could you please tell me what other techs I should recommend that players add? Are they the same techs as the ones all the other AIs get?
 
Deity -- No lucky huts

Well what a disaster start for me, only to follow through with a horrendous blunder on my part to set me back a few hundred years even more. And then to crawl out of it near the end in an un-stoppable fashion. The moral of the story here is Financial sucks; Philo rocks for getting out of tuff spots.

Spoiler :


I started off with a shot at the oracle. Oracle turned out to be a success, so then we go for phase #2, and try to do the old Engineer -> Mids shot then blow away the competition. Unfortunately here is where my first blunder blew up in my face…

Same turn I pop my great person, I get the notice that some lucky bastard already build the Mids. Well isn’t that just dandy?

Then to find out.. I’m boxed in already with only a max of 4 cities. And of course I had wasted 100 other hammers on a basted 5’th settler that couldn’t settle anywhere!

So… after using my settler as a SCOUT (yes I really did, a very expensive scout!), I finally settled a 0-resource city then gifted it to stupid Egypt who was dumb enough not just to accept it, but to also be extremely happen for getting exploited and shafted in such a ******ed manner.

She was so happy, that I was able to finally switch into an opposing religion and still be happy with her. Boy, you really have to hand it to those Firaxis designers. They sure know how to make an AI…

No stone… no marble.. This was just horrendous for me. But I did use my GE to rush TGL, and I only regret that I didn’t go after the Parthenon, but I still wasn’t sure yet at that point if I could conquer it with rifles. I continued past lit and went up to get the free artist at music. But then here I decided to get Sistine in order that I could flip a couple cities. This would give me 6 and allow a rifle quest.

Unfortunatly I did some really stupid things later. Like when I used the slider to jack up my culture, I realized a few hundred years later I had slide the spy slider to 100% by accident!

Well no wonder I wasn’t getting the results I expected, and why I found it odd I was winning the spy race against Egypt with so few cities to her so many.

So.. After I corrected for that, it looked like I was definitely set back for a long while. But bit by bit I continued settling my great people in my style, and trying to get 3 cities to legendary to save my ass from the fire.

And what do you know, I started flipping and flipping cities. Eventually I went from my lousy 4 to more than double that. And I was very saddened that I won when I did, because I wanted the game to continue so I could keep flipping the entire continent, I was on such a roll there. But all good things come to and end.

My micro was kind of bad, especially when I knew I had recovered and had the game in the bag, but who cares.

Nothing else special now that I can remember to say… except that Financial sucks, and Philo rocks.

---

So far it was looking so good...


You always got to know your outs -- Stuey Ungar


How stupid can Firaxis be?


It wasn't too wise for an AI to trade me paper here. Duh...


The same stupid Firaxis AI then trades me marble. Another huge mistake, Duh...


The first city in the game that went for a flip (though this was earlier)...


Fast forward though a lot more flips...

 

Attachments

  • victory.CivBeyondSwordSave
    553.6 KB · Views: 59
Immortal, normal

Spoiler :

There a lot of strategies possible in that position, but I decided to show one should always consider with Gold In Fat cross, especially of there are 2.


 

Attachments

  • Gandhi the dubious chef BC-1640.CivBeyondSwordSave
    113.6 KB · Views: 53
I try to play future on, but it is boring, game already won. Just spam settlers in bureaucracy, can claim a lot of cities peacefully.
 
Monarch/Epic to 1800BC:

I missed the Writing checkpoint, and stopped at Alphabet. Oops!

Spoiler :

Well, that is an interesting starting location. The capital site is absolutely awesome, with tons of food, 2 Gold, and enough hills for good production as well. The surrounding area is not so awesome, due to difficult decisions on city siting and no known strategic resources in the area (might be Iron, I'll know in 13 turns...).

Met 5 AI civs, but none of them terribly aggressive ones so an early war is likely going to be my choice if it happens. I've got OB with all of them, and have started to explore their territories. I've got enough land that I should be able to settle at least a half dozen cities before I get blocked in, maybe more since I've been blocking toward Hatty and WK.

Here's the current map:


Next city should probably be NE of Delhi, to finish blocking off Hatty. I'm hoping the cultural pressure from Memphis isn't too big of a problem, but I can see it becoming an issue. I'm scouting her territory, and if she lacks strategic resources I may try to remove that problem for good.

After that, I'll be going S and W as much as I can. I'll go for the Rice to the S of Delhi first, to block off as much territory as I can. Then we'll just see what we can get, with the somewhat thin distribution of food resources. Thankfully, all that Gold is going to help support both tech and early expansion.

Cities:


The Workboat in Bombay is for exploration, though I may eventually work it around to the Clam South of Delhi when I build a city there. After the Library in Delhi, it's workers, warriors, and settlers for a while. The Monument in Bombay is done, which will block off my East.

Foreign Relations:

Not much to report, almost everyone is still cautious.

Tech Race:

Looking good so far. I should be able to trade for most of what I don't have, without using Alphabet.

Tech:

I decided to go for IW rather than wait for someone else to tech it and trade, since I've got all that Jungle to my South. That, and thanks to the Gold my tech rate is sky high for this stage in the game. After IW, I'm going to need to focus on getting some of the economic techs done before my empire grows too quickly. Probably go for Monarchy, the CoL, then Currency. It's probably too late for the Oracle - I keep forgetting about it.

VC:

Not much to say about this, I'm doing OK.

Demographics:

Pretty solid start, I think.

Where I go from here depends a lot on whether I find Iron, and how the next couple of cities go. If I can keep expanding peacefully, I will.
 
to obsolete
Spoiler :
obsolete, how can you win culture so fast without cottages?.. moreover, you settled some of your GP...how many GP did you generated?
 
At higher levels they get hunting, deity they get agriculture. WB and check barb techs.
 
Top Bottom