What does "Capture in time" mean? Before what? As I understand the Religious VC can be proposed when you want if you control the AP.
I thought it was the number of votes, not the number of AI's that mattered. Do we need more than one AI to vote for us?
The vote comes up in regular intervals (every 4 turns maybe). But, by "capture in time", I mean that if we stop research at MT/Astro/DR, and expect to win soon after by closing the build and capture gaps, we will need to have the military in place to take on several AI within a short period of time (especially if Astro is a must). I guess we would want to research Astro early to start sending units to far away AI wonders, then MT to get some better units. How long will it take to capture all of the AI wonders and holy cities after finishing MT and DR? If we expect that those techs are the last ones to increse E(t), we had better have all of the wonders captured and built a few turns after stopping research, or E(t)/t will decrease below the later spike at Communism/MM/Medicine.
To win by AP vote, I believe the strategy is: (Can anyone else confirm?)
1) Found at least one religion that no one else will adopt, and spread it to all of your cities. If someone else's religion spreads to you, adopt it to get good relations with them.
2) Just before completing the AP, switch religions to the one you founded but no one else has adopted (maybe Taoism). The AP is now locked into that religion.
3) Spread the AP religion to your ally, but not so much that he'll switch to that religion. If anyone adopts the AP religion, they will be elligible to vote themselves victor.
4) Just before you are ready to win by AP vote, spread the AP religion to all of the other AI, preferably to one small city each (votes are based on population of cities with AP religion). Once everyone has at least one city with the AP religion and if you control less than 75% of the votes, the victory vote will come up shortly.
So 3 and 4 are the tricky parts in a game like this. We have to have at least one ally to vote for us. We need +8 relations with that ally. So we probably can't capture any wonders or holy cities from that ally, or +8 will be out of reach. +8 takes time to reach, so it may only be possible with someone we've known for a while, and someone that shares our religion (but not the AP religion). Any wonders that those potential allies have built are ones we can't capture. Will we find an AI like that? Time will tell. As for part 4, we need to spread the AP religion to all of the AI before we can get the vote. We would need to spread the AP religion before we started attacking them for their wonders, because after we've attacked, open borders will be tough. Open borders may be difficult with one or two AI anyway, and if any have adopted Theocracy, that's another problem. Again, time will tell if the game aligns well for a religious victory.
Beaker rate is hardly exponential, more likely it follows the logistic function also known as the s-curve since the growth in beakers will eventually be limited.
In my practice games, the derivative of the BPT function still seems to be increasing at the time I get to Communism/MM/Medicine. You've got lots of maturing cottages (with PP bonus), Oxford increasing in power, GP farm producing GPs faster despite the increasing cost, extra specialists from Sushi (and Cristo for free switches to Representation), extra gold from Wall Street/CorporateHQ/Shines city, big increase in happiness/health/food from the Hollywood/Rock/Broadway resources being traded to AI, capturing well-cottaged AI cities quite easily with Currassier/Airship/Frigate combo, etc.
I'll play a better-documented practice game through to Astro/MT/DR, and then on to Communism/MM/Medicine to see where E(t)/t really stands at those points.
By definition a longer game gives us more time. But it also decreases the score W(t)/t as t grows so I don't understand this argument.
Well, if W(t) grows faster than t, we should keep playing longer.
Nice work Fred, this is certainly the type of thing I have been trying to figure out. I think it sets an early goal that we should shoot for.
It is interesting that the lower half of the tree opens up few wonders until we get past Astronomy and Chemistry. The upper half is wonder rich! In the tech tree, if we draw a line that goes Optics, Theology, Paper, Printing Press to Military Tradition, along with the oddity of Astronomy, that would seem to be our goal.
