[BTS] Shaking Off the Rust - Monarch Playthrough

[Fish Man]

I did play on a bit peacefully and Churchill expanded surprisingly well, I think 6 cities 1AD. Yes, we agree that HBR is a detour, but one that might be the optimal play at that point. Those 350 can be "saved" earlier by having a more connected, efficient empire.


This is extremely minor IMO. There are plenty of good sites.


In your 1AD save, your capital is really pathetic, you are not able to even work all the food in that area. I think you should go for monarchy and I'm not sold on currency. Again I want to stress that I think chariot rush IS a very good choice.



Yes, obviously that requires conquering Churchs. Unlucky that I didn't settle the fp-site that happened to have iron. No need for HBR-detour then.


I'd rate my T91 save won in any way I want (duh, it's monarch). I can settle islands behind Churchill if I want to. Not that I need to, just go astro and then start conquering. I have never won space in BtS and I don't understand why you always insist on it. Military wins are easy and clean especially on lower levels.

Many of your previous comments also seem to assume a space victory in sight (and thus you value for example city amount a lot), while I think the bottleneck for victory is astronomy date.

Edit: which is why going for CoL especially having medi is , ruins the astro bulb.

Ah, that explains it, then. On emperor difficulty or below I never go for conquest or domination. The reason is simple: on those difficulties, barring an exceedingly bad start, you can blow past the AI so fast that any military-based victory is essentially won on t0, no matter who's where on what map. A space win is almost guaranteed too; however, finishing within a certain date, say before t300, provides a good challenge that I actually have a decent chance of failing (as seen here when I was 3 turns away from not meeting my self-imposed win condition). Therefore, I aim for space wins only on monarch 99% of the time, because I'm a perfectionist who likes to build up cities as much as possible yes, but mainly because it's the only thing that's remotely difficult on these difficulties. This is not to disparage anyone who plays below imm, of course, but I think it's basically commonly accepted that since the AI is, as you said, stupid, if you know what to tech and how to whip, etc. most difficulties are a cakewalk.

tl;dr: Why do I go for space? Well, why did @WastinTime go for a BC space victory when he could've easily wrapped up his Inca game with quechas by 3000BC ? Because it's challenging, and more fun IMO.

As for not going for monarchy - well, first of all, the excess pop will soon be used to whip quite a few things. Like a forge. And a market, since this is one of the rare instance where I actually want one (+1 happy and +25% gold in cap to help stabilize my tanking gpt isn't bad especially for a city with way too much food). Second, in space games, my philosophy is to never tech expensive or semi-expensive techs the AI can give you unless it's something that'll give you a big edge, right away - so, military techs or CS for buro, for example. Monarchy falls into the category of "nice to have but not extraordinary by any means"; my cap and London are the only cities that really could benefit from it significantly, and there's not even any wine. And AIs go for feuda like crazy once they can "see" it (come within 2 techs, so...finished priesthood/mono and writing). So I'll let AIs give me it once I meet them (which should be soon) and save myself 500 or more beakers in the process.

Mansa was a real bro in this game. He basically fed me 1/4 the tech tree, including aesth, lit, monarchy, feuda, philo, engineering, guilds, banking, corporation, rifling, artillery, and rocketry. Qin deserves honorable mention for bio and med. Speaking of that - I had reasonable cause to believe that they would tech these things - Qin is growth flavor which means he'll prioritize stuff along the biomed line, while Mansa is gold flavor so he'll rush to economics (and not in a very secure way, because he hands out the prereqs like candy, like all techs , which is why I beat him there) - which means I avoided them myself even though I could stand to gain a lil bit from teching them sooner. One of the keys to fast space wins, again, is to as much as possible avoid techs that you can trade for.

 

[sampsa]

tl;dr: Why do I go for space? Well, why did @WastinTime go for a BC space victory when he could've easily wrapped up his Inca game with quechas by 3000BC ? Because it's challenging, and more fun IMO.

Why does WT go for space? Because of HOF. You can do whatever you want of course, but don't assume other people do the same thing.

Since you are an ambitious player, I suggest you to look into monarchy a bit more in some situations. Deity isolated -thread has some valuable ideas.

 

[Fish Man]

Why does WT go for space? Because of HOF. You can do whatever you want of course, but don't assume other people do the same thing.

Since you are an ambitious player, I suggest you to look into monarchy a bit more in some situations. Deity isolated -thread has some valuable ideas.

Fair enough. Though I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume he finds some part of optimizing to launch and arrive as fast as possible fun (otherwise why put up with thousands of hours of micro) - as opposed to, say, straight-up winning as fast as possible, and that's part of why I find space wins so appealing.

I took a look at some, and am plowing through the Toku game. Also beat the infamous Pacal-jungle-iso start on deity with mids economy - though it was probably the closest call I ever had (almost outright losing a few times). Reading through the threads I got the gist of what to do - ignore EVERYTHING past writing to get to optics ASAP, trade optics to backfill, doublebulb astro, limp your way to steel, and pray to god when you land with rifles/cannons that the AI doesn't have the Terrible Triad yet (infantry, artillery, railroad/machine guns).

Monarchy is def useful, sure, but it can also slow you down and lose you games. In Lain's playthru of Toku iso, the 15-ish turn delay caused him to be faced with artillery when he landed and he just gave up when Gandhi peacevassaled to Julius, dragging him into a war he couldn't win.

 

[G-Off_Unit]

T91: (spoiler tags out of habit)

Spoiler :

Agri-min-BW-fish-AH-sailing-masonry-writing-pottery-medi-ph-monarchy-(CoL).

Lost my warrior T8 so early exploration was a disaster. No big deal on this map though, so clear 2nd/3rd city spots. With the help of chops (and whips), got out 2nd worker, 3 settlers, 3 boats (one for exploring). Put one chop into stonehenge for failgold since commerce is limiting factor on GLH date here. Note how in the screenshot all cities are at the same size they have good (improved) tiles. 2 workers is enough for a long time when you have many seafood tiles. Mainly their duty is chopping.

View attachment 501772


Got GLH T72 (should be safe on monarch?). Btw I think NW-cities are much better like this: crab on the 1st ring. Don't try to found cities that will eventually be good as waiting for a border pop wastes a lot of precious time. Put food on the 1st ring when not playing a creative leader. Got a bit sloppy at the end doing stupid stuff like putting into monuments in Basra and Kufah - I'll be in caste soon so can run an artist for border pop. Note how none of my cities besides capital has produced . It's often a waste of to build monuments. Should have improved the pig already, only then cottages... Capital should be way past size 15 by 1AD with this amount of food and -resources.


View attachment 501771


Save attached, I suggest you to look at it to get an idea on the details.

Thanks for the reply, and sorry I'm getting back to you (and this thread, generally) so late. I got unexpectedly busy over the last week. (I did have time one day but wound up spending it cleaning dog poop off a carpet all day instead, to give you an idea of how much fun I've been having, lol). I completely understand if you don't remember anything about your save at this point, but if you do remember then I noticed that you settled Medina (second city) on the plains hill and that it had no buildings in it. Does that mean you built nothing but workers and settlers there? And if so, was it at 2 population the whole time? And did you plan that more-or-less from the start?

I'll add that I gave the map another shot in the first 91 turns. It didn't turn out as fast as yours but it was definitely much better than my last update. It also brought back some memories of my aggressive expansion from when I used to play. For some reason I had it in my head coming back that I was on the wrong track when I was playing years ago, but apparently not.

 

[sampsa]

I completely understand if you don't remember anything about your save at this point, but if you do remember then I noticed that you settled Medina (second city) on the plains hill and that it had no buildings in it. Does that mean you built nothing but workers and settlers there? And if so, was it at 2 population the whole time? And did you plan that more-or-less from the start?

Yes, it was dictated mostly by having just two good tiles. I did grow to size 3 at one point, but 1-pop whipped to get a settler out faster. Pretty sure I got some boats out from that city too, as many were required.

I'll add that I gave the map another shot in the first 91 turns. It didn't turn out as fast as yours but it was definitely much better than my last update. It also brought back some memories of my aggressive expansion from when I used to play. For some reason I had it in my head coming back that I was on the wrong track when I was playing years ago, but apparently not.

Yep, rapid expansion pays off if you are able to work good tiles. Certainly an early war can pay off better, though.

 

[Fish Man]

Just a single good tile (gold if you don't have any, a wet corn, horse if you need to rush, etc.) is worth founding a city for if it's close enough.