*Spoiler1* Gotm20-Spain-Continent Map+Middle Ages

[ilovetoast]

A few clarifications:

My lux slider was at 4 beacuse that was the minimum to keep Madrid from rioting on the turns before the screenshot. On the last turn before the screenshot, I moved a warrior into town and completed the road to the incense. But, up until that turn I had to keep pushing it up to keep from rioting. Thanks for reminding me to keep close watch on that for gold though.

I see the massive trades failures now. Thanks to all for pointing those out. I will have to remember to keep exploring with my warriors and not let the cpu sell me all contacts and remember to talk to each cpu civ every turn for tech/workers/peace/maps.

As to the road network...maybe I'm doing something wrong (surprise) but for much of my game I only had 1 worker...I was desparate to get out a few soldiers...didn't want the AI thinking I'm too weak. Plus desparate to get settlers to build more cities. I only recently made my second and third workers. Two of which are trying to connect/improve my city to the south (one worker came from that city...the other had just roaded the incense). The other moved to hook up Toledo to the SW--figure it would help that cities happiness, etc. and facilitate settle movement SW to block Frnech N expansion. Never wasted (deliberately) a worker move(?) .... always at least built a road.

I seemed to get Madrid started well (aside from the damn disease). Got the squares I wanted improved efficiently. A question... when do you guys go for a second worker? I could really use some guidance there. I think I do it to late. My first cities often seem good....but then my infrastructure seems to fall behind (among other thigns).

Thanks again for the help...I will improve at this with time and practice and more good advice

ttv

 

[MadScot]

Personally, I built workers in:
2110Bc, 1910BC, 1700BC, 1550BC, 1525BC, 1425BC, 1350BC & 1300BC

The 1525BC and 1350BC workers were built in Toledo, which was my city on the river to the N, between the horse and the wheat. The rest were built in Seville, which was beside the southern floodplains wheat (and Seville had a granary).

Even with a total of 9 workers I felt I had too few (in 1300BC, for comparison, I had 10 cities).

A worker costs you 10 shields (and a population) - equivalent of a warrior or two. That worker will enable you to mine or irrigate a number of tiles, getting back your investment in shields and population quickly enough. So you don't gain much in terms of military by not building workers, since your growth and production lags.

 

[CruddyLeper]

I'd go with Mad Scot - less than about 1 per city and you start getting behind if you let things stay that way. I generally turn settler factories into worker factories and make do with less at the start... but the ideal way to do it is capture workers off the AI. They're free, even if they are slower than "your" workers. Plus of course it messes up the AI civ early on.

 

[Dianthus]

Originally posted by DaveMcW
1. Score is averaged over all the turns in the game. If your game lasts 300 turns, it takes 300 gold in entertainment to increase your score by one point. There are many more efficient ways to use gold in the ancient age to increase your score.

2. You can't get WLTKD until the city is size 6.

Good points Dave. I guess you're saying the obvious strategy is to keep the lux slider as low as possible?

 

[Jove]

A worker was just about the first thing I built. 1, maybe 2 warriors, then a worker... someone on here recommended it in the pregame I think. I also purchased a number of them in the ancient age- I think 100g will be recovered from a worker acquired that early in the game. I was fairly satisfied with the road system.

 

[Kemal]

PTW 1.21f Open

I played the first 3500 years of the game early this month, but have only found time to finish recently, som early spoilers will be a bit general as I can't recall how things exactly unfolded early on.

I started out by moving the worker south to the floodplains from the starting position, then moving my settler on the hills, revealing an excellent location for my capital and two other cities already, with two cows and the wheat nearby. With so many great locations nearby, after building some initial warriors for military police and exploration, I started on a settler in Madrid, since I wanted cities on these productive locations ASAP, resulting in the founding of Barcelona to the north in 3150 BC and Sevilla in 2590 near the wheat.

I had started researching writing on 10% science, as I figured that with this great location, pottery wasn't an absolute must early on, and I hoped that I could get to writing first this way. After contacting the French, I recieved pottery from them in a deal involving the free starting tech the wheel.

With about 37 turns of research on Writing done, I cringed as I noticed the Zulus and Ottomans had discovered writing themselves, but there was also reason to rejoice as I noticed contacts between the AIs were scattered between them, with some civs not knowing others yet, but all contacts available to buy from different AIs. Using this, I managed to get writing relatively cheap, trading some contacts around to get some gold back, and more importantly allowing me to start my next research gambit, polytheism, a few turns earlier, as every turn is critical with so many AIs having contact with eachother early on.

Meanwhile, I thought I had finished exploring to the north of Madrid, having only left a small patch of fog to the northeast, but since I hadn't seen any AI unit come from there, I (falsely, as i later discovered) assumed that the lands to the north were for me to claim, and decided I'd let Madrid pump settlers to fill the lands to the north, and then disband it to jump the palace to a better location to the north. With this in mind, I started the FP early in the city near the gold just northeast of Madrid. Unfortunately, after this plan had already been put in motion for some time, I suddenly noticed a Celtic border in the northeast and some quick exploring revealed the Celtic city of Richborough, located just after an the landbridge between "our" and their land, and also another land bridge to the north where they founded Eboracum. Too late to stop them there now, bad exploring on my part costing me a golden opportunity to secure the northern lands...

In around 1075BC, after some nerve-wrecking turns, I managed to get to polytheism first, and trading it around resulted in instant tech-parity with all the other civs and netting me all of their gold, leaving Spain as the only nations to have something to fill the treasure vaults with, 1100 gold to be exact. Zululand gave only 30 gold for polytheism when I contacted them about it, making me really glad I had been able to start on polytheism a few turns earlier by buying writing. Here's what the Spanish empire consisted of in the year 1000 BC:



and the minimap:



I was researching the Republic at that time, and entered the medieval age some time later after the AIs had finally discovered currency in about 750BC.

Before turning Republic, I had been able to rush two galleys for suicide missions, but both sank on their first turn at full sea, and later I had other priorities than building galleys, but that's out of the time period for this spoiler thread.

 

[Bam-Bam]

OK--game never finished in time to submit, but I did promise a report.

1.21

Report of the ancient age can be found here.

The rest of the report is not written yet, and the game is some long turns from a conquest victory. Sorry if this is a bit out of the ordinary, but so am I

-Bam-Bam

 

[Moonsinger]

Bam-Bam,

When I click on "GOTM XX - Part Two", it says that "Oops... The page you are looking for cannot be found."

 

[Yndy]

Well, he wrote, he only has the ancient age report ready.

Nice game BTW.

 

[rabies]

I enjoyed what you wrote so far Bam Bam...although some of those huge paragraph chunks with no breaks were a bit hard to follow.. :suicide:

 

[Bam-Bam]

thanks for the feedback, folks.

Yes, rabies, I can ease up on the long paragraphs. Hadn't yet gotten to the final parsing of the paragraphs. It is an easy fix to make. thanks for the constructive help on readability.

And, yes Moonsinger, I have not yet written the second page, though it will be up soon. Later pages may have to wait the 4-5 hours of slogging through the endgame.