Edit 12/9 — new record with tundra peter—t127. Strategy is pretty much the same, just a better map with more focus on straddling the tundra/food tiles and prioritizing growth so campuses are online ASAP.
Still made some errors like pushing too hard for Babylon when Geneva was also tough and I chopped two comm hub/banks only to pop a great scientist that boosted the tech anyway. I think this map could push down below 125 with practice but prob not into the teens. Capital growth was really terrible—no 2 food tiles to work at all until animal husbandry, still a great start overall but that delayed the expansion/culture boom significantly.
Notable benchmarks:
T40 pp with 4 cities founded/ready to found when ancestral dropped. Capital pumps settlers with Magnus to fill in surrounding lands while faith settlers are purchased as Far East/west as possible. Ideally 2 of those cities go lavra chop > double farm, then just prioritize growth. It’s fine to delay the campus in these two for a bit or let one grow while the other pumps settlers
t55 pyramids chopped in
T62 feudalism
T65 12 cities, apadana, temple, Oracle all chopped in with Magnus > Magnus heads to Kilwa city and pingala slides into the capital for the free culture/science/grants and oracle combo
T72 Kilwa is chopped in, saving enough future chops for amundsen in the same city. With the apa envoys should be enough for 15% faith/science/culture instantly with production following shortly
T90 casa is chopped in, lost out on great lib (greedy).
T100 ~800spt, ~600cpt. Way too much culture again. Faith is about 700 per turn, 30 cities either founded or getting ready to found, a number of which will just chop for eurekas. Stopped expanding to pool faith for ports as science is expanding so quickly it’s now clear I’m going to overshoot
T109 rocketry
T114 moon landing
T117 amundsen (built solely for the +20% production in cities with snow tiles—this game both of the latter chop cities have that and I needed it to chop the third and fourth projects without a governor). Science is outrageously over killed at this point, edging up over 4100 per turn at its peak
T122 Third and fourth projects, chopped in without a governor (needed nearly 20 chops)
T123 with boosts from techno, Casa, Magnus, space race, full amundsen, and the colonization card, chopped in a total of 13 projects, two of which burned aluminum in another city. City took too much power to pre power it (50 something). Wish I’d had Hong Kong this game, feels like if I’d planned a better moon landing city and had Hk I could have pushed it to 17 chops to shave another turn
t128 win (t127 hof)
———————
Older write ups below
edit: sped this one up a bit, got it down to T135. added some screenshots along the way to hopefully illustrate the snowball a bit better and where turns could be shaved to maybe break into the 120s at some point. Plan is still to leverage nan madol (early suz) and anta (T50ish suz when it starts to turn on) for culture while spiking science asap
t1-30: with ss mode on, the first 30 turns are about securing the first four governor titles and hitting every inspiration on the way to PP. i went magnus settler promo > amani to nan madol > pingala culture > pingala science this game instead and it paid off pretty well. hitting early empire is much easier and no tension with hitting 4 pop for the gov plaza.
I've hard built the first settler and will build another one once the lavra is up and I can slot the settler card before the gov plaza goes in and ancestral hall follows. religion comes online much later this time, around ~t55, but again it's aurora/work ethic/religious colonization. once the settler is out, he'll go east until ancestral is about to drop to form the first settler outpost.
on t30 science and culture are pretty unremarkable, but it doesn't seem to matter too much. just the two cities so far. this time i skipped the coliseum--i don't think I'll need the culture and id rather drop a second early campus to ramp science up quickly (I played this game mostly intending to secure stronger science as soon as possible, while aiming to be around ~450-500 culture at t100. Long term goal is hitting rocketry as quickly as possible.
of all the different phases, this one probably played out the worst. I’m so slow discovering a wonder that it probably wasn’t worth waiting for the Astro eureka, and though I bought a monument pretty early it still feels slow. If the capital had started on a lake/near a wonder—especially a culture wonder—I think there’s significant potential to go faster, as your initial ramp up is really gated behind your speed to poli Phil (t46 in this game).
t31-t65
religion is up and running, and we're going PP>holy adjacency card>feudalism>theocracy, while hitting all the inspirations along the way. as for science, we're moving toward kilwa without missing any eurekas. the capital is now using the settler card on top of ancestral hall, but once it starts to take ~5-7 turns per settler I'll magnus chop 2 of them then switch to apadana around t75 or so. in hindsight, apadana was great but not at all needed as going this wide made science such a nonissue that globalization was largely irrelevant
that third settler heads right and plops down on the edge of the tundra. the free builder chops a lavra, then builds two farms (to push us towards feudalism) and to keep the outpost city growing as fast as possible. the general idea here is to save faith for the outpost cities and fill in the area around the capital with production-based ones.
by turn 60, I've got 12 cities, some of which are still settlers on the move, and science and especially culture are ramping up quickly.
this phase was pretty close to optimal. Now that I’ve got some gold coming in I’m buying up all the diplo from ai who don’t value it early (most will often trade 20 for ~5-6 gold which can be flipped to Kristina for 180. She’ll bankrupt quick though, so I’m not sure it’s worth having her as great scientist competition).
a blizzard hurts this game a bit, preventing me from getting a second campus down quickly enough for the 2 campus eureka on the way to theocracy. Feudalism hits around t64, which still feels like it could have been improved.
t60-t95
faith is skyrocketing, and I'm buying a settler every 2-3 turns. around t80, i magnus chop the last few turns of apadana then finish kilwa the next turn. the capital is finished building settlers, so pingala gets swapped in as the capitals up to something like 11-12 population and magnus is now free to pump a chop city every 5 turns.
the strategy is largely the same, but with more of an emphasis on settling at the very edge of the tundra to make it easier to expand north and south. still chopping lavras early on in this phase, but as we creep up to turn ~90 or I start chopping campuses, plus whatever districts I need for eurekas (another comm hub for banks, a td for combustion and archeology, 2 harbors, an encampment and so on. Most if not all of those will be discounted, so it's easy enough to just chop them up via rainforests and make those cities hit 4 pop right away to follow up with a campus.
kilwa hits on turn ~80 or so (a huge part of this game was getting it online asap) and with the apadana envoys I've got 7 to place in one turn, so I've instantly got production/faith/science/culture +15%, plus the 30% in the capital megacity. production will help a lot with the next couple wonders: ToA, oracle, and eventually casa. I was going to build big ben to boost flight but it was just too slow, and I ended up 1 turning everything from t~87 on anyway. this game i went with the science belief instead of world church--it's just so easy to overshoot culture that it seemed like the better bet. still think it's a toss up though.
on t88, the second golden age hits and the void slinger +20% promotion turns on. science and culture explode, and from this point on they'll roughly double every 5 turns until I hit globalization. at this point I've got 22 cities counting the settlers still on the move.
I was still a little slow here—didn’t get the harbors built in time. I also messed up the chop cities—the moon landing one should have started with a lavra because the campus didn’t finish and the lavra production could have maybe saved me some chops for a laser project later. I built industrial zones in the other 2 cities which I never needed (as I pre powered the laser city anyway because it was faster/was pretty trivial). Should have either gone lavra first or maybe just straight to the armory or harbor for the eventual 15% space race policy.
t95-115
expansion finishes around t107, because rocketry hits on t110. That's much better than the last game (t116) because those 5 turns will allow me to have both pingala and magnus in place to chop the third and fourth projects plus all the lasers in one turn (all three space ports are purchased with moksha).
I've got way more cities, too: i finish with 32 total, up from ~24 i believe. the extra faith generated from the earlier expansion (going wider with settlers asap instead of focusing on an earlier religion) was much, much more powerful.
i didn't boost the 3 workshops tech, or flight, or chemistry, or rocketry, but it doesn't matter: with careful use of overflow they're all one-turned anyway. i save all of my one charge builders and send a bunch of the 2 charge ones west, because two of my chop cities are right next to each other and that'll shave a ton of faith/gold.
t115-135
the end game is the same, basically, but I've got enough time to get the laser city fully powered before the projects become available. the two mars projects unlock on t125, so i one turn them both to squeeze out that extra light year. all of the light year projects follow, then it's just mashing next turn until the victory screen.
I needed magnus to chop the third and fourth projects, so pingala is on lasers. I get up to 7 a turn right away, 8 the next, and eventually nine. amusingly enough the exoplanet mission is actually launched on the last turn of the medieval era.
Another funny quirk-I had a deer/tundra tile in my laser city so I stuck a 1 charge builder on it with another nearby to get both chops in the same turn. But with lasers coming on the first turn of the third golden age, I briefly lost the monu Movement buff to settlers and I couldn’t get the Second to chop in time. If I’d chopped the woods first to reduce the penalty I could have chopped it the same turn and this would have been a 134 win instead of being at 49/50 there.
amundsen is really interesting in these tundra games--if the chop cities are positioned just right it might be worth building just for the +40% chop production. that would have shaved one turn here for sure, possibly two.
hopefully that's helpful! leaving the lower write up below as it's probably still helpful/a bit more in depth, i'll prob add more tomorrow am
Still made some errors like pushing too hard for Babylon when Geneva was also tough and I chopped two comm hub/banks only to pop a great scientist that boosted the tech anyway. I think this map could push down below 125 with practice but prob not into the teens. Capital growth was really terrible—no 2 food tiles to work at all until animal husbandry, still a great start overall but that delayed the expansion/culture boom significantly.
Notable benchmarks:
T40 pp with 4 cities founded/ready to found when ancestral dropped. Capital pumps settlers with Magnus to fill in surrounding lands while faith settlers are purchased as Far East/west as possible. Ideally 2 of those cities go lavra chop > double farm, then just prioritize growth. It’s fine to delay the campus in these two for a bit or let one grow while the other pumps settlers
t55 pyramids chopped in
T62 feudalism
T65 12 cities, apadana, temple, Oracle all chopped in with Magnus > Magnus heads to Kilwa city and pingala slides into the capital for the free culture/science/grants and oracle combo
T72 Kilwa is chopped in, saving enough future chops for amundsen in the same city. With the apa envoys should be enough for 15% faith/science/culture instantly with production following shortly
T90 casa is chopped in, lost out on great lib (greedy).
T100 ~800spt, ~600cpt. Way too much culture again. Faith is about 700 per turn, 30 cities either founded or getting ready to found, a number of which will just chop for eurekas. Stopped expanding to pool faith for ports as science is expanding so quickly it’s now clear I’m going to overshoot
T109 rocketry
T114 moon landing
T117 amundsen (built solely for the +20% production in cities with snow tiles—this game both of the latter chop cities have that and I needed it to chop the third and fourth projects without a governor). Science is outrageously over killed at this point, edging up over 4100 per turn at its peak
T122 Third and fourth projects, chopped in without a governor (needed nearly 20 chops)
T123 with boosts from techno, Casa, Magnus, space race, full amundsen, and the colonization card, chopped in a total of 13 projects, two of which burned aluminum in another city. City took too much power to pre power it (50 something). Wish I’d had Hong Kong this game, feels like if I’d planned a better moon landing city and had Hk I could have pushed it to 17 chops to shave another turn
t128 win (t127 hof)
———————
Older write ups below
edit: sped this one up a bit, got it down to T135. added some screenshots along the way to hopefully illustrate the snowball a bit better and where turns could be shaved to maybe break into the 120s at some point. Plan is still to leverage nan madol (early suz) and anta (T50ish suz when it starts to turn on) for culture while spiking science asap
t1-30: with ss mode on, the first 30 turns are about securing the first four governor titles and hitting every inspiration on the way to PP. i went magnus settler promo > amani to nan madol > pingala culture > pingala science this game instead and it paid off pretty well. hitting early empire is much easier and no tension with hitting 4 pop for the gov plaza.
I've hard built the first settler and will build another one once the lavra is up and I can slot the settler card before the gov plaza goes in and ancestral hall follows. religion comes online much later this time, around ~t55, but again it's aurora/work ethic/religious colonization. once the settler is out, he'll go east until ancestral is about to drop to form the first settler outpost.
on t30 science and culture are pretty unremarkable, but it doesn't seem to matter too much. just the two cities so far. this time i skipped the coliseum--i don't think I'll need the culture and id rather drop a second early campus to ramp science up quickly (I played this game mostly intending to secure stronger science as soon as possible, while aiming to be around ~450-500 culture at t100. Long term goal is hitting rocketry as quickly as possible.
of all the different phases, this one probably played out the worst. I’m so slow discovering a wonder that it probably wasn’t worth waiting for the Astro eureka, and though I bought a monument pretty early it still feels slow. If the capital had started on a lake/near a wonder—especially a culture wonder—I think there’s significant potential to go faster, as your initial ramp up is really gated behind your speed to poli Phil (t46 in this game).
Spoiler t30 :
t31-t65
religion is up and running, and we're going PP>holy adjacency card>feudalism>theocracy, while hitting all the inspirations along the way. as for science, we're moving toward kilwa without missing any eurekas. the capital is now using the settler card on top of ancestral hall, but once it starts to take ~5-7 turns per settler I'll magnus chop 2 of them then switch to apadana around t75 or so. in hindsight, apadana was great but not at all needed as going this wide made science such a nonissue that globalization was largely irrelevant
that third settler heads right and plops down on the edge of the tundra. the free builder chops a lavra, then builds two farms (to push us towards feudalism) and to keep the outpost city growing as fast as possible. the general idea here is to save faith for the outpost cities and fill in the area around the capital with production-based ones.
by turn 60, I've got 12 cities, some of which are still settlers on the move, and science and especially culture are ramping up quickly.
this phase was pretty close to optimal. Now that I’ve got some gold coming in I’m buying up all the diplo from ai who don’t value it early (most will often trade 20 for ~5-6 gold which can be flipped to Kristina for 180. She’ll bankrupt quick though, so I’m not sure it’s worth having her as great scientist competition).
a blizzard hurts this game a bit, preventing me from getting a second campus down quickly enough for the 2 campus eureka on the way to theocracy. Feudalism hits around t64, which still feels like it could have been improved.
Spoiler t60 :
t60-t95
faith is skyrocketing, and I'm buying a settler every 2-3 turns. around t80, i magnus chop the last few turns of apadana then finish kilwa the next turn. the capital is finished building settlers, so pingala gets swapped in as the capitals up to something like 11-12 population and magnus is now free to pump a chop city every 5 turns.
the strategy is largely the same, but with more of an emphasis on settling at the very edge of the tundra to make it easier to expand north and south. still chopping lavras early on in this phase, but as we creep up to turn ~90 or I start chopping campuses, plus whatever districts I need for eurekas (another comm hub for banks, a td for combustion and archeology, 2 harbors, an encampment and so on. Most if not all of those will be discounted, so it's easy enough to just chop them up via rainforests and make those cities hit 4 pop right away to follow up with a campus.
kilwa hits on turn ~80 or so (a huge part of this game was getting it online asap) and with the apadana envoys I've got 7 to place in one turn, so I've instantly got production/faith/science/culture +15%, plus the 30% in the capital megacity. production will help a lot with the next couple wonders: ToA, oracle, and eventually casa. I was going to build big ben to boost flight but it was just too slow, and I ended up 1 turning everything from t~87 on anyway. this game i went with the science belief instead of world church--it's just so easy to overshoot culture that it seemed like the better bet. still think it's a toss up though.
on t88, the second golden age hits and the void slinger +20% promotion turns on. science and culture explode, and from this point on they'll roughly double every 5 turns until I hit globalization. at this point I've got 22 cities counting the settlers still on the move.
I was still a little slow here—didn’t get the harbors built in time. I also messed up the chop cities—the moon landing one should have started with a lavra because the campus didn’t finish and the lavra production could have maybe saved me some chops for a laser project later. I built industrial zones in the other 2 cities which I never needed (as I pre powered the laser city anyway because it was faster/was pretty trivial). Should have either gone lavra first or maybe just straight to the armory or harbor for the eventual 15% space race policy.
Spoiler t95 :
t95-115
expansion finishes around t107, because rocketry hits on t110. That's much better than the last game (t116) because those 5 turns will allow me to have both pingala and magnus in place to chop the third and fourth projects plus all the lasers in one turn (all three space ports are purchased with moksha).
I've got way more cities, too: i finish with 32 total, up from ~24 i believe. the extra faith generated from the earlier expansion (going wider with settlers asap instead of focusing on an earlier religion) was much, much more powerful.
i didn't boost the 3 workshops tech, or flight, or chemistry, or rocketry, but it doesn't matter: with careful use of overflow they're all one-turned anyway. i save all of my one charge builders and send a bunch of the 2 charge ones west, because two of my chop cities are right next to each other and that'll shave a ton of faith/gold.
Spoiler t115 :
t115-135
the end game is the same, basically, but I've got enough time to get the laser city fully powered before the projects become available. the two mars projects unlock on t125, so i one turn them both to squeeze out that extra light year. all of the light year projects follow, then it's just mashing next turn until the victory screen.
I needed magnus to chop the third and fourth projects, so pingala is on lasers. I get up to 7 a turn right away, 8 the next, and eventually nine. amusingly enough the exoplanet mission is actually launched on the last turn of the medieval era.
Another funny quirk-I had a deer/tundra tile in my laser city so I stuck a 1 charge builder on it with another nearby to get both chops in the same turn. But with lasers coming on the first turn of the third golden age, I briefly lost the monu Movement buff to settlers and I couldn’t get the Second to chop in time. If I’d chopped the woods first to reduce the penalty I could have chopped it the same turn and this would have been a 134 win instead of being at 49/50 there.
amundsen is really interesting in these tundra games--if the chop cities are positioned just right it might be worth building just for the +40% chop production. that would have shaved one turn here for sure, possibly two.
Spoiler t135win :
hopefully that's helpful! leaving the lower write up below as it's probably still helpful/a bit more in depth, i'll prob add more tomorrow am
Spoiler obsolete write up :
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