T294 Science Victory
3 city tradition and Freedom so not too shabby I guess. I found this map really hard though. Very few bonus production resources so cities tended to lag a lot in development. The only upside though was that I never went to war once. So I had a lot of gold to buy science buildings etc..
I started building a settler at size 2 with the intention of
I also got the Sacred Path pantheon so that was one good outcome. Worst of all though was the WLTKD - the first luxury in demand was crab - the very resource that is on the other side of the map and only available in small quantities so that really slowed my growth down and probably delayed launch significantly.
All in all Portugal really doesn't bring a lot to this map. The extra gold from trade routes is pretty useless for most of the game because the dirt is so bad you just cannot pass up sending internal trade routes. Your expo cities desperately need a production cargo ship just to help them get going. Late game it is powerful though (when you have more trade routes than you can send internally with 3 cities) but perhaps less game-changing/influencing then?
I only built 1 Nau before I hit Steam Power and they became obsolete, and upgraded 1 from a trireme. Again the poor dirt really did not give me the luxury to be able to build these things in mass production to take advantage of the cargo gold. Simply put there were more important things to do.
Feitora's were better. The starting area doesn't have much in the way of luxuries and with the massive ideology pressure from my neighbor meant I was facing 'Revolutionary Wave' very quickly and because a certain other civ (we all know who I'm talking about) insists on buying up every CS in the game that rules out reliable CS alliances. So the bonus happiness there is pretty welcome and definitely helped. Otherwise I would say Portugal was pretty lacklustre on this map. You almost feel like you are playing a completely white civ with no uniques... I didn't want to flip to Order because I had no way of being able to procure enough Great Engineers to make the SV pay off more quickly. I had Tradition but not enough faith to be able to buy multiple GEs, and because I only had 3 cities and the poor dirt meant the expo's lagged in growth for a while and my max BPT was only about 1000 which is not high enough to be able to neglect working specialist Great Scientists. So using gold to buy SpaceShip parts was the way to go and definitely worth the huge hit to happiness.
was a real runaway culture victory on this map. He got Temple of Artemis, Hanging Gardens, Pyramids, Chichen Itza, Taj Mahal, Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, Cristo Redentor.... Basically all the wonders you want for a cultural victory...
But I was friends with him nearly all of the game so I decided against trying to go to war - I might have been able to do a late game rush with Foreign Legions (Volunteer Army) but he had a lot of expo's and a big army so I don't think the outcome would be favorable
Check these screens out for proof. That was turn 280. By Turn 295 he was over 160% influential on me haha. Luckily 2 other civs managed to resist that incredible tourism allowing me to get of the planet in time
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