Alright, Im going to try and answere some of the stuff in one post here
. Lets go.
Are there any intermediate saves? It's rather hard to study a game with only the first and last saves
I believe I saved it somewhere during the middle when I took a break, Ill dig it up in a bit.
Question: Do you think with Ramesses you would be better off using your 2nd city to churn out the UU to conquer some additional territory early and to get promotions and then upgrade (more expensive, but better promoted) your UU to cav later?
I was debating on going that route. But I didnt bother getting horses till a little late (wasnt a need to). So the way things panned out, I took my time. By the time I had horses hooked up, I felt it best to wait until later. I like to attack with horses either very early, or wait until cavalry. Rarely will I ever beeline for guilds.
My thinking is that your finish time came pretty late and that if you were able to get a bit more land earlier perhaps that would've made a difference?
Yes, I did finish late, thats how I usually go about with my space race victories. Im often going through long stretches where I dont spend any money on teching at all. It slows me down a lot but the key is to make sure you are not surpassed, thats all. When the AIs are slow on their teching, then I slow down too. I often am doing this for security reasons. By using gold to upgrade defense.. or rushing wonders/buildings, etc. My goal is to make sure I WIN, not take risks by trying to finish a number of turns earlier.
What happens when you have a capital that doesn't have flood plains and plains hills?
Improvise. Just about all capital starting locations have ok food, though I have got a few real duds now and then. Hills are great, and I love them, but if I had all flat-plains, then Id have to decide if elsewhere will be my production city (probably), or Ill improvise with workshops, etc. DaveMcW wrote an article on turning flat-plains into production powerhouses, its somewhere in the strategy archives.
Sorry If I missed something, but why on earth didn't someone invade you earlier on?
Ragnar tried, but it didnt work. I dont give AIs reasons to attack me, so I dont have to worry about it much. The only one close to me was Ghandi, and as I already mentioned, he is so passive, we didnt have to worry about a thing considering we were friendly to him. Only Ragnar the aggressive fool was my worry, but hes an idiot and we can handle him if he tries anything. I just switch to military units if the time comes, no worries. I could make longbow men 1 a turn without needing to whip if things got desperate. I can always sue with techs for peace. There is no point in going over-board early on defense when doing so is over-kill. Thats wasted hammers/time. We are going with THIS situation. If Montezuna were sitting in Ghandis spot, then thats another story, and we'd change our strategy.
Angkor Wat doesn't affect the performance of settled prophets, so they remain their plain old selves.
Thats true and a lot of players don't realize that, but a big reason for using the Wat here is that it lets us run numerous engineers. Firaxis thought extra engineers early were too overpowering, thats why you cant run any early or mid game, even if using caste. You can only get a single one with a forge. But look at it this way.
Engineer = 2 hammers
Priest & Wat = 1 hammer + 1 gold + 1 hammer.
Priests actually give you more benefit here than engineers. But thats just icing on the cake. The big deal is we can unlock numerous priests now, which is giving us the same power as an engineer. Bypassing firaxis precious engineer restrictions. So even if our plots give us very poor production, we can crank up the hammers with specialists.
I like the wonder rush and settled GP for Industrious. It builds on the trait (hammers from settled GP get the industrious bonus too). Combine with Org Religion for a powerhouse wonder city.
Actually, very rarely do I use Organize Religion as of late. The effects are not as great as some people think. And for all those city shots, none are using the 25% modifier. So technically that super city can be pumped up even more by a simple civ switch.
I just avoid it because the organized religion tech route is not needed, and that whole breach of techs is full of junkers, which only ends in a dead end anyhow. I always end up refusing to accept this tech even when it is given to me for free, because it takes up a precious tech slot. This will then contribute to the WFYABTA problem. And I dont like that. I like to trade for techs I need, not junkers. Theocracy is the next junk tech up there. And it gets worse from there
Also ORG R. can get expensive sometimes, but the real problem is it is a great way to make enemies. You need to share the same religion as people to avoid the risk of war. And even if you do, it only affects cities running that religion. So many problems. I'm not saying it's always bad, just that there are so many issues I have against it. I will still use it the odd time when called for.
The time for Liberalism was fairly late - there was a risk that Mansa would be on the other continent and picked it up first.
We grabbed the oracle, not an AI. So for Monarch, to have an AI beat us on the liberalism race at this point would have been almost impossible unless they got one crapload of techs from goodie huts.
Very, very rarely can we ever lose a liberalism race in this spot.
