TSG 259 Opening Actions Thread

Nizef

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This thread is used to discuss the game's opening decisions and strategies through the first 100 or so turns. Here you can post questions related to the game and share your achievements/anger/frustration/victories while you play.

- What did you think about before starting the game, what was your approach to this game?
- Where did you settle and what did you build first?
- How did the terrain and map settings affect your early decisions?
- What were your initial priorities?
- What tech path did you follow and why?
- What Social Policies did you choose?
- What Wonders did you try to get and did you get them?
- Did you get a religion? What religious beliefs did you pick?
 
Going into this one I had absolutely no clue how to approach the game, since we need to gain as many points as possible without winning. I ended up deciding to go wide, since more cities + more land probably racks up more points, but honestly I have no clue how it'll work out for me.
What I do know is that currently I feel like the game is going terribly, mostly because I didn't get the religion I wanted.

I am not really worried about Science at all this game, which may or may not be a terrible choice, I mostly just figured that I don't need to leap so far ahead of the AI and can just focus on Wonders as I stay slightly ahead. But honestly I am already regretting it.

I settled the city in place and focused on getting an early Great Library, which I usually absolutely never do, and immediately followed it up with a National College after grabbing Philosophy from the Great Library. That's when I started grabbing settlers and now the plan is to just settle literally everywhere I can. Using Liberty and Exploration to essentially explode my production and take all the space I can. Morocco threw me shade so I'm in the process of taking out Morocco even though I'm not every interested in his capital at all, since he didn't build anything.

Currently at T100 my wonders are, Great Library, Great Lighthouse, Great Wall, Pyramids, Oracle

My religious beliefs are mostly focused on Production, Goddess of the Sea, Guruship, but I was able to at least get Happiness from Temples. Though not getting Pagodas makes me a bit worried about my wide gameplan, but I'll go roll with it and see where we go from here.

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I Was thinking of the great library too but an AI built it on turn 19. Yes, you read that right, turn 19. And Stonehenge was built on turn 26. There must be some interesting AIs out there. Someone also reached the medieval age more than 10 turns before me.

I focused mostly on growth but Gradually started to chew up the neighbours (petra and hanging gardens in Marrakesh.) I started with Liberty tree and havr just gone on to Tradition after that. Maybe I’ll post more tomorrow.
 
You get points for: cities, population, land, technolgies, future technologies, wonders, policies, great works and religion. And as stated above, you need to keep an/some AIs alive to avoid other VCs.
Is the final score calculated as an average from all preceding turns of the value of these assets, or is it just the instantaneous value on turn 330 that counts?
 
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Dang. I built my 2nd city on the sugar, with plans to build Petra there. Not until t68 when I completed currency did I realize there was not a single desert tile in the first ring... I kind of forgot this was required :(

So I probably won't get a super competitive score. I guess I'll just play till the end anyway, doing a peaceful (or not so peaceful) but anyway none-competitve builder game for once.

Settled 4 cities pre-NC. Capital SIP, 2nd on sugar, third on gems near Sri Pada, 4th between the mountain and the Whales to the south. Standard tradition play.

Took one worker from Morocco, then got lots of gold, gpt and Salt in the peace deal. Played peacefully after that except for one CS which I also took a worker from and am now using as an XP farm. My units aren't even doing anything, they just walk there, get themselves bombarded and then walk back to my land to heal.

Otherwise I believe I'm off to a good start, though I haven't had a look at the other posts in this thread yet to avoid spoilers. I'm running two food trade ships to the capital, and my city sizes are 11, 9, 6, and 6 at turn 68. Capital has GLH and just started building NC.

Maybe someone else will build Petra for me, we'll see...
 
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Is the final score calculated as an average from all preceding turns of the value of these assets, or is it just the instantaneous value on turn 330 that counts?
It is the value at turn 330 that counts. But most parameters are of course accumulated during the whole game (population count and number of techs as examples).
 
Here is a screenshot of my game on turn 88:
GOTM259_t88.PNG

Morocco has just been eliminated and I'm heading to Assyria. The dromons have been mildly useful so far. It is a slight problem that they upgrade to galleasses rather than caravels, because that means they can't be used to search for overseas civilizations when Astronomy comes in, in about 10 turns. Om the other hand, they will upgrade to frigates later.😈

Not sure if razing Rabat is a good idea, with a nice salt mine and everything, but I don’t want to slow my research down too much.

For religion I picked Eastern Orthodoxy (of course), with the copper/iron/stone pantheon, tithe, pagodas, mosques and Divine inspiration. Policies, as I've already mentioned, were Liberty tree and then starting the tradition tree for extra growth and happiness. I tend not to want to build workers from scratch and this time Morocco had to supply me with some, because I stumbled upon a settler of theirs. But I think I got only 3-4 because they started protecting them pretty badly and barbarians kept coming in from the flatlands where Rabat was later founded. There is a clear difference between the King and Prince difficulties, I think.
 
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Here's what I got so far.
Wonders: great wall, mausoleum, oracle, pyramids. I see other wonders going quite fast after the tech. Some wonderspammer on other continent. Maybe I will try for notre dame.
Religion: faith from iron, stone, copper, Tithe, Pagoda's, Mosques, then used the great prophet from liberty finisher to enhance internerant preachers and % hammers.
3 internal sea trade routes going, 1 hammers and 2 food.

I warred with morocco to get his workers and pillage his stuff. I razed 3 of his cities, made peace once to trade lux for lump sum, then declared again to get his capital. He didn't build anything sadly :(
I will dump a settler near the sugar.

Social policy wise i went representation first, before any city, because i want to maximize social policies. I will also get some aesthetics policies to max culture. And maybe later tradition for the tile bonus. I don't know yet if i should finish tradition or go for rationalism.

My plan is to build a decent amount of cities, that can grow decently because i should have quite some happiness from mosques and pagoda's. Maybe let the other continent also wonder spam and then steal their wonders.

Ashurbanipal only has one city, didn't build any wonders, so he's being useless. I will probably capture him before meeting the other continent.
Will probably annex marrakech as soon as happiness allows. Puppets don't grow in borders well and don't focus on growth.
Spoiler :

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T106, its going well and I'm in a race against the clock to see if I can clear the continent before meeting anyone else from overseas. I wasn't going to try that at first; before the game started I planned to go Tradition and build some big cities and take up as much land as possible. So I SiP and started with Scout, Scout, Monument as usual. But then as I explored, I realized that it was a rather narrow continent with Morrocco taking up the eastern part and Assyria had the whole south. that meant cities would likely be coastal but with the points only being awarded for land tiles, coastal cities would result in less points. That meant I would need more cities.

Since I didn't really want Morrocco and his missionary/GPr spamming-self right next to me, I decided to take him out. I switched to war footing and built units. Unfortunately, Marrakech wasn't coastal so I couldn't use Dromons. I successfully prevented any of his settlers from moving north - so he decided to trapse a settler all the way across the continent and settle on the SW coast - right next to Ashurbanipal. Big Mistake Ahmad. As I was preparing to take Marrakech, I realized Ashur was spamming cities and all but one was coastal and he had captured Melbourne, also coastal, which I could liberate. So I started building Dromon. I would just try and take out Ahmad and Ashur and have the whole continent to myself. I took Marrakech and peaced out - he was willing to give me Fes, his second expand on the SW coast which I immediately razed since it was only a pop 1 city in a not-so-good location.

Ashur conveniently took out Ahmad for me and now at T106, I have two Assyrian cities left. Hopefully I don't meet anyone from the other continent before I can get those last two cities. And wow, Dromon are amazing. I remember discussions in threads about whether they were actually a good UU or not and after this game, I'll have to say I would much rather have them the Trireme's any day. They are awesome for taking out early coastal cities; four of them helped lay waste to 3 Assyrian cities with one more coastal city to go. I underestimated them and didn't even really need all the CB I brought, so I'm moving them up to take out the lone inland city.

The tech path I went down was fairly normal, I should have gone to get Cataphracts earlier than I did though, they would have been nice to have. Because I originally was just going to play tall, I went Tradition and I don't feel the need to change; it is an all around the best tree anyway and going wide with it is viable. Plus, I'm going to puppet most of the captured cities anyway.

Someone on the other continent looks to be a runaway and is way ahead of me in tech. And also is a wonder spamming fool - I wonder if its Egypt? The faith wonders went super early. I was beat to every wonder I tried; ToA, MoH, Terracotta Army, Great Wall, even Oracle (which is usually easy to get).

I got second religion, Eastern Orthodoxy (Ahmad got first). Earth Mother, Tithe, Pagodas, Iterant Preachers, (don't remember the other follower); and for the Byzantine bonus I took a second pantheon of Fertility Rights for growth; this should really kick in toward the end of the game and since we have to go to 330 it should be very good.
 

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Focussing on growth from the start. I got my food trade routes as early as possible, and I think in some cities I built lighthouses before libraries even.
I’m going to have to try and play to maximize science one of these games and see how it goes. I never have any money though so feel like I need to run regular trade routes. Plus happiness, the higher pop puts me in negative happiness and so sometimes I purposely stop growth.
 
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