Adventure 13 - Compromise's Conquest

[Compromise]

I gave this one a shot. You can read about it here . I didn't beat T-Hawk, but with more careful play, I might have been able to make it closer.

[T-hawk]

Good report and good game. Very similar to mine -- we attacked the AIs in the same order. I notice your AIs were slower to longbows-- your Mansa only had Skirmishers while mine had longbows by the time I got there at about the same dates. My Astronomy beeline probably accounts for just about all of the difference in our finish dates.

Also, you said you intended to play a religionless game, but in one of the later screenshots, Judaism had gotten to your capital. Did you ever spread that as a state religion, to use Theocracy for the units? By comparison, I got Confucianism on my CS slingshot path, and used that all game.

[Qwack]

Well played. You also won with maceman in ~1800 . And five cities also? . Seems you played way better than me, since this is basically the same case as my game but I finished a good deal later. I had initially thought that Mao cannot be accessed without astronomy, but later found out about the western route. I feel pretty stupid about that now since I should have taken chemistry with liberalism for a quicker finish.

[T-hawk]

By the way, I'm struck by some graphics involving the water in your screenshots. Compare your screenshot here with mine here. The water looks much smoother in your screenshot, and the coast outlines and grid tile lines are much sharper too. What graphics card and resolution are you using?

[Ruff_Hi]

Nice game and report - although I couldn't quite see the route to China in your screenshot ... coming on from the South West then North? It seems that the circumnavigation spot is a popular meeting place ... you, t-hawk and me all got it in the same-ish spot.

You also mentioned that you came to regret the two-gem city (a city that I also founded) ... why did you come to regret it?

[theGrimm]

I also regretted it. I HATE cities with no extra food.

[Compromise]

@ruff, grimm: I regretted the gem city for two reasons. First, I don't think I needed it. Maybe the two happy (with forge bonus) from the gems was worth it, but probably not. Those no-extra-food cities are just painful. The reason I was referring to in my report (I never did answer that) was because I'm pretty sure Isabella would have settled there if I hadn't (just) beaten her to it. If she had, I wouldn't have had to go so far looking for her. That right there could easily have shaved 10 turns or so off my game length.

The route to China came via Mansa's lands, then island hopped. His cities on his big island provided the cultural route. I approached his lands from west of his lands.

@ Qwack: I'd hoped Mao's borders would expand. After seeing them, then circling around looking for more, I realized that if he opened up anywhere, that's where it would be. By the time I got back, the route was open.

@T-hawk: I went and looked up the graphics info. In-game, I have all the settings (graphics, render, globe) set to high. The graphics card tells me it's an Nvidia GeForce4 MX420 with 64MB of memory. It's on a Dell and seems pretty good compared to the computer itself. I don't play Large maps at all, and even a standard map gets pretty painful if I get anywhere near the modern age.

As I recall, I never did research Feudalism. (Perhaps that's why the AIs were slower to get it in my game?) I was really surprised at the extent to which they remained isolated from each other. Only after I finished the game did I read something Blake wrote about how powerful those extra 2XP are. I'll have to try that some time.

The Astronomy beeline certainly explains some of the difference, but if I hadn't had to go get Ghandi and Isabella's far-away capitals (or if I'd brought just a reasonable number of troops), I could have been finishing off Mao and Roosevelt at the same time. That would have made our finish dates pretty comparable.

Also, if I were going to do it again, I would have founded a third city on the starting island and tried to pump out troops just axes and cats sooner. It felt like I missed stopping the AI's distant-galley expansion by about 10 turns, and that cost me lots of time (especially with only galleys) later.