Sorry I didn't get anything posted sooner, but I slept through most of the weekend. So, here's the short version with a long version coming at some point:
Very short version: Victory by space race in 1959
Short version: Mao's Great Leap Forward! Mao is enlightened to be skilled at leveraging peasants' labor. No simply tilling fields or trading rocks to each other in a hole in the ground (cottage). Nay, they will harvest the fruits of the land with watermills, wherever possible, and windmills/workshops in most tiles. Special resources still got their special improvements. No cottages at all and no farms except on grain resources.
To actually make a run at this, I badly need some river tile frontage, or my sources of income are terribly stunted. Though no rivers were available in the starting area, one big, long, excellent one ran north/south to the west of me, more than enough.
The ideal plan was this:
Find stone.
Build the Pyramids and go Representation
Use the resulting GE to lightbulb Machinery.
Put up watermills/windmills/workshops everywhere, completely eschewing cottages.
If iron is around, consider some warmongering with CKNs.
If the pyramids are missed, cottages might be used to limp to Machinery.
If rivers are exceptionally scarce, I'll turn this into a shadow game with Replaceable Parts instead.
If marble is available, might go after the Oracle.
As it turns out, I had no source of stone, but did have some marble, so I Oracle Leapfrogged and came out with machinery fairly early, but my iron source was in the far north, so I couldn't make CKNs until I found it, just as they were becoming marginally obsolete.
Stuff happened which will be filled in, but my manufacturing powered my economy, which drove my research, which let me deal with pesky other AIs and bloat my empire.
Victory by space race in 1959
Very short version: Victory by space race in 1959
Short version: Mao's Great Leap Forward! Mao is enlightened to be skilled at leveraging peasants' labor. No simply tilling fields or trading rocks to each other in a hole in the ground (cottage). Nay, they will harvest the fruits of the land with watermills, wherever possible, and windmills/workshops in most tiles. Special resources still got their special improvements. No cottages at all and no farms except on grain resources.
To actually make a run at this, I badly need some river tile frontage, or my sources of income are terribly stunted. Though no rivers were available in the starting area, one big, long, excellent one ran north/south to the west of me, more than enough.
The ideal plan was this:
Find stone.
Build the Pyramids and go Representation
Use the resulting GE to lightbulb Machinery.
Put up watermills/windmills/workshops everywhere, completely eschewing cottages.
If iron is around, consider some warmongering with CKNs.
If the pyramids are missed, cottages might be used to limp to Machinery.
If rivers are exceptionally scarce, I'll turn this into a shadow game with Replaceable Parts instead.
If marble is available, might go after the Oracle.
As it turns out, I had no source of stone, but did have some marble, so I Oracle Leapfrogged and came out with machinery fairly early, but my iron source was in the far north, so I couldn't make CKNs until I found it, just as they were becoming marginally obsolete.
Stuff happened which will be filled in, but my manufacturing powered my economy, which drove my research, which let me deal with pesky other AIs and bloat my empire.
Victory by space race in 1959
. It sounds like a good twist on the game, I suppose your free tech was Communism?