Adventure 57 - Portuguese Imperialism

[Ceiliazul]

One thing that's really interesting is how much being quicker leads to even more quickness. I notice a lot of new world forests in your screenshots.

Very true. When I started, none of the barbs had popped borders. At the end I was attacking fortified axes behind walled cities!

I didn't even consider the forests, that's a big deal. Someone, I think Ronald, even said the later barbs had horse archers doing worker steals. Ack!

By getting started early, I skipped a lot of these headaches, I think.

I just realized, the barbs making "leaps and bounds" is probably my own fault. I was spreading around non-wonder techs for cash, this likely sped the barbarians along as well. Oh well, cash is still king.

[flugauto]

Amazing.

[T-hawk]

Thank goodness the sponsors prevented colony maintenance by turning off 'vassal states'.

Yes. Whenever potential sponsors propose a game idea, I always ask for a full writeup. Details like that really can make or break a scenario. Starting your Portugal on the coast closest to the New World was also deliberate, of course. BTW, I'm not sure I like the spying around with the flying camera. It wasn't prohibited (nothing is, since Civ 4 is tight enough that we've never had to write any list of exploitive actions), but it treads really close to my personal sense of unfair play.

Oracle - CS is possible most of the time on most maps on Monarch. 875 BC will probably get you the Oracle more than half the time, especially with raging barbs and nobody Industrious. It does depend on the AI traits and a fair bit of luck as to whether they start the wonder right away or if their capital happens to be in the middle of a 12 turn settler when they get the tech.

I like that Portugal borders Spain, not sure if that was scenario design. With Byzantine nearby as well, I'm guessing it was random.

The location was random. The roster of AIs came from Qgqqqqq. I don't know if he chose them or if the list was random.

Note, The land T-hawk rolled for us really isn't very good. Limited rivers, few luxuries (and most of them required a reach!) and not much production. This provided a nice counterpoint to the relatively low difficulty.

This was intentional, both as a counterpoint to the typical rich RB map and to motivate you towards the new world. I did design that one city site of your Coimbra to provide a strong hammer coastal location for shipbuilding.

The war went even better than I had hoped, and I had so much cash I rush-bought the five wonders still under construction.

Afraid you ran afoul of the condition on that scoring goal. Cash-rushed wonders in the new world did not count. Let's follow up in the scoring thread.

[Ceiliazul]

Ah, so I did. I only rushed those five, fortunately. As I was finishing the game I was kicking myself for not figuring it out earlier!

[timmy827]

One thing that's really interesting is how much being quicker leads to even more quickness. I notice a lot of new world forests in your screenshots.

Very true. When I started, none of the barbs had popped borders. At the end I was attacking fortified axes behind walled cities!

I didn't even consider the forests, that's a big deal. Someone, I think Ronald, even said the later barbs had horse archers doing worker steals. Ack!

By getting started early, I skipped a lot of these headaches, I think.

I just realized, the barbs making "leaps and bounds" is probably my own fault. I was spreading around non-wonder techs for cash, this likely sped the barbarians along as well. Oh well, cash is still king.

Another example is beating the AI to Oracle really slows them down, or vice versa. In my game, Gilgamesh got it around 1240BC, and took the usual MC and then got the Colossus, and became by far the AI tech leader. (Colossus is really good wonder for the AI as they love to work water tiles, and Gilgamesh on this map had a peninsula with a lot of water). I definitely got some benefits from that as he became Friendly and gave useful tech trades, but also lowered my new world wonder score most likely.