Adventure 40 - Ronald's game

[Ronald]

Pregame planning:

Since we need to set the science slide to 0 after 1 AD, a specialist economy or a hammer economy is needed or a combination of both is needed. I was planning to run a specialist economy in the beginning and add hammers for science later in the game.
Crucial for specialist economy are the pyramids, so I decided to not gamble on getting both the oracle and the pyramids and concentrated on the pyramids and the Great Library.

What victory condition to choose:
The obvious choice for a non science game would be a cultural victory, but I thought that is too easy.
Since we are Romans, we have a wonderful unit to conquer our neighbours early on. So I decided to research iron working as soon as possible, settle my second city next to iron and use this city to produce preatorians.

Actual game:



Settled in place. This city with the very high food resources is great to run specialists.
Found the next city northwest of the iron. build one more settler and worker and one preatorian in the capital and started the pyramids.



After building 4 more preatorians I started the war against Stalin and 2 cities from him. Moscow was hard to take, I lost 3 praetorians, so I made peace to produce more.



As soon as I had 8 units, I took the remaiing cities from Stalin.




Now I was at 1AD and the rapid expansion seriously hurt my economy. Even If I would want to run science higher than 0%, I could not afford it.
My specialist kept the technology rate going and I rebuilt my cash position with some cottages and, courthouses and the forbidden palace in Moscow.

Shortly before 1000 AD I joined Genghis in the war against Gandhi and took all his city but 1. I made peace for all techs Gandhi had and destroyed him 10 turns later.



Right after that I declared war on Genghis and his Keshiks were no match against my pikes and macemen.



As research I won the race to liberalism, built the Taj Mahal for a GA and then used the next 3 great people for another 2 GAs. So I cruised along to rifling and with all the money I had left I could upgrade all my macemen to riflemen.

Genghis was history before 1500 AD and my final assault against Hammurabi began. He was no match for my troops. I started to build a number of settlers to have them ready to fill all gaps. I was not sure if this continent would be big ebough to get to the domination limit. It looked OK, but very close.



To be on the safe side I researched towards astronomy. After optics I made contact with Justinian and Isabella. They were far behind in techs. When I destroyed Hammurabi, I waited that his cities came out of resistance. At the same turn I discovered astronomy and was ready to upgrade my galleys and caravelles, but it was not necessary, I triggered the domination limit.

[Ronald]

I finally managed to put up the screenshots