Adv 42 - Frozen Halls of Fervor

[Olodune]

948 missionaries, in a playtime of 1004 minutes. You averaged just under one missionary per minute for 16 hours straight.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the game was how close I came to my pre-game planning estimate of ~1000 missionaries.

You got to Railroad quickly, did you use or consider Mining Inc at all for hammers? Or did your cities get to 40-hammer missionaries every turn without it?

My tech pace was pretty much right on target -- I got Communism sometime around 1200-1300AD, and Assembly Line (and Railroad) by 1550AD. With the tundra cities Communism was a clear winner. Adding Factories + Coal Plants meant that I had ~ 30 cities that could build a missionary in 1 turn. As I mentioned above I think the optimal approach is to go max gold, and just rush buy all the missionaries (with the 0t penalty) in the border cities. The hammer approach is fine as long as the target city is within 9 tiles, but quickly falls behind if a missionary needs 2+ turns to move into position.

Edit: Cross-post with Rego

[dazedroyalty]

Very impressed with your game. I almost never use gold to rush buy things, but in this case sounds like you had plenty to spend!

[timmy827]

I skipped the event after coming to your same conclusions about low difficulty and high micromanagement, plus also holiday travel and playing lots of Final Frontier. RB also had a similar game back in Dutch Masters, doing a dense build and max religion spreading. Glad to read reports like this, I'm usually the one that everyone else plays vicariously through, so I get to turn that around for once.

I had similar reasons for not playing (except for the Final Frontier binge. But I'll look forward to T-hawkl's sponsored event in that...), and I'll echo that it's good to see one of the other optimization vets step forward.

One thing that I was surprised was that everyone conquered their neighbors only. During my pregame plan I was thinking that it would be good to conquer the other side of the big continent or some scattered patches, so that more of the world is within 1 turn's journey of your cities. Did you give this any thought?

[Olodune]

One thing that I was surprised was that everyone conquered their neighbors only. During my pregame plan I was thinking that it would be good to conquer the other side of the big continent or some scattered patches, so that more of the world is within 1 turn's journey of your cities. Did you give this any thought?

A Coca-Cola Company style production and distribution network does make a lot of sense -- I was prepared to go to war again if needed to set up some local missionary manufacturing. I was also thinking we may need boat chains (to instantly transport missionaries across oceans). However, it turned out that the map was larger than I anticipated so the vast majority of spread attempts were to my own cities. If the game went to 1925 I think conquering a sector of America (and gifting some cities to SB to prevent domination) would have been the way to go.

Edit: Also the tundra was unsettled by the AIs, so it was possible to settle north of Roma, and south of America.