Adventure 61 - Joey rides the pink elephants

[GermanJoey]

This was a nice quick game, so I'll just write a nice quick report. (I actually forgot to take screenshots until the game was almost over, heh) I played this about a month ago, so a few details are hazy, but I'll do my best.

So, our start. Our capital is junk long-term, but it's actually not too bad for Cathy's Imp trait at size 3. So, what we want to do is get the two deer pastured and that plains hill mined; that gives (4+2+2+2)*1.5 = 15hpt into a settler. Not bad. Chopping is weak here, because tundra takes an extra turn to chop. It's sorta like chopping in a quick speed PBEM... slow enough that it ends up just being a waste of your workers' time. However, we'll still want to chop a little bit later, just to get extra workers for our pink dota cities, because our capital is too weak to support them otherwise.

Anyways, IMHO what you want to do here is forget about roads/trade routes for a little bit and just chuck some settlers out to good locations. Cathy's Cre trait is helpful here. I ended up placing two pink dots, at the "1" near Zara, for the wet rice + cow (for more settlers w/ Imp), and eventually the gold, and the "2" near the copper/wheat. Each of these sites had great foodhammerage so they could contribute workers and settlers at low sizes, and then eventually work cottages. The capital just kept spamming settlers and workers at size 3 as fast as it could. (IIRC, I eventually chopped Moai in there for the score.) In the end, I settled like this:




I also scored a barb city (the one labeled "B" on the map), in which I insta-chopped the Oracle for Currency.




My strategy was to get my economy worked out and then rush for elephants. However, I ended up winning on T105 before that happened.

My power is 87% of the top, meeting the 75% requirement.




I've also got at least 5 techs up on everybody:




And... unfortunately I just realized I didn't save one with my final score. I really thought I had? I guess I saved over it with a T106 screenshot? So, here's that:




I think I was going to play out a few more turns just to have fun invading with my elephults, but then I saw that my PB22 turn had rolled or something, and somehow the final screenshot got lost in the shuffle... this one doesn't even show me as +50% of Brennus's score. =/ But, I really did have it! IIRC, the score was something like my 1216 to Brennus's 809 - I do remember that I had just barely made it over the required level, by both techs and score, by back-filling Monotheism on that turn.

Thanks to T-Hawk for the map!

[T-hawk]

The capital was indeed designed specifically to feed into Imperialistic settlers, as you worked out. It's fine actually up to size 5, with two deer, two mined plains hills, and the clam isn't terrible. Your "1" site and Brick's first city site towards Brennus were indeed designed specifically for pink dot grabs. I spread out the rest of the resources without intending any particular sites.

You hit the alternate victory conditions quite a bit faster than I would have expected. The scenario was intended to be somewhat more than a 100 turn land grab exercise. I thought the limiting factor would be power, that if you land-grabbed to enough score, you'd need time to catch up on tech and then also military. But guess that didn't happen on Monarch. Even if it was that early, though... it was still clear that you had a winning position already anyway. I think the alternate-win did serve its purpose here.

[GermanJoey]

I still had a lot of fun as a REXy exercise. Ordinarily I try to settle very compactly if I can, but that was very impossible here. So, the game played out very differently than what I've been used to, and that made it interesting.

I was lucky that I didn't have too many barb problems until I got a spawnbusting network up - all I had was my scout and a couple warriors on hand to escort my first few settlers, so if a panther or some such had shown up I'd have been in a world of trouble. Tech-wise, I think Oracle was a huge help, as was the AIs skipping a lot of ancient-era techs pre-tech trading. Had one of the AIs gotten Alphabet and backfilled each other, getting the global 5 tech lead would have taken a lot longer.

[T-hawk]

Tech trading was off for this game, so no backfilling among the AIs. Looks like a lot of your +5 margins was the cheap religious techs, which yes the AIs do often ignore for quite a while. Maybe if we do that sort of thing again, count it as classical and higher techs.

[GermanJoey]

Yeah, definitely.

[The Reverend Doctor]

I was never even close to the alternate victory conditions in my game... Nor did I even think to just run up the score early and tech all the cheap things to grab an early victory.

Good read, well played!