Civilization V Solo Reports

[Dark Savant]

This was the refinement, of everything else I've done.  I've been flipping around the civs and social policy paths and making those the headline feature of each report, but everything besides that has gotten nailed down to some fairly tight tracks.

I could see a number of small improvements to this game: more desert could get to a 4th faith scientist (I came only a few hundred faith short), could have enhanced the religion earlier instead of buying pagodas for a little while (earlier Religious Community to build aqueducts), could attack a second AI early for a second worker steal and ceded city, could fix the one lost turn at endgame with tighter timing on the bulbing, maybe one more city could shave a turn or two, or of course El Dorado.  None of that makes me want to play a whole game over again to do it.  I can't see any chunks of 5+ turns left to be gained.

The luck with ruins and city-state camps was probably about 95th percentile, I'd estimate.  Remember that each report you see is the tip of a pyramid.  It goes something like 100 map rerolls, of which 10 have enough desert to try starting, of which 2 give enough ruins and reachable luxury resources, of which 1 gets all of the important missable things like Desert Folklore, Pyramids, Petra, Jesuit Education.  I'm already operating in the top 1% percentile, and this is the first time I really absolutely can't see any significant improvements to make.

I might be thinking of "official" speedruns too much, because I'm still seriously thinking of doing one (for an RPG, not Civ), and what's stopped me from actually doing it is that top 1% isn't really good enough.  It doesn't really take that long to reroll a map 100 times if you're not going to play more than ~30 turns the vast majority of the time.  What I wanted to know is if there's enough to be gained from going from 1% to 0.1%.

Another way to improve would be to get a better slate of city-states.  You've gamed the system to get a top ~1% collection of city-states, but if you write a script to look at which city-states you have after rolling a completely fresh start, you could reroll until you get top ~0.1% for a few more maritime or cultured city-states (and then base rerolls on that).

It doesn't sound like that will gain you much though -- maybe a couple turns at most.