Adventure 11 - T-hawk

[Sullla]

Well, cultural may be an easier option generally, but this time the cultural victories did not go unchallenged by the AI as they often do. Congrats on the fastest finish so far.

Right, except that it was total dumb luck that we saw that take place in your game and T-Hawk's. It's not like the AI actually notices you accumulating culture and takes steps to deal with it.

[blid]

Nicely executed T-Hawk and congrats on a very early date. I see you completely locked out poor Cathy and then started flipping her cities
I had that strange duct in my game too, I loved your interpretation of the architectural design

[T-hawk]

What I found interesting as well is that our city placements was completely different this time. I really had trouble dotmapping these lands, and my settler first build completely changed my dotmap as well.

I really didn't dotmap at all. I built the Pyramids too early, after only one settler. Then my dotmap plan was to fling settlers towards Catherine as fast as I could to grab whatever land was possible, plus taking a couple tundra resource locations. I'm not proud at all of my city locations; there was a ton of wasted land and some very awkward sites at the edges. Next time I want the Pyramids with Stone available, I know that they can wait until after four or five cities are out, or they can even be built in the second city as Sulla did rather than losing time on building settlers from the capital.

[T-hawk]

By the way, would you all believe that I never noticed the enemy teams comprised Financial civs and Industrious civs until reading the reports? That's the extent to which the cultural game plan could just ignore the AIs except when they were actually shooting at me.

Good move getting you finance able to give 150gpt for peace, maybe I should have tried that instead of 'crying' that the 4AIs team wouldn't accept peace for anything

That's an old Civ 3 trick, to raise the cash slider to 100% when you need to pay for something on credit.

What I find quite surprising is that your victory date is so good despite your decision to go for culture came quite late.

I think this point might be worth discussing a bit more. I made my decision for culture in 1 AD. What was there to do differently before that? Building actual culture prior to 1 AD is unnecessary, since the post-research late game cultural production exceeds the early game by literally two orders of magnitude.

I might have gone for Hinduism, but as I commented in uberfish's thread, I think waiting on picking a religion actually led to a higher religion count overall by getting natural spread on some of the early religions by natural spread. And delaying my religion meant that Alex and Cathy did not incur "heathen faith" penalties until later, when I was in better position to rapidly spread my faith to convert them. Finally, my city #3 would have been a cultural city at a strong commerce site rather than my military city -- but having my military city established earlier instead gave me a much stronger game against the barbarians.

So overall, I think a cultural game plan works out better if you just proceed as normal in the early game and turn to culture somewhat later. (At least on high difficulty when you can't just chase early religions exclusively.)

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I made my decision for culture in 1 AD. What was there to do differently before that? Building actual culture prior to 1 AD is unnecessary, since the post-research late game cultural production exceeds the early game by literally two orders of magnitude.

I like to whip monasteries, libraries and temples in my culture cities ASAP if I plan to go that route, to get the doubling of culture output after 1000 years earlier. That would also be an argument for founding your own religions, to get access to monasteries and temples faster. Using the whip for example, you can get several of those before 1AD, which should make a difference to a game where you decide only then to go for a cultural victory. Maybe only a few turns of difference in the end, but that might become important in a tournament.

Of course there might be other things to consider, like diplomatic relations in this game - but then you don't have to convert to the religion you founded. Also if you found a religion, you don't have to spread it manually to all your cities and could leave some atheist to hope other religions spread to them. And if that doesn't work the AIs will send their missionaries to you, sooner or later.

-Kylearan

[uberfish]

You don't have to commit to cultural from the start of the game, but it is an advantage if you commit early enough that you have time to build buildings that give positive culture in time for their value to be doubled when the multipliers come online.

I think an early religion is generally more helpful than not, and it's just the combination of very early shrine plus total lack of any other early religions founded on the continent that caused Hinduism to overspread in my empire. I did not build any Hindu missionaries except one at the end, and the AI did not send any to me.

[T-hawk]

I like to whip monasteries, libraries and temples in my culture cities ASAP if I plan to go that route

Assuming you have two monasteries and two temples, the total cultural output from all of those is +8/turn, doubling to +16. Why not spend that time building a wonder instead, which will also give you +8/turn doubling to +16? Then you have the effects of a wonder to enjoy, and you can still build the mundane buildings too.

But I think the issue is more one of scale. Any amount of early culture production just drowns in the multiplicative math later on. Who cares if you've gotten an extra +8 culture for 100 turns early on? Later on, with Free Speech, four cathedrals, some settled great artists, and 80% culture slider, a good legendary city produces 800 culture in a single turn. That's the scale of the numbers here. If you bend your entire city's effort to culture before 1 AD, you've improved the endgame victory date by one whole turn.

IMO, the two most important single factors to cultural speed are the date of reaching Free Speech and the date of shutting off research to run culture. Neither of those were affected by my late decision on the game plan.

[uberfish]

IMO, the two most important single factors to cultural speed are the date of reaching Free Speech and the date of shutting off research to run culture. Neither of those were affected by my late decision on the game plan.

Also religion spread.

[T-hawk]

Also religion spread.

Yeah, I forgot that. But that's yet another item that was unaffected (or even positively affected) by my delayed culture plan.

[Zeviz]

Congratulations with achieving a very fast victory after fighting off the Industrious team.