Looks like you had a very successful opening and were going to win this by domination if UN didn't interfere. I agree with somebody who said that a draw like this should count as a win.
You were much better than me at claiming good city sites. (I lost your site #3, two sites east of Bahdad, and the site you poached from Alex. I got only the Iron, Deer, and Marble site in the north instead.) However, I don't think your economy ever truely caught up after overexpansion. We signed the PA at almost the same time, but I had Physics, Electriciy, Radio, and half of Computers researched at that point, in addition to Nationalism and Military Tradition. So at least by 1620 the "always keep economy above 70%" method was significantly ahead of the "stay below 30% early on" method. After that it becomes hard to compare because I stopped my expansion at 10 cities shortly after 1000AD to save RL time, and you were heavily involved in wars, which tends to delay research.
Overall, I agree that settler-spam was a good option for this scenario, but I still think that it's better to always keep your research above 50-70%.
Quote:Could someone explain how the maintenance costs work and what is this talk about after a certain size cities produce more commerce... libraries produce commerce? I find that my highest scoring personal games (scoring 40000-80000 pts) are usually on tiny/small maps and won by conquest around 1100-1550 ad after fighting with significant strike scares. I also don't really know what all this talk is about number of cities you can have before the city maintenance cap or whatever kicks in... these sorts of things seem to be important and could help me better decide when to expand and how far to expand. Anyone feel like providing some in depth analyses? Thnx. I always sweat the small stuff
Qwack already answered most of these, so I have only a few things to add:
The score you get after victory is completely irrelevant, because, as you've noticed, the best way to get an astronomical score is by early rush on a Tiny map.
About city limit, I don't set any concrete targets for myself. I just try to prevent my research rate from falling below 70% and become very worried if it falls below 50%. Some techs might significantly improve your economic situation allowing you to get more cities right away, but it always depends on the situation. These techs include Currency (if you already have foregn trade, and can start selling resources), Sailing (if this will let you have foreign trade routes much faster than you could by building land roads), CoL (if you are getting burried by city maintanance costs), Beurocracy (if your capital is providing a large portion of your income), and some later techs like Printing Press (more income from Towns and Villages) and Liberalism (Free Speech for even more income from Towns).
As for Libraries contributing to commerce, since cash and research are interchangable, improving research output is just as good as improving cash income. In fact, if your research slider is above 50%, improving research does more good for you than improving cash income.
