[SPOILERS]Luddite: A Man, A Plan, An Also-Ran

[luddite]

Ah, OK. Didn't he use the pyramids in another game though?

[slowcheetah]

I believe he had them in 26; before Commodore invaded. I can't remember any other games he's played where he got them. He does seem to like wonders, just not specifically the pyramids.

[Commodore]

Yeah, he made our 'mids, we invented Numidians to take them from him. 28 was a wash, 33 I'm dedlurking Brick so have no idea, and 35 he picked Bismark for some reason or another.

[luddite]

I'm (sort of, lazily) ded lurking Nic in 35 so I have no idea what Sian is doing there.

[luddite]

Settled in place. Moving the warrior reveals... mountains. Lots and lots of mountains. I really hope we're not completely ringed in by mountains.


(I went with an incredibly nerdy "Venture Brothers" theme, mostly so I could send out scouts named Henchman 21 and Henchman 24. "They have that perfect henchman combination of expendable, yet invulnerable.")

demos indicate identical starts

[luddite]

Right now my tentative micro plan is as follows:

Turn 5: agriculture finishes
Turn 8: first worker, Cocoon starts a warrior
Turn 10: meditation
Turn 12: Wheat farm done, Cocoon grows to size 2 and starts a settler
Turn 14: The Wheel
Turn 16: Corn farm done
Turn 18: Pottery
Turn 20: settler done, start a second worker

I'm not sure yet where to settle my second city, but definitely somewhere close enough to share those food tiles with the capital and help it grow cottages. Possibly 3E of The Cocoon? I'll also need an early city in the NW to grab that gold for happiness, though. And I'm not quite sure yet whether it's better to get AH or pottery first.

[luddite]

By the way, Mist, was it on purpose to have that desert tile 2NW from the capital be just a desert and not Flood Plains?

[Mist]

Yes, there's few more of those and there's a reason behind them.

[ironstar]

So I am sitting on the train on my way to work, wondering about ways to cut a few corners in the tech tree via bulbing. Allow me to humour you:

Without caste system it's usually a bit difficult to generate GPP. But the below doesn't rely on caste, since it only allows you to hire unlimited scientists, merchants and artists. Scientist are not too hard to generate without caste due to the 2 specialist slots in the library anyway. Two of my ideas involve a GE and a GP respectively.

1) Seeing as we are industrious, an idea could be an early cheap forge and run an engineer specialist. Meanwhile bulid Oracle, grab machinery and then lightbulb engineering. Should be pretty easy to do.

2) Follow up with scientists and bulb through the standard philosophy -> education line.
After the philo bulb we could research nationalism for an almost guaranteed Taj.

3) Since you plan to go for a religion, another idea could be to delay masonry, build a temple, run a prophet. If you pick up polytheism and priesthood (which we would need for Oracle anyway), you could use the prophet for a Civil Service lightbulb.

Also, since we are on a beeline towards mil trad and Conquistadors, why not pick up the free artist at music? We need that tech anyway.

Anyway, just a few random ideas.

[luddite]

I do plan to use some caste system. If I succeed in getting the MoM and Taj Majal, then it will be easy to switch back and forth, but even just 1 regular golden age should be enough to make use of caste. But yeah, it would help to get more gpp outside of caste.

1) Seeing as we are industrious, an idea could be an early cheap forge and run an engineer specialist. Meanwhile bulid Oracle, grab machinery and then lightbulb engineering. Should be pretty easy to do.

I actually can't research machinery, because doing that would make a great scientist bulb printing press instead of liberalism like I want. At any rate I really don't think I'll need early engineering. The citadel is fun, but it's not worth rushing for it.

2) Follow up with scientists and bulb through the standard philosophy -> education line.
After the philo bulb we could research nationalism for an almost guaranteed Taj.

I'll go for philosophy and nationalism immediately after getting civil service. Unfortunately there's no way to bulb nationalism- you can do it with artists and prophets but you have to to research every single religion tech, including Divine Right, first. It's like the game developers made it as hard as possible to bulb nationalism.

3) Since you plan to go for a religion, another idea could be to delay masonry, build a temple, run a prophet. If you pick up polytheism and priesthood (which we would need for Oracle anyway), you could use the prophet for a Civil Service lightbulb.

Similar problem here, you have to research up to theology before a prophet can bulb Civil Service. I'm thinking of building the Temple of Artemis though, and using any prophets I get for golden ages.

Also, since we are on a beeline towards mil trad and Conquistadors, why not pick up the free artist at music? We need that tech anyway.

Yeah the music artist would be very nice. With that, Taj, and the MoM I could have 27 turns of golden age easily.