Adventure 40 by T-hawk

[T-hawk]

No reports yet? Here's my not-so-adventurous adventure:

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv40/

[Speaker]

Well played. I always enjoy quick and dirty culture victories.

[Olodune]

I've long wanted to play a game with a dedicated espionage economy... but this isn't it. EE wants to be on high difficulty, where the AIs research fast and the multiplicative discounts for stealing become seriously important. Monarch AIs will leave me bored with piles of extra espionage points waiting for them to research steal-fodder.

I'm not too hot on a specialist economy either. Oh it's easily enough winnable - .....

These were exactly my thoughts, but I came to a different solution for a peaceful builder game

[Dantski]

I'm really impressed how far west you managed to expand, I guess that was the price of guarateeing Pyramids.

Seems like the AI wars achieved nothing in your game which again was in stark contrast to mine.

One obvious difference I saw was that when you turned the slider down at 1AD your science was originally running entirely on commerce, I lost less than a third of my science output at that date.

Anyway a nice game and report

[T-hawk]

Expanding west was no big trick. The second-to-last city was barbarian, which blocked the AIs from getting a settler through to the last spot. I sent my settler for the last spot along with Praets to capture the barb city. Also I didn't expand north towards Stalin at all.

I fully intended to run full commerce research until 1 AD. Hoped to get Music by then, and would have come pretty close if not for missing Oracle-Aesthetics and finding no trade for Mathematics.

[athlete4life10]

Great game! I had the same thoughts as you about the slider. Run culture. In my mind it was the best option available. Not that I even attempted to play due to time constraints but it was nice to see someone put it into action. I doubt I'd have gotten there nearly as quickly as you though!

[Olodune]

Anyway, I had to research Aesthetics - Literature myself

Do you think the Oracle->Aesthetics play would have been enough to get to Music before 1ad? I suppose it's not a big deal since you got to Music first anyways. You're right that the tech trading options were pretty miserable, otherwise I bet a Liberalism date before 1000ad would have been possible with your strategy.

Did I miss the point of the game? Maybe some, but I was satisfied. I got to see enough of the espionage/Research/specialist economy, in crawling to Music and getting the Liberalism prerequisites, and then the culture exit was fine by me. As I'd guessed, Monarch AIs would never be strong enough to make a focused EE truly worthwhile, and trying to steal everything would just be tedious.

The only downside to having such an open game is that it is very hard to compare our efforts I enjoyed the read, but I bet a faster cultural victory would have been quite easy with a more friendly set of tech traders. Having the religious zealots unable to spread their religions to you didn't help either.

[T-hawk]

Do you think the Oracle->Aesthetics play would have been enough to get to Music before 1ad? I suppose it's not a big deal since you got to Music first anyways.

Just about, and the remainder would just be a couple turns of building Research. Aesthetics and Mathematics are each half the cost of Music, and I just about had the first two (about 50 beakers short on Math) by 1 AD. If all of those research beakers had gone directly into Music instead, I'd be 50 beakers away from Music instead. That's fine, 1 AD wasn't a hard deadline of any sort, just a general goal. Not a big deal either way, just a difference of a few turns on culture victory, in building Research instead of culture buildings and in delaying Calendar and Pacifism and everything else.