Civilization V Solo Reports

[chumchu]

It probably depends on how good your culture game have been thus far. Do you need the 3-4 extra policies or not?

You do not have to grow the cities that much for freedom to be worthwhile. Stagnating around 18 pop should be good for 16 specialists + 2 food tiles. With the extra food you can work 3 more specialists while the extra hammers give you more research/gold.

I played science games on immortal and deity. That makes you less focused on early wonders (unless conquered) and more on trading gold and tech discounts/steals.

As for liberty/tradition Poland you should go for early medieval through Civil Service. With the two free policies and the extra culture per city and faster cities tradition should be done by then which is when you really start to grow anyway.

Doing it this way gives you the benefits front loaded. Production of settlers is a major bottleneck early in the game for tradition (less so with Shoshone =) ), a 250ish hammer discount during turns 25-50 is a wonder or an army or some serious economic tempo.

[T-hawk]

How do you get 16 specialist slots in a city? The usual max is 9: 4 scientists, 3 engineers, 2 merchants. (The stock exchange and windmill come too late with too poor payback to be worth building.) I can support those 9 on about 4 food tiles well enough with Order. Freedom doesn't add any more specialists because there aren't slots. It might add a few trading posts for a beaker each, but Order still adds more than that with Workers' Faculties.

I understand front-loading Collective Rule before Tradition, but that's still a serious dent in when you finish Tradition which is where all that tree's power is. Actually, come to think of it, Poland pulls out another advantage late-game: get one more Great Scientist, by delaying the Liberty finisher until endgame when all the regular great scientist production is done. That works perfectly, I always get 9 policies (including the Oracle) before the Renaissance, so Poland brings that to 11 which is perfect to finish Tradition and skip one in Liberty (not sure about Republic or Meritocracy.) Then Poland is guaranteed to finish both Rationalism and Order and do that faster than any other civ. Not sure if I can dip back into Commerce to buy the labs with Mercantilism, but might not need to.

[Staltran]

How do you get 16 specialist slots in a city? The usual max is 9: 4 scientists, 3 engineers, 2 merchants. (The stock exchange and windmill come too late with too poor payback to be worth building.)

The artist/writer/musician guilds get you to 15. I imagine one of them might be worth it if you're having trouble filling out Rationalism and your ideology, but probably not all of them. The sixteenth slot would still have to come from windmill or stock exchange though.

[T-hawk]

Not a game report, but here's a discussion on the correct wideness for a science game. http://dos486.com/civ5/index/science.shtml

[chumchu]

Doh, I meant 12 of course. You will need to build windmills and stock exchanges but they are decent buildings. The stock exchanges helps a fair bit with amassing gold. The timing is different with Freedom as you do not have to build parts which means that you can grow a bit more before you bulb to rocketry.

[asdfion]

For the city-state tribute question in the tall game

Local military power in a radius of 5 (increases with larger map sizes) around the city state is compared. Depending on the ratio of the power of your units and the city state units, you get 100 / 80 / 60 / 40 / 20 for 3x / 2x / 1.5x / 1x / 0.5x the power

from here, citing SDK source. Followup answer notes that the values changed a bit since the original answer.

[T-hawk]

The best Poland science games are usually with following social policies for maximal growth. Opening tradition, liberty to collective rule, full tradition, rest of liberty, full rationalism + ideology. It requires a bit of early culture to finish tradition in time and happiness to support 6+cities.

This is a good idea indeed.  http://dos486.com/civ5/bnw18/

[Ichabod]

Oddly, though, the influence didn't stay at -60 but reset to 0 (then -6 for trespassing on that turn.) No idea why this happened. And in fact then Monaco asked for a quest to spread my religion and we became friends anyway thus ignoring three millennia of war.

When you declare war on a City State, the influence starts going up on that turn. While you stay at war, it'll always stay at -60, but behind the scenes, it's already improving. So, if you stay at war for long enough, when you make peace, you'll already be at 0 influence.

It's something along these lines, I've seen it mentioned by a streamer in a guide about Civ 5 MP.

[Pysethus]

T-hawk congratulations on another T185 finish.

I wonder if early Freedom for Arsenal of Democracy would be viable for science speedrun. The idea would be gifting Triremes to ally with every city state in map for Patronage 3 science. Having 24 allied CS would obviously have some other nice bonuses - not just science.

[T-hawk]

http://dos486.com/civ5/bnw19/

If you want to ally 24 city-states, just use Greece.

There's no such thing as early Freedom or early any ideology. It comes no more than 30 turns from the end no matter how you do it.