Adventure Five - The Uberfish Report

[uberfish]

Rather than make people read through a multi-page report of a game where no fighting happened, I'll summarize the strategy and key events. I launched in 1890.

With all this marble and stone around, and no military resources anyway, the only good opening strategy is to build wonders. So I went for the flashiest opening possible and built Pyramids in my first city and Oracle in the second completing both around 1000 BC (This is Prince after all, we can get away with that.) I took CS from the oracle, went to Representation/Bureaucracy and took advantage of Philo trait to run a primarily Super Specialist based strategy with one outside Academy and Shrine. I was beaten to the Great Lighthouse by 1 turn, however I was able to nail down the other wonders I really wanted such as Great Library, and Hanging Gardens + Hagia Sophia which were built primarily for Engineer points.

I didn't convert and use Pacifism as Saladin had founded Hinduism and I didn't want him to declare war on me (after all I was stuck with archers.) Instead I was planning to convert to his religion and use that. Ironically this resulted in me spending most of the game waiting for God. Unfortunately Hinduism never spread to me, so I just ended up in free religion.

As I had recently played a space game where I conquered everyone on my continent first before going to space, I decided to try the totally pacifist builder approach. Got to Education in 400 AD and Liberalism (taking astronomy) in 740 AD. I got every free GP tech first and added most of them to Berlin. I stayed in Representation, Free Market, Emancipation, Bureaucracy, Free Religion and ran a hybrid Town + Specialist economy. I did build a military deterrent of more modern units as they became available, but the game was entirely peaceful.

I finished research in 1828 AD but had somehow left Apollo until very late (I was building Three Gorges in my capital since 5 of my 7 cities had no access to power otherwise, and just plain forgot about Apollo for some reason), so embarrassingly got bottlenecked on production and took until 1890 to actually launch the spaceship. I'm not particularly proud of this result as with a couple of cities stolen from Saladin and without the Apollo snafu, I suspect a launch in the first half of the 19th century would have been achievable.

Thanks for the game, the scenario was entertaining. I smelled a rat around Iron, but didn't completely get the joke until map trading.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Originally Posted by uberfish

Rather than make people read through a multi-page report of a game...

Wow, do I feel smoked....

If you get the time, I'd love to see a dot map, settling order, and build order for Berlin... because clearly you did what I started out trying to do, but got it right. Maybe a page or two detailing the start up to the Oracle? (It can't hurt to ask, right?)

[Timon of Athens]

@uberfish:

After having read the report of your brilliant Adventure IV some time ago I'm not surprised by your result. Fastest launch so far, as expected. Congratulations ! Unlike me, you're truly a hell of a player !

LT

[uberfish]

Thanks guys - I had a dot map but the upload server doesn't seem to be working. A few more notes:

I founded in this order: 5S 5E, 4S 5W, 6E 2N, 6S, 9E 4S, and then at the wheat/clam/sheep site further east. Saladin took the mediocre city site to the NW. I settle cities based on what resources I can get within their boundaries and also emphasize coastal access. I don't care about such concepts as optimal city spacing or using all the tiles within my empire; in fact there's an entire ring of mostly plains tiles outside Berlin's boundaries that remained unused for the entire game.

Research order was Wheel (hut), Agriculture, AH, BW, Masonry, Pottery, Writing, Mysticism, Archery, Meditation, Priesthood, CoL.

Berlin would probably have built worker, 3-4 warriors, worker, settler, settler, Pyramids. I improved the corn and cow first. I didn't chop rush workers and settlers. I did chop a bit to speed the pyramids and oracle.

Like many other players I was playing quickly, and made a few significant mistakes, such as not whipping to finish Great Lighthouse and thus losing it to the AI, not exploring properly and missing that nice jungle island to the north, not switching to Universal Suffrage sometime in the 18th century when it should have been clear spaceship production would be a potential hold up due to the lack of Coal and Iron, and forgetting to build Apollo until late.