Adv57 - Portugal, Spanish-Style

[timmy827]

Scoring summary:

Captured all 35 barbarian cities in the New World, and never lost any: 700 pts
Versailles in New World: 400? (Right? I believe Qqqq's answers is that the 100+300 points stack, but not the 50 for 'each wonder in the new world)
FP in New World: 100
Other wonders in New World: 550
(Spiral Minaret, Taj Mahal, Kremlin, Broadway, SoL, Hollywood, Rock 'n Roll, Cristo, Eiffel, UN, Hollywood)
Won Circumnavigation: 150
Domination: 500

Subtotal: 2300

'Fastest' dates:
Circumnavigated in 1040AD. (Shame on the community if I get any points for this...) - 0 Pts
Captured 1st New World city in 700AD - 0 Pts
Owned all New World cities in 1360AD - 2nd place/400 pts

Super-sub-total: 2700

Won 1555AD - Turn 221 - bonus is (500-221) * .2 = 55.8 %
Grand Total - 4206.6

[timmy827]

Looks really fun. I have always like exploration/overseas colonization games, dating from really early stuff (vague memories of sailing around the world and trading circa 1500-ish Age of Discovery, on an Apple IIe in my elementary school's library - wish I rememberd the name!)
and enjoying that part of the Europa Universalis franchise. It is something that traditionally has rather shallow in Civ4; by the time Astronomy comes around, new cities on the new world take too long to develop and pay back compared to other options. Sulla discussed this in his writeup of the Apolyton Demogame, but I think it applies to single player as well (in slightly different fashion - rather than a human player/team conquering , against the AIs it is more effective to spend resources on military to capture developed AI cities/land rather than settling the new world). The Terra mapscript tries to help by having some happy/health resources only in the New World, but at most they incentivize planting a couple colonies to get them if needed, not creating a w. (And of course the BTS 'colony' system was a horrible feature; incentivizing the player to give control of a portion of empire to an AI, combining it with all the existing issues of the vassal system....)

So it's cool to have a scenario scoring system based around the other continent. If we are still playing Civ4 in a year, I might even toy around with the idea of a reprise without the barbarian feature. Perhaps keep the same "don't invade the AI's rule" and play for fastest space (presumably a race to develop the far contient as quickly as possible). Or win by culture with the legendaries on the far continent.

It was also interesting to think about how to go after the other continent.
This Thread showed how barb tech advances, but I had no idea if the commerce from barb cities adds to their tech rate (or, if maintenance from starting with all those cities prevents them from ever adding to their rate...in a normal game where typical no more than 3 barb cities exist at a time, and are generally captured before they get to size 5 or improve tiles, you can't really tell. Presumably the sponsor playtested to make sure that strike doesn't disband all the barb units on the map ) An even greater variable was that I had no idea how the barb units would act on the other continent.; from 'normal' experience I think I've seen barb cities make a new unit (besides the garrison that spawns at creation) and that new unit wander out to fight, but no idea if barbs from multiple cities would act in a concerted manner.

Anways, enough commentary. What did I actually do?


Before starting I kicked around ideas about fast Optics, such as the classic Oracle->MC, get a forge in a different city up fast, outrace the Oracle to a Great Engineer and bulb Machinery. Of course two other highly desirable wonders are Great Wall and Great Lighthouse; either of those probably sinks the Engineer bulb (to get Oracle + one of above, probably both have to be in capital, then you can't outrace 2 wonders of GPP. After the opening turns when the land looked to have plenty more coast, I decided to do GLH + Oracle and forget the Machinery bulb. An early Merchant likely produces more beakers anyways for a Optics goal (in this case, Machinery itself doesn't do that much, so the instant nature of the bulb vs. spending the Merchant's cash on deficit research over many turns is unlikely to be a big edge. )

Also as discovered we near a peninsular end of the continent, resolved to expand out pretty quickly. Was thinking that we'd need significant production power to fight a continent of barbs and with the variant rule it was imperative to not get boxed in, even at significant hit to early teching. There was one obvious location to grab early with corn, horses, and a river for most of the trade route to the capital, but was not to be:

I have a settler on the '34' square but obviously Justinian is going to beat me to the square my warrior is on. And that's the only strat resource I can see (research was Ag->AH->Wheel->currently on Pottery).

At this point I made a very good decision to do another test game...the first one had barbs raging into my borders shortly after 2000BC. But that was an outlier, another careful test revealed they would show up at turn 43. Yikes.

Solution:


Spam warriors like mad (had 9 on this turn, 2200 BC) and go for a total spawnbust. (The worker on the wines is actually part of the net for the moment!) Hadn't quite mapped out the north but the warriors I had were enough to forestall disaster. And Oporto was undoubtedly the lowest-long-term potential spot I have ever built my 2nd city on. But it could help put out warriors, workers and settlers switfly at small size, locked down ivory (at the time I assumed elepahants would be major invade-New-World unit, with a rush to Optics precluding more expensive tech units like Maces or Trebs) and blocked a lot of land off. You can also see the borders of Izzy's 2nd city, in about the best place I could hope - close enough to be a good barb shield, but with the corn in the 2nd ring so I could plan to culture-swipe it.

Next:

Also going to be stunted, working just that gold for ages. It also allowed for a road from Oporto to connect all my cities for the +1 trade routes without a road to the capital, as Sailing was followed early for a Lighthouse prereq.

Even more spamming. Plan was to chop the Oracle at Coimbra once I had finished the techs (Meditation and Priesthood still needed) and plopped a city right on the norther tundra marble. Coimbra chosen both to keep Lisbon a pure Merchant Great Person (GLH was in progress there), and use the culture to swipe the corn. However the Oracle fell a few turns later. But the above plan was a good one because it 'compressed' the commitment of resources to the Oracle; I could send the settler somewhere better, not tech religion next, and save the forests for later.

Evora seems a little like carried-away expansion, however the tech hit was actually very little. Once you are paying for a big spawnbusting operation, the negative effect of more cities comes later as their maintenance is partially recouped by savings on unit costs/supply. And wanted to make sure Justy didn't poach the spot.

Losing the Oracle was not surprising in retrospect. We have a low commerce start, needed to invest in either spawnbusters or 'real' barb defense early, GLH+Oracle+cows at start means you need to tech basically everything in the first few columns, and I was trying to landgrab aggressively too. Perhaps I erred by going Pottery; did Lisbon's cottages paid back its research cost by 1280BC? Perhaps should have considered the Oracle more at risk and gone that way first, delaying Sailing and Masonry. Very interested to see if anyone else tries for and gets both.


Of course, like any good Imperialistic leader, I worked silly tiles to 3-whip the settler, overflow largely polished off the Great Lighthouse a few turns later. Although looking at the screen shot now, maybe I should have just worked normal tiles 2 turns, then double whipped with overflow...

Here is a shot showing the extent of the land grab at 400BC, when I had backfilled the places closer to my capital and nabbed one tundra fishing village. This is basically complete, added one city at the marked square later for marble/whales. Braga was marked as the royal shipyard, getting Moai. As usual I selected a hybrid land/sea location with 5 grass hills so it could be built in a reasonable amount of time. My spawnbusting earlier was mostly successful but one drawback was there was no chance for an early Heroic Epic. I also wonder if Lagos should have been 1S on the fur so it could borrow Lisbon's cow; the capital often did not need both of its food resources.

I had decided to go to Metal Casting the old fashioned way, and made another plan for chopping the Colossus at Coimbra after researching Math (again wanted this place for the culture), but was also too late, Gilgamesh got it (of course, he was the AI that got the Oracle and took MC). That was a known risk but with the scenario points and the wonder's fairly helpful short-term teching boost seemed worth pursuing. Again, I 'failed early enough' to preserve the forests, which led to my next iteration of the plan to make Coimbra the great person farm...

Also, the Great Lighthouse took a very long time to fully activate. There was some space between Spain and Mongolia that hampered efforts to map out the other AIs enough for trade routes, and I was not fully set there until well after the 1AD.

One bright spot was that Pacal had (typical for him) gone nuts with Buddhist missionaries and got it to me and Izzy around the calendar change. I even got brownie points with Izzy asking me to convert! I had adapted OR along with HR after the first round of tech trading, and made a significant investment in missionaries for Justinian (he was briefly Jewish but was able to persuade him). Everyone except Hammy was Buddhist, and with a lot of easy favorite civics (HR for Gilg and Pacal, Theocracy for Izzy and Justinian) I could look forward to Friendly tech trading down the line. In the near term was able to get some helpful begging gold too.

After the failed Colossus bid, research was
Alphabet - Had really hoped that some AI would research it for me, but no dice, and I needed to trade for Monarchy which I saw would be on offer soon (EP on Justinian gave research visibility).
Currency
Aesthetics (going for Great Library)
Code of Laws (ugh, Justinian started researching it, and I wanted to bury the religion and keep everyone Buddhist)
Literature



Was aiming at a medium-term plan of two Great Scientists for an Astronomy double bulb (plus finally grabbing that corn tile). Yes, even though we're Portugal, Galleons are a signifcant improvement in transport capacity.
(Of course this tech plan made my earlier MC sort of a dud, forges are useful but have a high cost in beakers and hammers compared to Alpha/Currency earlier. And I was already giving up on the idea of early Optics for the circumnavigation and earliest-1st-conquest points, while gearing up for chasing 'fastest to own the whole New World'. Assumed that would take more developed mainland to build the units and support the sprawling empire, also that Astronomy for trade routes would be vital to prevent bankruptcy).

But at this point, Carracks came fairly soon; the first Great Merchant trade mission allowed rapid push through Compass/Machinery/Optics. First landfall was quick:

You can see my borders - this is quite close but ouchie on the size of that garrison! Eh, let's keep looking...

One of the most helpful things was Gilgamesh getting Engineering early and being Friendly. He did decide to build Notre Dame so I couldn't trade for it until 740AD. But that allowed me to pursue some side projects like Music (pocking the Great Artist for a later Golden Age, Oporto built the Mausoleum) and Feudalism (against barb archers, figured longbows + trebs would be plenty). Also important in scenario context was getting Divine Right first (800AD) so that the AIs would ignore it, giving the time to build Versailles somewhere down the line. The Astro double bulb came in here as well, though I still wonder if that was best play. (wonder if anyone will have success with a deliberate strategy of spies popping New World huts for Astro?)

But before these new toys came into play, I found softer targets where a few xbow/longbow/elephant could take a city:

Ah, much better. For some reason the barbs loved Angle, and most other cities had only 2 archers and maybe an axeman. You can see barbs 'out and about' here, but not so many in these southern cities, and the roaming barbs generally took care of themselves by suiciding into longbows in cities.

As opposed to normal barb-fighting, it was a little disconcerting to have them marching in on roads to cities with unpopped borders. I didn't plan this, but Islam was founded in Khazak, and I could get some use out of the missionary by running him out 3 squares each turn to scout then running him back in. Some spies were useful as lookouts. Also, since my first two cities did not have a direct/safe road connection, I would keep a spare boat or two nearby, so that longbows could be shifted between them. This may have inadvertently been Civ3-style string pulling, seemed that the barbs changed direction a couple of times after I reinforced from the sea; although perhaps they were just waiting for friends and making bigger stacks. Here was the culmination:

Dear lord, nearly shot myself in the foot here. I forgot to unload the 2 longbows in the boat so they didn't defend! Still barely held the city, think a few barbs went to pillage instead of finishing off my garrison...that would have been borderline with the guidlines Qqqq laid down ("fastest city capture must expand its borders and hold 10 turns") so very fortunate. Expeditionary forces were being dropped off elsewhere in the meantime:

This is 1050AD. You can see I have a couple of wonder builders identified already; the 'Versailles' is actually a city I would found that had forests. (It would still be slow to complete in a new city, but could bank on the AIs ignoring Divine Right for a long time with the religion gone, and so Taj in stronger Chinook as that one might have an actual race.) I intended to make Avar and Maruyan a narrow frontline, wrap up the other coastal cities on this peninsula and use them as a 'forward base' - have some land safe from pillaging so could start those wonders and whip additional units until I was strong enough to push forward against the onslaught.

But then a funny thing happened - said onslaught basically stopped. I guess there only a certain number of 'attack-AI' barbs going around, and that battle at Zhou was the last significant batch. For whatever reason the stack at Angle didn't move a bit (had a spy camping there to check). And I suppose the barb count was high enough from that stack, and/or the 'self-spawnbusting' nature of barbs enough, that there were not really any random spawners.

In other news....

The Northwest Passage was not to be. There was a water route but I made a gamble that did not work out, assuming I could send just one Carrack around to the north (saving the rest for starting the conquest). Initially lost a few turns in this bay:

then found too much ice/islands, there was not a way for a Carrack to get all the way through without stopping on a coast and the whole region was swarming with barb galleys.

So my first explorer was eventually killed and circumnavigation was eventually found via going around the south of the New World which was much more open ocean and thus safe from galleys, but it took me a while to start down that path. Oddly the barb galleys were far denser in the icy wastes, they almost never caused problems with the main invasion route. Barb galleys provided another bonus of going to Astronomy. During my Vassalage/Theo times, the Galleons came with 4XP, and were very safe to win against one galley and promote to Navigation 1 for a little more transport oomph (although I didn't get any quick enough to speed circumnavigation) Carracks would have been a bit riskier to try this with.

One item that did help was giving Gilg optics (believe was part of the engineering trade). He helpfully sent his first caravel east, and buying his map a few times (without selling mine) took a few turns off my circumnav time. You can see his route in the minimap here:

My research was aimed at Liberalism->Communism slingshot. Besides the 0-distance maintenance, the uber-workshops sounded like a great goal; was expecting to wrap up the game in the Cannon era and probably wouldn't tech to the point where corporations would help. Of course, this made Versailles and the FP points-only formalities; the FP in particular came superlate as I built only one Courthouse in the old world.

I had gotten the Music artist and used it around 1000AD for a Maus-boosted golden age. After the double-Astro-Bulb, I focused on Great Merchants for trade missions, conveniently the Temple of Artemis was in nearby Madrid. Gold from the city captures and map sales helped significantly as well. More than once I would gift someone to Friendly through old techs (Gilg, Justinian, and Izzy were all on the edge at some point) then find they wouldn't trade me a monopoly on say, Philosophy (bulbed by Justinian) because they were building the wonder, though I think I eventually got most of the trades I wanted. Also diverted to Nationalism when Gilgamesh started it, but goal completed in 1160AD:

The astute will notice that I'm still lacking the earlier boosters for the workshops, and that I could have cheapened Scientific Method (while enjoying the Parthenon and Great Library longer) by going for Chemistry earlier. But I felt I had to rush forward over those, my breakeven research out of the golden age was only 130 BPT at this point and was worried about a stall with the distance maintenance. The Communism great spy was part of a 2nd golden age, that plus State Property immediately tripled that tech rate and a rather amazing research snowball started. Finally, relations were good enough to go Free Religion for a while; since I had so few science buildings the 10% was fairly significant.

Above I had noted the barb activity really died down, and around 1100AD I was able to start moving west from the peninsula chokepoint. The fighting got very lopsided as trebs just smashed walls, archers, axes and spears. Rather shockingly, many barb cities did not pop their borders at all, and even the ones that did were often approachable through roads on the diagnoal (so only one turn in barb culture before taking the city). I originally envisioned the New World conquest as a long '2 steps forward, 1 step back' slog but in actuality it became a frantic race, with splitting my army into 4 groups and racing to get as many cities as possible before the barbs advanced their tech. Spies were useful here too as advance scouts. I saw some cryptic notes about barb behavior and having some 'radar range', so I swung around west, worried that if I started going straight north at some point the barbs at Angle would wake up and cause trouble. Also, figured it made sense to beeline to the northwest; fresh units from my core could be landed at Angle for a big 'final battle' if the barbs stayed there; would be the fastest to clear the continent that way.

One other non-predicted benefit of the barb behavior was that the barb cities could often be drafted very soon as their culture was so weak. It did take quite a while for me to figure out Nationhood as quickest solution to stacks become siege-heavy as they left garrison units behind in captured cities. The zero-cost civic also was breakeven with the Bureau bonus at the capital Free speech was used eventually, but I got quite a good haul of muskets out of otherwise low-production new world cities.

In the meantime, I was starting to look ahead to victory conditions. From demographics I could see that Izzy was the largest AI, and my land + hers + the whole New World = domination. Except, I could not get just her land (other culture would weigh in on it) so I was probably going to need multiple wars. Gilgamesh had built the AP which allowed for some free mischief as I was voted resident. Genghis declared on Hammy (again the lone not-Buddhist), and I took the opportunity to order a dogpile. Of course by variant rule I don't lift a finger against him in real terms, but the diplo bonus helps get more to Friendly, and it would be good to have the AI's burning their stacks.

Also, research started really picking up above expectations. It was not conventional civ development - I feel I built only 1-2 each of Market, University, Observatory the whole game, and kept many Old World cities production-focused on units. It was the New World cities; they came with little infrastructure, and couldn't build much (frequently the new world city builds were longbows to replace garrisons), and I was terribly short of workers (the ones I had in the new world were in labor-intensive projects putting watermills and workshops on the relatively few cities aimed at wonder production). But, the barbs frequently worked ~6 tiles per city to Villages, and when each city has a small marginal cost (6 NumCities, was past the point where homeland NumCity cost hit the cap, plus its civic maintenance) the collective boost really took off. After communism the goals were Steel for cannons and the last workshop boosters, followed by the wonder-heavy part of the tree (Electricity->Radio->Mass Media).


Back in the new world, I was starting to feel a bit overextended:

Wow, was not expecting a barb galley invasion! I had ignored this one since no city works that fish, and fortunately had a few units passing through. (Generally I was shipping most units from the Old World over the shortest sea route - southwest to Zhou, my first capture - and walking them through the New as I never had all that many ships). Some random spawns were starting to happen as well, including a couple horse archers that zapped some workers from well out of sight...there was a lot of management to figure out where to pop borders twice and/or leave more spawnbusters behind in the gaps to prevent this. And finally, the age of archery came to an end:

Rather annoying that they all magic-upgrade together. However, it seemed i would hit my research goals for the bulk of the wonders in plenty of time to finish them before Domination (after clearing the New World there would be quite a bit of time moving the army back to the Old, plus the standard waiting for resistance/border popping on the Old World cities). So simply had to pause a bit for Cannon upgrades and continue. The core could start shipping units straight west, leading to this:

No biggie, cannons pasted the whole stack. Took 2 turns to kill them all but only lost 2-3 cannons all told. The campaigns in the far reaches wrapped up a few turns later; I even got a little use out of Airships (not strong, but superfast at reaching the front)


As for the wonders, I did have one great engineer, and the best way to use him with this ruleset was on a national wonder of course:

However this was rather botched - as previously mentioned I made a big swing to the west and captured this Ironworks location much later than I should have. In the end, wound up largely distributing the wonder-load around 6 new world cities - some had some forests to chop, and even without factories/power, the 800-1200 hammer wonders don't take that long when you can put a 2f/5h workshop on any grassland. (Nearly all of 1000AD to the end of the game was covered by chained golden ages.) Went back to Organized Relgion at some point to help. I got all of the later wonders I aimed for on the new world (Taj, the Divine Right pair, Krelim, Status of Lib, and the Elect/Radio/Mass Media cluster). There were some older that went quite late, but none enough for me to rush-chop them out in the new world. Was rather surpised that some of the medieval stone wonders (Sankore, Angkor Wat, Notre Dame) were built fairly quickly despite stone only being in the new world.

Now for the final act, clinching Domination. Was going to be a formality; my power was well above any AI. Another target survey:

Justinian, Isabella, and Genghis were still at war with Hammy from the AP dogpile. Justinian has the next-largest military, and his 12-strength cataphracts could cause some losses, and I had some residual fear from my very first Epic (13) where he wiped one of my Portugese stacks including a Great General. So decided I would conquer Spain then Babylon and Mongolia; paid Justinian to make peace so my victims would beat each other up more instead of a big Byzantine stack rolling over Babylon.

Shipping was a bottleneck moving back from the New World, so I had successive waves of units. This worked out really well - from Portugal's point of view Spain was long but pretty narrow. So I sent units ahead to start the war from Mongol and Byzantine borders. Looks something like this:

So most of her cities were attacked within the first 2-3 turns of the war. She did get Conquistadors just before, which inflicted a few losses but nothing major; knew half her army was in Babylon (hooray for airship recon!). I left one city of hers in the north because it would give me no Domination tiles (byzantine cities on 3 sides). Most of her cities would starve the first turn; it was amusing to turn everyone into a free speech artist and have it pop borders twice in one turn. (Probably the game logic should differentiate between a city producing 28/32 needed food and 2/32 needed food...)

With the wonder techs completed, there wasn't much benefit from more research, I went Steam Power (coal for IW, minor production boost, though it was too late for Levees to matter) through flight. Overkill, but railroads did speed things slightly, as did having Bombers give mounted units the freedom to rush ahead of the slow cannons. Techs were still coming in via trade from Friendly Gilgamesh as well; think I traded for Constitution (then had done Democracy myself for the Statue), Guilds, Banking, Replaceable Parts, Military Tradition and even Rifling (after Spain was gone). Curs, cavs and rifles were hardly necessary but since I was about out of useful things to tech, might as well spend the gold on upgrade. I had dismissed the Pentagon and the Dam earlier as they had high build as well as tech costs, but maybe I could have gotten them (and I had figured that depending on my 'fastest' points, you need to add about 1 wonder every 10-12 turns to counter the decreasing % bonus; however it would seem overly milky to just sit on a commanding military lead. The other wonders I built were fine since they fit well into the timeframe needed to ship the army back at the AIs.)

That dogpile war really helped smooth the last conquests, you can see a lot of its effects in one picture here:

At the time I was at war with Babylon but not Genghis (who had just taken the city Babylon). Could use the no-culture space opened up to 'poach' Akkad ahead of Genghis's stack. His stack went towards Borsippa; I DOW'd Genghis and took Babylon before it came out of resistance. Then Genghis tried to attack me but with his troops in Babylon culture, I got first shot with the cannons and cleaned out. Izzy's stack in the picture was enough to take Borsippa too, so I re-DOWed her, razed her last city the same turn (Byzantine border close enough for Cavs to blitz) to 'poof' her army away, then finally my stack advanced and kicked Hammy off the mainland.

In the meantime, other armies converged on the rest of Mongolia, including running some to Maya lands before the DOW, using the navy on the southwest coast, aided by the new bombers rolling off the line. So after some more gross slaughter, Genghis is barely saved from extermination:

Strictly speaking, this was reachable only fighting 2 AIs, but it seemed faster to just sweep the culture clear of all 3 of them. (I also hadn't filled every last nook and cranny of the new world).

Thanks much to Qqqq and T-hawk for putting together a very fun game. It's just amazing that I can think 'oh I'm done with Civ4' but every now and then a scenario forces me back. (No offense to some of the other games/sponsors - there have been ones I was excited about in last year but couldn't find time - needs something extra to make me neglect work, friends, sleep and practicing to play a video game )

[zakalwe]

Great report, Timmy. Interesting spawnbusting strategy.

[T-hawk]

Yes, great report and glad to see Civ 4 still pulling you in. Compromise is going to clean up on the fastest-everything points but you did some great work too.

Of course, like any good Imperialistic leader, I worked silly tiles to 3-whip the settler,

Well, the overflow gets divided back by the Imp bonus so you don't get anywhere ahead of a regular whip. Is one extra whip worth giving up 12+ foodhammers in coming off the corn and cow and hills?

Communism before Guilds - I wouldn't even have realized that was possible, so yeah, first time I've seen the workshop food bonus arrive ahead of the first hammer increase.

[Compromise]

As I was spending lots of time trying to box in Justinian and Isabella, I kept thinking: How is this going to compare with a more peaceful approach to the AI? Obviously, you've proven that the nice-to-the-AI route was better. Your tech rate was amazing.

Your Ironworks city was also a thing of beauty. I hope there are future events which reward fewer, but well-designed, city location/types.

Very glad you found this one compelling enough to play, it's always a learning experience to read your game reports.

Oh...and @T-Hawk: Compromise is only getting some Optics-related "fastest" bonuses. He was slower than all at everything else. And didn't build New World wonders....

[Compromise]

And one other thing: you wondered if anyone would send spies to the New World to try to pop Astronomy.... I did. Not Astronomy, per se, but definitely looked for huts with a spy and waited to pop them if I only had a turn or two left on whatever tech I was researching.

This turned out to be pointless. I think I popped hostiles, warriors, and Aesthetics (at that point a 5-turn tech that I didn't need) in the New World.

I also noticed that there were very few huts in the New World for that spy to pop. And after checking some saves, I now know why: Barbarian city culture pops huts!

[T-hawk]

I hope there are future events which reward fewer, but well-designed, city location/types.

So... Civilization V?

[timmy827]

Well, the overflow gets divided back by the Imp bonus so you don't get anywhere ahead of a regular whip. Is one extra whip worth giving up 12+ foodhammers in coming off the corn and cow and hills?

Yeah, that does make it sound rather bad. Maybe it was ok as the overflow went into a crucial wonder and the extra 'usefulness' of whipping one extra citizen at time where I had a lot of surplus. (effectively, if you do a double whip, you 'come off' the corn later as Libson has no need to grow after the whip, though you do keep the hill tiles.)

I'm actually really curious now but don't have an exact save from that sequence, maybe if I have some civ time I will try to reconstruct that and toy around.

@Compromise: My wonder score was really a function of tech lead, not the Ironworks city. In fact upon review it only completed 2 of the 12 wonders I built in the New World! (That was also in part due to research flying - Mass Media is less expensive than Radio, so 5 wonders get enabled close together, and since I didn't need more military might as well parallelize them though non-IW cites are not as efficient).

[Ceiliazul]

Wow, that was a great game report! Our dotmaps looked really similar, and you even put G.Lib and National Epic on the same city tile. Cool.

Communism before Guilds - I wouldn't even have realized that was possible, so yeah, first time I've seen the workshop food bonus arrive ahead of the first hammer increase.

Nice play here too, we had a lot in common. At the height of the economy crunch, some of the larger new world cities were paying over 15gpt in distance maintenance!