Your path out of the gate was for the early religion, thus ruling out the quick worker and Animal Husbandry research. Then, not content with just one religion, you had to go for Monotheism and found Judaism too. Typical Sirian start in one of these Adventures!
But I got the pigs hooked up much earlier, and (with Mining) was able to improve the output of those hill tiles while you were still in religion-land. And I got my own religion soon enough with the Oracle at virtually no cost. After that Adventure Two start, I'll never disparage Sirian's odd religion-heavy starts, but I'll be interesting to see how our expansions compare here. I'll have the early lead, but perhaps Sirian will be stronger down the road.
Please tell me this though - why did you research Hunting and Archery over Animal Husbandry?
There were pigs at the start, and with horses for War Chariots, archers were irrelevant. Now you didn't know that you had horses - but you didn't know you DIDN'T have them either! (if that makes sense) I find those choices a bit odd. I know you wanted to get the cottages going, but... it still seems strange to me.
Quote:Unfortunately as you can see, the barbarians are encroaching. I hook up my Copper, and after the Oracle completes I have to spend some time training Archers and Axemen.
Hehe, not in my game. I had War Chariots out kicking their behinds. That shot of the barbs incoming in 950BC amuses me greatly.
And once you HAD researched Animal Husbandry and could see the horses, why no settler beeline over there to grab them? Egyptian axemen? Bah, I feel like Fried in this game. War Chariots are just so awesome (and cheap!) not using them is silly.
You have no idea how amusing it is for me to read that you connected the SOUTHERN horses in the ice first!
And your Helipolis narrowly manages to avoid the horses in the west too. What, were you deliberately trying to avoid them or something? Were they not GOOD enough for you?
The comparative shots of our territory from 100AD are interesting. You had six cities to my seven, but mine were much, much higher in population and tile improvements. You know, I think that you may have fallen into the trap of those floodplains; cottaging them was clearly the best move, but I think it was better to FIRST connect the pigs and mine the hills to allow for quick expansion, THEN go back and build the cottages later. For once, I can say the sentence: "I encourage you to think long-term." We both had lots of cottages going at Thebes, and while yours were slightly more built-up than mine (say, villages as opposed to hamlets), I had developed the entire rest of my civ better. I traded earlier commerce for faster expansion. And I think it worked out here.
*GASP*! Sirian NOT getting one of those two awesome whipping islands?
I am disappointed!
And still no War Chariots. That's the one puzzling thing about this game. You're going to have to tell me why you didn't build any once you had horses, because I just don't get that. Oh wait, you finally did use ONE of them in 1070AD. Yay!
The collapse of America was surprising to see. Nothing like that happened in my game, obviously. And of course you get rewarded with a silver pop at Thebes a little later. Fried would be beating his head on the table on reading that. Late AI research of Alphabet was a tough break though.
Oh - guess which one of us reached the other continent first?
Fred actually came and found YOU! So no more teasing about scouting, m'kay?
Your Liberalism grab was, uh, a lot later than mine. But I'm glad to see that someone else also went for the Astronomy push with it, which I think makes a lot of sense. I'd have done that in many other games, had I not had the Colossus to worry about.
Lots of wars in your game, even more than in mine. Of course, the fighting on the other continent was no doubt due to the fact that Fred had converted away from Buddhism. They all stayed Buddhist in my game and all remained peaceful over there. And poor FDR! It just was not his game.
I had just as many cottages as you, only I didn't go quite as crazy with the flying camera.
Alaskan Salmon is hilarious, and a nice addition too.
Even with all these cottages, I still think that Representation was more useful to be running than Universal Suffrage. That specialist boost along with Statue of Liberty is just so strong... In any case, I didn't need production, I needed more beakers. Maybe it was different for you, since your cities generally got a later start than mine.
I agree with you on the city flips. I had some captured cities under major cultural pressure, and I was able to dump my whole military in them and stop any chance of a revolt. Soren should tweak this a bit to make it more likely for cities to flip (cut down what the garrison does to the chances). But one other thing on that regard - you did know that having your state religion in a city you're trying to flip makes it about twice as likely to flip, right? You might have had more luck if Hinduism had been in those cities.
So a good game, a lot to compare here. I think in this case, your early religion push was counter-productive, because the slower expansion left you vulnerable to barb attack in a way that more cities would have reduced. (Again, I ask myself - did you really NEED all those religions?
) I agree that this map would have been definitely viable on Emperor, even with the variant restrictions. Immortal might have been a fun challenge. It was a good read, and I hope to hear your responses.
And no shocking twist ending? Was this even a Sirian report?
EDIT: I just see now that Sirian responded to a lot of this (and basically agreed with me) in his response to Kylearan. Whoops. Guess I wrote a lot more than I needed to! It was fun regardless.
on my part. If I had registered the fact that the player had more open space around them than the AIs, I'd have known the barbs would be more of a problem, but I didn't know that up front.
