Timmy tries Adv 4

[unaghy]

Congrats! You were extremely lucky on AI behavior, as none GP got patronaged early by AI in your game, especially Gandhi seemed to be somehow buggy, as in my game he expanded best from all other AI and was using faith for getting GP like crazy. Also good choice on Knights as they allowed you to conquer much quicker thanks to good movement. I also skip Big Ben and spent money on army, while I did not have to. Btw, how much GP did you get through Big Ben / last turn cash spending?

[shinghand]

As I said in Archduke thread you could have solved the problem by loading the last of the relics in a single city and gifting it. I'm sure you would have found this trick if you had time to get to turn 250 and needed a way to get there.

How many points would you have gotten in Epic 2? I'm sure that it would be a lot higher that 184. I'd also like you to break down your score to see where your points came from. (Edit: I consider anything above 200 points as 'much higher' due to the scoring system that epic used.)

Use spoilers for big posts next time, shinghand.

Yeah, sorry about that - my work PC blocks all imgur pics from loading. Thought the report was shorter than it was

timmy, your game was masterful in its exploitation - I can't help being impressed at how disgusting it was!

Some questions: How did you manage to grab 6 cities by turn 5 - did you do nothing but build settlers early? (I know one of them was captured)
Was your tech path a literal beeline to Apprenticeship, stopping for nothing along the way? I see that you only have farms and mines out. If so, wondering how you got the eureka for Currency. Did you buy a trader?

[timmy827]

Thanks all for the reads and comments.  Few general thoughts -

Buying a relic at T19 seems less (comparatively) lucky than it seemed with several players popping one T8-10.

It was funny how in every game Spain settled towards the player and their SW and ignored some fine sites SE/E/N of Madrid.  Wonder if the AI is now smart enough to prioritize the middle of the map and backfill later?  I think that captured settler of mine grabbing the NW river/hill site was a big swing, very powerful site and it bottled up Spain for a while having weaker cities on the coast and not reaching much further west.  

As far as I can tell I was the only one to mention the “average era” formula (the tip was in Sullla’s Adventure 2 report, then I tested a bit loading old saves to come up with what I wrote in the intro) and take advantage to keep the cheaper GP from disappearing, it seems that the other players who expanded/conquered well often completely killed AI’s and didn’t get that benefit.

Now specific responses...

Unaghy - yes very lucky on AI behavior, they didn’t patronage any or build many districts.  My Ghandi stayed at one city until ~T150.  Aside from the prophets, Germany got the 2nd GG and Spain the 1st. Admiral, and that was it.  Fred was close to the first engineer as I was taking his Hansas, but didn’t patronage him.  Along with that luck, I didn’t suffer any of the following and it seems most players saw at least one of these
-early DOW  (Hey, I’m owed this after triple dogpile in Adv 2…)
-AI settling right in my face early
-AI conquering a useful city state early.  
-Barb horse trouble


Shinghand -I think you mean 6 cities by T53 or so?  Yes mostly settlers.
Opening builds: warrior->slinger->settler
I bought the first builder with cash and didn’t make many more in the first 50 turns; with finite charges and early improvements only giving +1 of something they don’t seem as useful early always compared to the “worker” model of previous games.  I am (slowly) losing my Civ4 habit of cringing when any city works an unimproved tile for more than 5 turns.  
2nd city started a settler about T30 and finished ~T42 (could go real fast with the 5 food rice and 1/3 forsted hill then a mined hill) while cap did two more from about 30-46 plus the lucky capture.  
Got Early Empire T33 and used Colonization almost continuously from then on.  Think I used more cash from relic + lux sales to buy builders instead of hammers.
I did have 3 warriors, 2 slingers, 2 scouts at T51 so wasn’t absolute farmers gambit but put zero hammers into any district or building early.  

Obviously that risked losing some of the cheap 60 point GP but think it was right move for better growth over course of the game.  That maybe was a function of the hill + river abundance making for a lot of very good reachable city spots, if the map was less fertile a heavy landgrab would be less strong.

Apprenticeship is almost always an early tech focus but I did pick up Masonry, Wheel first, for CS quests (one for actual quest and also just to buy time to finish quests before advancing to Medieval).  With no cities on the coast I bypassed the top part entirely until after Apprenticeship.  I did build the trader in the capital while the first settler was walking.


RefSteel:  Yes I did not ask for any cities ceded in any peace treaty this game, and the occupation penalty vanished with the peace treaty.  I played around before starting the Adv4 by reloading some saves from Adv3 and experimenting.  It may be that getting the AI to cede you a city removes some of their ‘you have our city’ hatred but not 100% on that.  I’m not sure if thisnew mechanic is a (considerable, undocumented but intentional) patch change or a bug introduced.  The patch notes also don’t mention that DoW’s themselves no longer give any warmonger points (regardless of surprise/CB etc) but that is at least shown in the diplo interface.

Also I reloaded my T150 save (was in 2nd war with Germany) and only the one city I captured in that war shows occupation, German cities captured-not-ceded in the first war are fine and dandy

Ending buy spree:  2 Engineer, 2 General, 4 Admiral, 9 Scientists

MJW - I can probably answer the epic 2 question.  I got to T200 but couldn’t finish by reporting day, went a bit further and was thinking about doing a full shadow report but ran out of steam.  It’s close enough to T250 that I can post some saves and brief summary, as well as an estimate of what I’d get (you’re still the victor of course).  Hosting family right now so may be variable time before I get to it.

[MJW (ya that one)]

MJW - I can probably answer the epic 2 question.  I got to T200 but couldn’t finish by reporting day, went a bit further and was thinking about doing a full shadow report but ran out of steam.  It’s close enough to T250 that I can post some saves and brief summary, as well as an estimate of what I’d get (you’re still the victor of course).  Hosting family right now so may be variable time before I get to it.

  (I really have no idea what will happen, so I won't say anything more, aside from the fact that he probably would have gotten over 200 points.)