Adv28, Timmy's master milkers

[timmy827]

Score: 4654 science + 31811 culture = 36465 points

Summary - domination victory, used 1750AD as my scoring turn (domination probably would've triggered the next turn, and of course it did after configuring all cities for max culture). As turn counts go, that's turn 260 and 1900AD is 320, so 60 turns early. I got a bit greedy about land grabbing and it definitely would've been optimal for high-scoring to grab a bit less and thus be able to make it to 1900AD. However, the game was really dragging; due to a lot of culture scaling with # of cities (corporations and culture buildings) I had crammed filler cities everywhere, and each turn it felt like half of them finished a build requiring a new one. The other possible mistake I made was accepting Pacal as a voluntary vassal; at first I had forgotten that it would add to my domination scores. Then I assumed I would be able to stop sharing his religion temporarily to get him to break free, but I couldn't find any way to knock him below Friendly! This might have been possible by repeatedly declaring wars on AI's he was on good terms with (but not taking any of their land) but I decided that would be too risky, and might get completely balanced out by additional "mutual military struggle". However, I got some big research help from him and was able to demand a nice pile of corporation resources so all in all it might have been an even trade.


My pregame plan, with some corrections I discovered along the way:
How to maximize beakers+culture?

Science multipliers - up to 100% normal buildings, andother 100 in Oxford city (whoops! never built a single university!), 50% where I have academies.
Culture - 100% for Free Speech (see below), 50% for broadcast tower/eiffel tower, 50% for each cathedral. Culture clearly wins hands down, so slider will be at 100% culture on that turn. Obviously save up cash to allow that.

Tile improvements:
Assume avg multipliers 25%sci (turns out I built only 4 obs, no unis the whole game!), 200%culture (free speech, Eiffel, one catherdral), 100% hammer
Artist, with representation and sistine, 4+6->5+18=23
Normal (fin) grass town 9->27
plains/grass hill town: 31/29 (extra hammer)
grass windmills (with enviro) 3h6c->24
grass windmils on rivers - 3h7c ->29 (assuming the city has a dike)
Interesting - cottages on hills much better than windmills, but during 35 turns of maturation lack of food is bad. So I stick with windmills on the hills.
Essentially, this means the developed towns and windmills get worked, every other tile, except for some good special resources, turns into artist (I allowed food deficits as long as it's not so severe that the pop will decrease in a single turn). One area I did pretty poorly in was windmills - I didn't really realize it until I was microing each city's tiles the scoring turn, but I had a lot of mines that weren't converted yet.

Of course, on scoring turn set all cities to building either research or culture(since building gets your hammer multipliers instead of beaker/gold/culture, doesn't matter which).

Corporations: Cereal vs. Sushi - hard to say; extra culture of Sushi is probably a winner unless resource amounts are way imbalanced (this was not the case, so Sushi it was). Definitely want the food one ASAP so all the food can be translated into extra specialists and developed cottages. After looking at the other bonuses and considering what I was likely to have available, Creative Constructions was a clear 2nd priority, followed by AlumCo and CivJewelers. It turns out that Alum was more helpful than CivJewelrs because it fully synergizes with CreCon and I could only get 4 total jewel resources. However, both of those came too late to spread much.

What else?
Civics - Free speech for culture multiplier + town bonus.
Rep for whatever extra specialists I can run (artists with 1 beaker/4 cult will be best since culture mults are higher than science and highest base anyways)
Caste System - IIRC theatres allow 2 artists and that's basically it (was wrong, broadcast towers allow some, but I still would need caste system to get anywhere near).
Initially I though Free Market - can't use SP since I want corps - but eventually went for Enviro for the windmill commerce bonus. Over the long run that would lose out bigtime to my extensive corporation fees, but for one turn it was better than the extra trade route and, I think, better than an extra Artist from Mercantilism.
Definitely want a state religion for sistine bonus but religious civic on max turn shouldn't matter. (Not surprisingly, I was in OR most of the game to spread religions around).

Other things to watch -
Pregame I intended to finish as many culture producing buildings by 900AD (finding right balance with long-term empire growth likely to be tricky). Since I'm creative I should have lots of libs and theatres. Here was what I had done by then:


Well, I did get a nice stack of those cheap culture buildings, but at the time I didn't realize just how little it would mean next to the final total. Also, since I scored myself 1750AD, a good number of those didn't double.

Spread religions for max cathedrals - did fairly well here, but the failure chances and limit of 3 missionaries makes it difficult. I made an effort to build a lot of state religion monasteries before obsoletion due to the Sistine bonus, then discovered that they keep their 2 base culture but not the 5 extra after Sci Method.

Obviously, a big an empire as possible to control max resources for corporations, and cities crammed in as closely as possible since so much scales by city, not by tile. I didn't realize the latter until I already had around 10 cities.

Wonders to prioritize -
Statue for extra specialists (assuming I have a good-sized continent for it to work well)
Sistine Chapel (big culture bonus for specialists and state religion buildings)
Eiffel (not necessary but convenient as I will want the broadcast towers everywhere)
U Sankore
Spiral Minaret (No effect on the final scoring, but with all the state religion buildings I was going after was a clear good choice. Pacal was nice enough to build the AP and be the right religion for me to take advantage of that as well.)

Alright, enough talk. Time to show an actual game!

[timmy827]

Settle in place, go mining->BW first. I decide to not pursue early religions in hopes of being able to pick them up later, this is kind of a gamble and could backfire if most of them get founded on other continents. However, this fractal turns out to be a pangaea and I do eventually get all of the religions.

Upon meeting Joao early I make a vow to make him miserable as much as possible to add some historical flavor, however other things get in the way the whole game and I never do war against him. In the late game his border cities are half-suffocated by my culture but I never manage to flip any.

1st settler goes 1S of the cow on the desert tile. This eventually becomes my heroic epic site.

Well, I got "in the zone" and found myself at 800BC. I have done Alpha and am doing some backfill trades. Here's a shot of my empire, I have a 6th city about to be founded to get pigs and stone on the coast (also sealing in Hammy). Plan is to finish Calendar (have 3 happy resources already that can be activated then) allowing my cities to grow while pumping cats and jumbos to knock some heads around.



I continue expanding and Ragnar declares war on me, which is a bit scary as I have no more than one unit per city. Luckily his stack is a joke - 1 sword, 1 chariot, 2 archers; he goes for my new city nearest him which has an axe and is able to whip an archer. Round one ends with one archer on each side, but his has 2.3/3 and mine 0.3/3
However, he has no backup and I am able to retake the city with a sword next turn and garrison it well before he makes any other moves. Right around this time I finish Construction then HBR and start churning out cats and phants. I sign ceasefire after taking Uppsala in hopes that he will reduce building units.

During work (is it a bad thing that I consider Dutch Masters to be a more interesting intellectual topic than my work?) I realize that I've overlooked a key part of maximization strategy - lots of densely packed cities! A lot of culture scales per city (each building, trade routes, corporations and artists from them) so that will be on my list.

I redeclare on Ragnar in 275AD. I get a HUGE stroke of good luck-I get to his capital to find a wall in my way and only one catapult on my side. Next turn is a slave revolt! It doesn't injure the units but kills all that culture defense; I romp and trade my lone catapult for 8 of ragnars units and his capital.



Sign peace after reducing Raggy to one city (I get marble here, very cool). There's still some open land that Boudica is ignoring while she sends 7 units all the way through my empire to attack Hammy - ouch, that should just not be allowed in the AI programming.


Also one of Joao's cities falls to the barbs - I think they spawned from the event; I haven't seen a single barb unit in my territory ever this game and most of the space is filled.

After this I halt expansion for a while to focus on getting theatres and libs before 900AD. I build a late pyramids and the godly Mausoleum during this time as well. I had been Jewish when both Hammy (founder) and Joao had been, but Joao converts to Buddhism (founded by Pacal) and I do to. This secures my eastern and souther neighbors, and I go to initially phony war with Hammy to placate Boudica (Hindu) as well. Since he doesn't have much land I resolve to kill him. It takes a while to train new units and move my anti-viking army all the way north. I capture Akkad in 980AD and Babylon in 1030AD, then pause as he has just gotten longbows. He's quite crippled but I wait quite a while to finish him (until Cannon) which may have been a mistake. Babylon is the only holy city I had the whole game and was the obvious choice for Wall Street and corporate HQ's, by leaving Hammy alive his former capital was culturally choked and stuck at size 4/5. If I finished him earlier I could've been in much better shape to get all the gold multipliers in Babylon quickly. However, I was able to extort Compass from him for peace - normally not a priority but here it allowed me to bulb Liberalism almost completely with a GS.

This whole time I've gone without a GP farm and quickly build one out of nearly nothing - I find a three food bonus site north of the Viking capital. I am able to chop and whip granary, lighthouse, library, and Nat'l Epic then use a GE to build the great library. It's scary how quickly I went from a settler to an operational specialist farm. I start planning at this point how to allocate GP for corporations and golden ages; I wind up saving some for corps for a LOOONG time (always fearful that if I use, say, an artist for a golden age I'll lose the dice rolls and never get another). Fortunately my luck is good and I am eventually able to found each of the four corps as I soon as I get the needed tech.

1100AD - Sistine done in capital, start Taj. A GS is born and bulbs PP to a turn of completion. I divert research to Optics after this because I'm going to finish constitution and lib a few turns before the Taj and I'm not going to adopt those civics until golden age.

1170AD - Pacal offers vassalization and I accept. It brings him to friendly, and I correctly deduce that since he is still unwilling to trade me theology (and Asoka is) that Pacal will build the AP. With him auto-voting for me, I am able to keep the chair the whole game and thus avoid any trouble from resolutions as well as getting the AP hammer religious building bonus.
Lib->Dem in 1200, Taj in 1210.

[timmy827]

By 1490 Hammy is gone; I'm at 54 % of land (with Pacal) and so I need to be very conservative in my future conquests. (I also haven't yet deployed settlers on the 2 islands I've found as they are waiting for work boats to arrive). Delhi looks really good with 3 sushi resources, there's also a Celtic city on my border that could potentially get me 2 copper and 1 stone (both for Creative Constructions). That might be all I can handle; I really don't have a good feel for how much all the culture the corps are going to spit out will further expand my borders. That is more or less what I conquer by the end of the game; however Delhi is no use - even adding in the culture corps there's just not enough time to counter all of Asoka's previous culture. It is able to get me one seafood temporaily, however it revolts frequently and I do not have that resource on the scoring turn.

I won't go into the details of the wars against Boudica and Ragnar (he had vassaled, she DoW'd) or Asoka (later on I blitz Delhi from the sea just before he gets to Rifling). Except for a bit of a rant against the AI:
I had a decent little army in Nidaros waiting for a chance to wipe out Ragnar if he stopped being a vassal, and thinking that Ragnar had nothing to attack with (remember that he's been stuck with one city for ages) I moved all but one out towards Boudica (this was a couple turns into the war). Next turn I get a total heart attack:



This is the AI at its absolute worst. I had noticed in Epic 14 that it has a problem with sieges and is too obsessed with bombing all defenses; at least once in that game I faced a situation where the AI could have taken a city of mine had it just attacked ASAP but the 4 turns of bombardment gave me plenty of time to move in reinforcements. Well the situation here was that phenomenon carried to absurd proportions. As you can see, I had a single AXEMAN for crying out loud; all of those chariots could have attacked the turn they entered my borders and he surely would've taken the city with the loss of maybe one. But they don't because the AI waits until all units in the stack can act. I of course rushbuy a pike and upgrade the axe to a mace, on Ragnar's turn he suicides one chariot (this alone is a huge AI problem, I can't understand why they can't program it to either attack with everything in a stack or nothing) and bombards, subsequent turns he keeps pecking away defenses 8% at a time. I show up outside his only city with 4 cannons and 3 elephants - it has a castle but the cannons can ignore that - win, and Ragnar's chariot horde goes poof. I take the copper/stone city from Boudica a few turns later once my army gets in position; she's unwilling to talk so I take one more city, force peace, then gift it back.

I have founded sushi and rushbuy the first executive to start the spread (Babylon still has to finish its bank and grocer, let alone Wall Street!). Then in 1560 I get another gamechanging event:


Now this is late! As you can see my vassal will trade me rifling soon and RR is my next target after Communism (pushing to Combustion for the corporation). However I take the time to check out the reward - and with the Taj I get a golden age! Yeah, I think this is worth delaying those techs for, and I am able to get a full set of muskets in 2 turns, only needing one rushbuy.

(As an aside - what the heck were the designers thinking? One BTS-overpowered golden age from the Taj isn't enough, so we'll give you a chance for another? Craziness.)

So the rest of the game is really pretty dull, having made the transition from an easy game with a storng, then dominant position, to total score milking. I think I got up to 44 cities. There's a lot of missionary and corp spread. I'll cut to the end:

[timmy827]

Scoring turn, 1750: I do get Sushi and CreCon almost everywhere; I needed just a couple more turns to move executives around and airlift them to the islands. AlumCo is just starting to get established and it's sad that I don't have it everywhere. Besides the 15 beakers for 5 coals, it also counts as 5 extra aluminums giving +15 culture to CreCon! I wasn't sure what was going to happen until I founded it; I was expecting either no benefit from the aluminum or maybe 1 extra, not an extra one per! Civ Jewelers was just founded and as I only have enough resources for 16 culture from it, it clearly loses to AlumCo and that's what I focused on spreading as much as I could.

Final civics (again): Rep/FS/Caste/Enviro/Org Rel.
Envrio + spreading corps a ton to cities without courthouses does a number on my finances; after paying the expansion costs I'm going to lose 3500 gold this turn! I have 4500 banked but I was kind of stunned that the cost of the turn was anywhere near it.

The final turn took something around an hour to play. The city micro wasn't too bad, just tedious; after doing a few I got pretty good at quickly spotting which tiles should be worked and then just turn everyone else into artists (one annoying thing is that riverside towns produced 10c but showed up as just one $ bag, so it was easy at first to mistakenly think they'd be better off as artists). Only in Nidaros did I have to hold off on artists because of food shortage (it was way under 1/2 full, did some random event drain the food or blow the granary? Was I just being weedy and forgot to build one?). Occasionally I did a little bit of extra arranging to give good tiles to cities with more cathedrals, or make sure that a city with a dike was working a riverside tile. The tricky part of the turn was coordinating all of my executives, trying to get the corps in as many places as possible that turn - if the scoring turn were just a couple later I would have had the big two in each city and not had to worry.

Score: 4654 science + 31811 culture = 36465 points.

No doubt there could have been substantial improvement if I did not win early; still had a lot of hills to windmill, cottages to mature, 2 more corps to spread completely, additional religion spread/cathedrals, and more city growth to allow more artists. Although those last turns were real slow; in addition to late game drag I was having a lot of crash problems; very disheartening since previously I've only run into them on larger than standard maps. The MemSaver mostly fixed it, but for an RB game its problematic as the inability to alt-tab makes writing notes for the report and taking screenshots a real pain. If it was possible to write a simple AI script (windmill everything, keep pumping missionaries and executives, wake me up if one of the AI's is crazy enough to declare on me, etc.) this would've been a good case to do so.

Well, it was an interesting idea. Since it was a gentle adventure, I'm not going to complain about things being easy. However, I think an ending date of 1700 would've been better, both to match the historical duration of the Dutch peak and to force some more choices on the player. With that date, some endgame drag would've been avoided, and there would have been tradeoffs like religion spread vs. corp spread, teching vs. founding as many cities as possible, etc. With this 1900AD deadline, good players will be able to have their cake and eat it on all of these issues. However, it will be interesting to see how others do. Even with agreement on overall strategy, which I think I am almost totally correct (although didn't get to fully implement it), games could go drastically differently; starting in the middle of the map there were a lot of choices as to which way to expand. For me Ragnar's declaration was a great blessing as I did not only take his land but was opened to the big gap between him and Boudica at a time when I was out of room to expand peacefully in my local neighborhood.

Finally, just to show how much milking was involved:





These are distorted by my final GA, but still pretty amazing. First time I've gotten to 100 million people.

[LKendter]

1st settler goes 1S of the cow on the desert tile. This eventually becomes my heroic epic site.

Interesting that you picked the exact same spot I did.

Besides the 15 beakers for 5 coals, it also counts as 5 extra aluminums giving +15 culture to CreCon!

That was a good catch! I missed this one totally. That alone would have been good for several thousand points to my score.

[Sullla]

Well, it was an interesting idea. Since it was a gentle adventure, I'm not going to complain about things being easy. However, I think an ending date of 1700 would've been better, both to match the historical duration of the Dutch peak and to force some more choices on the player. With that date, some endgame drag would've been avoided, and there would have been tradeoffs like religion spread vs. corp spread, teching vs. founding as many cities as possible, etc. With this 1900AD deadline, good players will be able to have their cake and eat it on all of these issues.

You're absolutely correct. Of course, the intended audience of this game was non-expert players, which is why it was a Gentle Adventure. I think we can safely put you in the "Veteran" scoring category for this one.

For a standard game, the ending date would have been sooner (probably 1750 or 1800) and the difficulty would have been higher.

[Muaziz]

I second the motion that a faster end date would have required a lot more strategy in terms of how to really maximize culture. I think 1700 AD would have been a little too soon, but certainly not later than 1800. Cutting 50 turns off of my game would have forced some interesting choices. And saved me a lot of missionary nightmares...

[T-hawk]

Well done. Yes, the overall strategy was correct (and really intuitively obvious to think of) - build densely, conquer to just under the domination limit, spread religions and cultural corporations. I also ran into the problem of the culture zooming up to the domination limit faster than anticipated, though not to the same degree you did. 70 more turns and you surely would have passed my culture.

(one annoying thing is that riverside towns produced 10c but showed up as just one $ bag, so it was easy at first to mistakenly think they'd be better off as artists)

+1, I spent much time dealing with that too...

still had a lot of hills to windmill,

I did the same thing, windmilling plains hills since that's the most commerce available from the tile, but I think it turned out to be irrelevant in the end. Even 1 hammer plus Enviro-boosted 6 commerce from the tile is inferior to just hiring an artist instead, assuming Representation and Sistine.

AlumCo is just starting to get established and it's sad that I don't have it everywhere. Besides the 15 beakers for 5 coals, it also counts as 5 extra aluminums giving +15 culture to CreCon! I wasn't sure what was going to happen until I founded it; I was expecting either no benefit from the aluminum or maybe 1 extra, not an extra one per!

Is that how that works? I saw the synergy that AlumCo could provide aluminum for Creative Con, but didn't bother with the effort for just +3 culture per city. It's one aluminum per coal, making it superior to Civ Jewelers here? Wow, I never thought of that, I never bothered with AlumCo at all. Good thinking!

[timmy827]

Well done. Yes, the overall strategy was correct (and really intuitively obvious to think of) - build densely, conquer to just under the domination limit, spread religions and cultural corporations.

It would be interesting to see how I would have settled if I had realized the importance of density right away instead of after my first 8-10 cities.

I did the same thing, windmilling plains hills since that's the most commerce available from the tile, but I think it turned out to be irrelevant in the end. Even 1 hammer plus Enviro-boosted 6 commerce from the tile is inferior to just hiring an artist instead, assuming Representation and Sistine.

Depends...to refresh, base yield from windmill in golden age is 3/4h (grass/plains) and 6c. Artist, of course, is 4sci6cult. So the culture multiplier in the city doesn't matter in this case. Assuming a normal city with full multipliers (double hammer and beakers each, no IW, Oxford, Academy) artist beats grass hill and ties plains. But if those hills are riverside, there's an extra 1c and likely 1h which pushes river windmills over the top.

Is that how that works? I saw the synergy that AlumCo could provide aluminum for Creative Con, but didn't bother with the effort for just +3 culture per city. It's one aluminum per coal, making it superior to Civ Jewelers here? Wow, I never thought of that, I never bothered with AlumCo at all. Good thinking!

Well, more like a lucky side effect - I wanted AlumCo just for the beakers it provided; not a high priority as the other three corps but well worth an extra great scientist that I had lying around. Wasn't until after I started spreading it that I got curious and saw what it did in relation to CreCon.