Andy's Game 1

Alright!  I've unsuccessfully attempted to write about three games, so I'm gonna do it a bit different to start getting some content out there!

GAME 1:  NAPOLEON CITY OF LIGHTS

Started as tradition, not sure what the turn count is at this point, but I just got sistine chapel (NOT IN PARIS DOH!) and the world congress has voted in arts funding.  I've signed open borders with every player, I'm paying 1-2 gold a turn per, but the bump to tourism is nice!

Ramses has a good hold on the game, and the Shoshone are hated by all (I declared friendship with them, which didn't help my diplomatic standing).  I'm targeting ramses with my tourism, I've got open borders and a trade route.

I founded protestantism with mount uluguru and natural worship (2 food, +10 faith).  I got cathedrals, which I'm really impressed with.  I enhanced to get Religious Art +5 culture and tourism from the HERM.  Paris is rushing uffizi as we speak and it will produce the herm right after.  I'm about to get 33% culture in cities with wonders, so things are looking really good!

I have returned to my love of tradition with insular trade routes and high road connection values.  I'm totally self sufficient at about +60g a turn.

Stay tuned for pics, updates, and live action I AM H'AMPEROR!!!

Day 2

Captain's Log stardate 2.  My plots against Ramses were delayed due to a Greek declaration of war!!! Needless to say the Greeks have been crushed, and Coutume de Paris is well entrenched. I'm excited to say some rather risque Greek art was captured in the genocide, and France has entered a deep confusion.  The world community was none to pleased with my extinction of the greeks, spy networks are relaying that it could have had to do with a widespread seedy underbelly of contraband art

During this time, Catherine and Ramses went to war, but seemingly no lands exchanged hands, both were also at war with England and sad as I am to lose my historical and romantic rival, London was captured with a whimper.

Next on my chopping block is silly silly suleiman because russia declared war on him and I've got the autocracy buff that gives me extra tourism for war-butt-buddies.  My tourism game has kind of fallen off and has been replaced by autocratic destruction of the known universe.  Russia is my kindred spirit, but Ramses still holds the top of the charts!  I've run out of places for French Pop tunes so I'm sending musicians to egypt to keep up my tourism, they're dropping for about 470 a piece +100 every time they spawn from autocracy.  I've got military academies in all four of my original cities, with total war and brandenburg, so my troops are top cheese.  For now i'm reliant on Egyptian trade, but after connecting the subdued Greek empire to my capital, my bottom line is looking very very healthy.  

I'm going to find a way to have my screenshots sync'd to google drive so I can post them.

Day Tricks

Captain's Log stardate 3-Breguol.

Finally, my scheming has landed me the centre of the world stage.  French artillery have pounded their way to thebes.  We lost many men, but Egypt has fallen.  An intense campaign, very tight technologically.  I had to suck some serious Russian dong for oil in order to produce fighters to protect my artillery advance.  Ramses had machine guns, battleships and anti-aircraft guns, so I did not have many turns left before I'd be sunk.  His cities had defenses in the 120-150 range.  If I had not been autocracy with 4 cities with military academies I would've been defeated for sure.  Citadels continue to be my favourite war feature of this expansion.

I've not yet looked in thebes, but I'm certain there were serious wonders present.  I took two Egyptian cities and cleared 1300g for doing so (lady, King Tut is putting my kids through college!).  

Prior to the war with Egypt french engineer Andre de Grosses Boules rushed the Prora launching military France into an age of enlightenment. 

The only remaining cultural challenge will be Pedro, but with Thebes in hand, I cannot imagine him putting up much of a fight.  My musicians are dropping for +100 +670 tourism! And diplomats have permeated his Baltimore-esque administration.  Russia could provide a military challenge, but time will tell.

I'll have some more details and screenshots soon.  Amazing campaign today though, choke-points, fighters,bombers, close tech, citadels, billy-two-willy-arty with range and city siege :O.

Game 2: Pacal Continents

The Settings: Emperor, Continents, Standard Size, Standard Speed

The Strategy: Bri mentioned how good interfaith dialogue was.  I wanted to try going Pacal because he can use Messenger of the Gods (+2 sci per city connection) and his UB (temple +2 faith +2 sci) to build a sprawling empire with lots of science in an unconventional way.  I wanted to use his UA to get an early scientist and focus on great people for a New Deal economy.

The Victory: Technological Victory was achieved in 12 b'ak'tun, 15 k'atun, 9 tun, 13 winal, k 4'in--or more simply, 1924.

Just finishing up the ol' internet here--notice how strong the city defenses are with XCOM garrisons!

Score Screen--as you can see, you don't get a lot of points for early science wins!  =*(

The City: Palenque.  City of Enlightenment.  Settled all of my scientists around it until close to the endgame, I managed to settle 10 of them.  Managed to get it up to 647.5 science--which I'm sure could be beaten handily by someone--the city was only 24 population.  Most of the game I was riding the happiness cap and as you can see there are not a lot of great food resources around Palenque.  Freedom obviously helped with the two specialist enhancers but the city did not have time to grow much at the end of the game. We just started working on the international space station so it would have gone up a tiny bit after that =).

City of Palenque.  If only that mountain were a little closer!

Game Narrative:  Early on I adopted a policy of aggressive expansion.  I realized fairly quickly that I was the only one on the continent and placed my cities in such a way that only 4-5 tiles on the whole continent were not in range of one city or another.  I placed one city inland on a river to get the benefits of gardens for my writer/artist/musician guilds.  At the beginning of the game I concentrated on settling, connecting with roads, and building up faith.  Maya is a very efficient civilization when you have faith and science generated from the same easy building which is constructed in 1/2 the time with the Piety base policy.  

I tried to get to theology early so I could get the Great Mosque.  I ended up getting the Borobodur and the Hagia Sofia, but I missed the Great Mosque.  I did manage to get the enhancer belief that reduces the costs of missionaries, however, and once I had Pagodas all over the empire I put it on auto-purchase missionary for a long time.  I realized this game that the AI does not get upset about you spreading your religion to their cities if you don't actually convert the majority.  As it is in your interest to convert cities with as many followers as possible, you never want to convert cities anyway.  A number of times this game I hit Constantinople, Honolulu, or Marakech with a missionary when they had 18-25 followers of their respective religions, and I think my best hit was a 250 science one on Marakech when I first found him.  For a great length in the middle of the game I was efficiently converting faith to science through this process of buying a missionary for 160 faith and then using him up to generate 200+ science.  If I had managed to get the Great Mosque then this would have improved another ~40-50% with the third conversion, which would have certainly improved the strategy.

Diplomacy-wise, this was a straightforward game.  Monty was on the continent with Napoleon, Elizabeth, and Polynesia and they were content to beat up on him all game.  He was the only one to go Freedom when I did but I was not willing to step in and save him.  The order folks seemed to hate the autocrats more than me so they kept trading with me.  I have never signed so many research agreements in a game, I could not generate enough money to keep it up.  I had rationalism and the porcelain tower for many of them as well so that was a very efficient source of science generation. When I hit the industrial age I cut off missionary production reasoning that I would do better with buying scientists--didn't do any math just took a guess, and it let me put up several of the academies you see above.

Never got my hands dirty with a war and I only managed to grab a few city states here and there.  At the end I mistakenly took Treaty Organization when the intention of building up diplomatic power (I already had all of my spies rigging elections once I managed the Great Firewall in Palenque) before getting Space Procurements.  I didn't realize at the time how close I was (using Hubble Telescope) to finishing the tech tree and could have shaved off a few turns with a better policy choice.

The one danger I knew I would face late game is the Public Opinion.  I decided to build up my culture strongly in the Archaeology era--going into many people's lands to lift an artifact or two.  I experienced some nasty pressure to switch ideologies but it was never enough to knock me off the path.  With many artifacts/great works, the Freedom policy Creative Expression meant my culture was being generated at a sufficient rate to resist enemy tourism--the enemies also spent too much time at war to exert a lot of pressure.

Commentary:  This game made me realize how much of the weakness in my regular game is the failure to accord science the priority it deserves.  I was able to DESTROY the AI on tech and was I think 10 techs ahead at the last count.  Usually I am not able to catch/surpass the AI until very late in the game when all the exponential investments I make early have paid off.  This game I was never behind the AI in tech and managed a serious lead fairly early on.  I often left science to its own devices since it was based on population and there are other limits to your population that you need to manage--but that's not the right approach.  Science should be very highly valued and sought after as it was in Civ 4.  An obvious statement but one that I have been ignoring for too long!

So perfect!

Well done!  It's perfect! So excited to train Venice to the top!!!

Game 1: Napoleon Emperor Continents Plus

The Settings: Emperor, Continents Plus, Standard Size

The Strategy: So I was looking at the bonuses for Hotels and Airports and realized that most of it came from World Wonders and terrain.  I thought that anyone who can generate culture from terrain stands a good chance of winning a cultural victory because of this tourism conversion, and the Chateau is so excellent for culture generation that France is a good choice.  I thought the civ ability was kind of week (double theme bonus in capital) but the chateau more than made up for it.

The Victory:  This was a cultural victory achieved in 1930.

Here is the victory screen, cultural win achieved in 1930--1032 culture per turn and 526 tourism.

What I really liked about this game was the relatively low tech--no airports, no internet.  Most of it done without even hotels.  France is powerful!

The City: The winning city this game was Paris itself without a doubt--it generated the majority of my tourism and a tremendous amount of culture as well.  With the various chateaus it generated good money as well.  The trick with this city was how to get the wonders built in it--and for that I used mostly engineers purchased via faith.  The tourism with Aesthetics and the French civ ability also unlocked an achievement to earn the full +16 theming bonus from the Louvre.

The City of Paris on the winning turn.  Faith to engineers to wonders really did well this game.

Comments: Learned a few things this game.  First of all, that faith is still very good.  I have ignored it in many of my games recently and this game brought it back in a big way.  When I got the formation belief for sacred sites (+2 toursim per faith-produced building) my tourism jumped from +14 to +42 very early in the game.  This means I whittled down their resistance early and was able to crush them when things got rolling with Aesthetics and Archaeology.  Used faith for pagodas and cathedrals as well as Messiah.  Founding belief was Pilgrimage to get +2 faith per foreign city following it.  I strongly recommend Pilgrimage if you're interested in spreading your religion--especially early on it's very strong.

Game Narrative:  Early on I just tried to expand and keep my neighbor to the North (Shoshone) happy.  Our empires were separated by mountains with just a few mountain passes and I was able to use an archer (hut-upgraded from a scout) to block his settlers coming my way until I was happy with the land I had.  Crucially, the Shoshone did not found a religion so they adopted Catholicism which enhanced our relationship and generated a lot of faith for me from Pilgrimage.

In the South you had Shaka, Ahmad al-Mansur, and Washington.  I managed to spread Catholicism to Shaka and Washington--but then Ahmad founded Islam and Washington founded Buddhism and for the most part I could not get through that.  I started using my faith instead for prophets, reasoning that if you're going to finish the Piety tree (which I was determined to do--and later was glad I did), you'd better have a lot of holy sites.  I did not really spread my religion much after that.

I found this game that the AI is more than happy to stay friends with you as long as there is someone in the game they can all gang up on.  In this game that was Shaka--but despite angering the whole continent and numerous wars, Shaka came out on top and completely crushed Ahmad--this was a good thing as Ahmad was my #1 competitor for points. At this point I got into a war with my allies Shoshone and America to fight Shaka that lasted on and off until the end of the game.  I took Marakech and used an Inquisitor to remove his holy city and gradually took some of Shaka's land and pushed my religion further.  Amazingly, Shaka had enough Impi do kill many of my musketeers and very nearly retook Marakech after I overreached.

Towards the end of the game I used faith (with tradition and aesthetics) to get engineers and the right kind of culture great people to both build and theme the great wonders.  I only missed the Globe Theatre I think, but I still managed to found the world congress and eventually get Catholicism promoted to the world religion, which was hugely beneficial for Paris.  The Shoshone got the forbidden palace which made it extra good to be his ally--when I did not have enough votes to be host a second time I made sure he was host and he actually proposed the world religion and voted it through.