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!