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Adventure Fifty-six: Santa's Workshop

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hanging-gardens.jpg - 30kbHere's the usual 1 AD overview. More wonders under construction, including the Pyramids, and Hanging Gardens just completed with some typical Industrious mega hammerage. I'm researching Horseback Riding, which is pretty useless -- except that Gandhi shows 3 turns away from it, so this lets me get an extra tech gift point cheap.

The research visibility then showed Gandhi going for Music, so I swooped in there. Of course that meant a Golden Age and all the civic swaps I'd been delaying in Representation, Bureaucracy, and Org Rel.

Great Person #2 came presently as a Merchant (Great Lighthouse) who went for a $1500 trade mission (remember that's 2500+ beakers via skew and the 20% prereq bonuses, way better than lightbulbing.) This cash blasted me through Education in 6 turns during the GA.

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That's an interesting place for Taoism. I wouldn't use it at all, instead taking Hinduism that Gandhi founded and two other civs adopted. This also shows Moai Statues at its best, turning a useless tiny island into a monster powerhouse. (Building Moai at North Pole had been a tempting option, but that city didn't need it and it'd have higher leverage on some island.)


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Here's a look at how to work the tech trades for maximum scenario score. Washington is 2 turns from Philosophy. I traded it to him, and had to give him Metal Casting too, otherwise he would have been able to trade Philo for MC and I'd lose out on both sides of that tech gift. So in general, whenever I swapped a tech, I had to look if anybody else had it on their "wish list". If so, I'd have to figure out the possible trades, and if any existed, sabotage it by replacing half of the would-be AI-AI exchange with my own gift. It was possible for this to chain-reaction into several gifts from one original AI near-research... I didn't pay perfect attention and probably did miss out on a few scenario points to AI-AI trades.

Throughout the whole game, Mansa Musa was not uncharacteristically the tech leader besides myself. Of course I closely watched his research. When he came close to a tech I didn't have, it was an ongoing question whether to jump in ahead of him (to get score for trading it to him), or instead to let him trade it TO me in order to spread it around more myself. I mostly leaned towards the latter, except for first-researcher bonuses, Optics for circumnavigation and later the Communism Great Spy. Mansa did feed me around six or seven techs throughout the game.

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Moving along quickly (because the game did), here's my midrange goal, Liberalism to Democracy. We know that's always great for a space race, and should be even more so here with Democracy operating not as a side tech but instead just as pointworthy as anything else.

I'd also moved my Palace to Vancouver to leverage Bureaucracy better. I'm not sure if this made back the hammer cost of the Palace, but couldn't have hurt. It did dovetail with an Academy in Vancouver, which could be much more productive here than in the tundra.

The next strategic fork was the usual, Communism or Corporations? Well, the F2 screen showed my civ was somehow paying just 38 distance maintenance in all. Not much for State Property to save there, so I guess it's gotta be good old Sid's Sushi. The food wouldn't go crazy on specialists, but it would enable dumping farms and windmills and going more cottages everywhere. I was also definitely locked into Representation (not Universal Suffrage) thanks to the Statue of Liberty and also the Salon UB, so top-end specialists would be acceptable.


I'll skip over a lot of detail, there's not much interesting about a Monarch-level peaceful comp stomp. Sid's Sushi came sometime around 900 AD. I popped the 2-man Golden Age to spend 11 turns in Universal Suffrage for executive rushing/building (town hammers too), Free Market, and Free Religion (straight research now more important than buildings, especially when we're building executives instead.)

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And in a crazy stroke of luck, I spawned a Great Engineer from my Pyramids/Hanging Gardens city literally on the same turn as Railroad was discovered. There's Mining Inc.

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As I often do in peaceful games with a tech lead, I built a couple Privateers to go mess around for entertainment. This was the most successful one I've ever had, racking up enough experience against those zergs of triremes to spawn a Great General all by himself. Just for kicks I attached the GG to that same unit -- bet you probably haven't seen a Combat 6 Privateer before. eek.gif - 2kb (That spot was also pretty lucrative -- if the privateer blockaded two tiles west of San Francisco, he would cover all four cities and earn 8-12 gold each turn!)

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