This Monarch difficult adventure (more details are here at Realms Beyond) sponsored by Sullla is all about speed with the aim to minimize game play time. This means that I will need to minimize human interaction with the game (build queues, automate as much as possible, etc). A cultural victory (minimal unit movement) also will help with this aim. BTW: As I have limited civ4 time, I played this game with the latest BUG mod installed for BUG testing purposes and so this game is a shadow game.
So, I settle in place, send my warrior out scouting (pop 2 scouts from huts which really helps in meeting people) and set to research growth techs. I'll grab some religion later. As it turned out, starting next to Isabella insured that her major religion would spread to me and I ended the game with 4 religions (Budda, Conf, Toa and Islam - the last 3 self teched).
My first city went West to grab the stone so that I could build stonehenge, the Wall and the Pyramids. This city turned into a hammer power house and I put it on a constant wonder build. I also used this city as my 2nd Legendary city powered by wonder culture - it ended up being the 3rd city to Legendary status. My other cities (for the minimum cultural victory target of 9) were scattered to gather resources (South for Deer, Marble, Iron, Cow: East for pig; North for dye, gold, gems; etc).
From there it was just a matter of teching concentrating on the remaining religious techs, building wonders for the cultural benefit and setting up a 3rd city for legendary status - selected my city north with the dye and lots of grassland - cottaged it up nicely. It also got the Hermatage for the +100% culture benefit.
Here is my hammer-wonder city that I converted to cottage domination to ramp up the culture. It is 5 turns from Legendary status.
5 turns later, I won.
For those interested, the main part of BUG that I was testing is the mod of the victory screen. I'm going to play on with this game (wipe out France to start with and maybe America) and then tech to space. We're also working on the 'members' tab to list all AIs sorted by their status, show their attitudes to the two candidates and put in some code to 'estimate' how they will vote.
And my victory date ...
