Ruff_Hi's Antics

All Happiness is the Release of Internal Pressure

While the people of Realms Beyond struggle through a very large Epic, T-Hawk released what should be a short blast of a game. Always Peace, no Barbarians, no tech trading, permanent Golden Age, no cities on other land masses with victory types of space of diplo. I decided to aim for space so it was a pure builder game with an initial focus on commerce and then hammers.

T-Hawk also left us some nice in-game little puzzles ...

The stone and marble you can see are the only ones available to us. The question is, how to get them connected to cities. T-Hawk (or the map script) left them behind mountains. This makes it difficult (actually, impossible) to road to the cities without using the coastal trade networks. There has been some discussion on the CFC boards about connecting these types of resouces (mainly in the 'funny screenshot' thread of all places). Putting a quarry down and then roading doesn't work - roads by themselves don't connect to the coastal network. Putting a city on one of the resources will work - you get automatic connection when you found on resouces and cities also tie into the coastal network. The downside of using a city is that I will only be able to hook up 1 of the 2 resources.

The answer I used was to put down the city (see pic below) and then putting a fort on both resources. This meant building a ferry (galley) for the workers as well as teching to mathematics (to open forts).

T34 (1960BC) yields the Oracle / Civil Service sling and sets my capital up for a monster city - not a lot of cottageable land, but plenty of opportunity to run specialists. My capital pumped out a settler or two and then my other cities took over the expansion role ... allowing my capital to chase wonders (see page 2). The Great People that I generated were used sparingly ... Priest for Shrine, Scientists for Academies (yes, lots of academies), 2 set aside for corporations and then all others settled - ones that generated money went into my Shrine city - the others settled in my capital (including 3 Great Engineers - there really is no need to rush wonders when you have a capital like this and are working in a Golden Age).

Here are my cities on the island. I took a fair bit of time dot mapping it and wasn't that fazed by putting down cities that would only have 4 or 5 unique tiles (corporations would help these cities).

This city would be a moderate commerce city (the gems pop helped) but it wouldn't amount to much by way of production if it wasn't for corporations ...

The tech that opens up TGD also opens up hydro dams. It seems that I always build a hydro dam (to provide power) and then have that city build the TGD. I've always wondered if this makes any sense. With my capital, the equation is ...

• Base Hammers = 80
• Multipliers = +50% + 25% + 50%
• Hydro = 134 Hammers / 1 turn
• TDG = 1172 Hammers / 7 turns

Adding a hydro dam to my capital changes it to ...

• Base Hammers = 80
• Multipliers = +50% + 50% + 50%
• TDG = 1172 Hammers / 6 turns

So, not a lot of benefit from building a Hydro dam then.

I launched on T175 (1750AD) and won on T182 (1785AD).