Ruff_Hi's Antics

All Happiness is the Release of Internal Pressure

A farm until you drop and then farm some more game played on a rainforest (jungle!) map. I also played this game with the latest BUG mod - yes, more BUG testing - so it is only a shadow report.

I've read some of the reports already (after I finished the game) and I will be making some comments on similarities and differences. I approached this game in 5 phases ...

• Settle 3 or 4 cities and review
• Phase 1 Expansion
• Tech like crazy
• Phase 2 Expansion
• Win Diplomatically

Obviously, with no army and having to win diplomatically, you need to be an AI suck up and just give in to the pesky demands.

I settled on the spot and my warrior headed East. Tech was set to hunting and build to worker. I would have enough time to tech Animal Husbandry by the time the worker needed the tech. On Turn 1, I got the earliest non-event event that this game could give me ... a forest growth at the capital!

pic 0003

How cool is that - an extra hammer.

I met the following:

• Turn 27 - Hammurabi
• Turn 41 - Ragnar
• Turn 47 - Victoria
• Turn 52 - Willem van Oranje
• Turn 60 - Peter
• Turn 64 - Cyrus

The basic layout was me in the Top North, Hammurabi immediately South of me, with RAgnar to his South East. Victoria was to my West behind a little lake and Cyrus was further West of her. Willem was in the middle bottom (probably slightly West of center) and Peter was further West of him. I had pretty good hut luck (no where need as good as T-Hawk) and only had to delete 1 warrior due to the military cap. I whipped a library with the overflow going into my first Settler. I'd read our in poly game how it was possible to grow your city while you were building a settler and I was going to try that in this game - the double whip of the library resulted in ... 0022 I was pretty happy with that. My first settler went to the Horse site (1W of the Horses) and my second settler went to the Elephant site (1NW of the Northern Elephant). From what I have seen of the reports, at least 2 others have identical city placement for their first 2 cities. My forth city was 1 North of the Western rice - again, another popular city site - this city was my missionary pump - I came pretty close to auto-starting the missionaries but that would have auto-started my workers to so I just had to settle with pressing 'R' to issue instructions to the missionaries (set and forget). 0025 How did I build the pyramids? T-Hawk rushed his with an Engineer. Some people just built them the very slow way. In other games it is possible to build them out of wood (ie chopping). In this game, I build them from spare body parts (whipping) and food. I would put 1 or 2 turns of production into a worker and then double whip them with the overflow going into the Pyramids. This gives me the hammers from the 'body parts'. Also, food is converted into hammers when building workers or settlers so you get hammer overflow. My capital was generating 14 extra food ... these turned into 14 overflow hammers - these overflow hammers also went into the Pyramids. I would then slow build them while growing my capital back and then repeat. I completed the Pyramids on Turn 104 (300BC). Not bad. 0055 In this pic, you can see that I have dot mapped the area between Hammurbi and myself. I was rushing settlers into the jungle to those spots and also sending road crew workers along. The main objective was to land the cities ASAP. Firstly, to block Hammurbi off from the North East (huge mountain range to the East totally blocked it off) but also to get the cities in place before I finished the Hanging Gardens in my Elephant wonder hammer heavy (!) city. You will also notice some additional information in the scoreboard.

• The '!' beside Hammurbi indicates that he will not talk to me. I think that was due to me closing borders with him when another AI asked me to - that was a pretty easy decision with him being Budda and everyone else being Hindo (Ragnar converted to Hindo about 20 turns after this screenshot
• the green '+4' is my score delta - it has gone up 4 points from the start of the prior turn
• The 0.5 with the strong arm represents my strength v the AIs (<1 - they are stronger is my preferred display option)
• a smilie for attitude
• the number right at the end is the number of cities that each AI has - a very useful guide to tell you when you are falling behind

There are others that come and go ... war and peace treaty indicators, WHEOOHs indicator, vassal / master, etc.

Another BUG improvement is the F7 - Religious Advisor. There were a bunch of things that I disliked about the default screen (difficult to tell if a city is missing a particular religion, cannot tell if a city is missing a temple or monestary, how many temples you have, how many missionaries you have, etc). As such, BUG has provided this ...

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