Adventure Forty-three: An Otherworldly Experience

Here's another reason to have built the Apostolic Palace in a culture game. This resolution can short-circuit the flip process and yoink a city as soon as your culture in it goes over 50%. You even keep culture buildings like temples when it gets reassigned. The timing was awkward, since it meant that Carib likely would become the Islam holy city, but somehow Islam defied the odds and landed in Madrid instead.

Also notice that Carib itself is already the Jewish holy city. Now I control six holy cities. That's a record. And Carib contains Buddhism, so now I have a culture victory going with all seven religions, which I think is also a first.

I've gotten very used to playing without the statistics history graphs available. It seems like I always find something useful to do with the trickle of EP from the palace and courthouses. This game held true to that, when I spy-bonked Hannibal into Confucianism. Sounds good to me to have a religious buddy.

I had traded Divine Right to Hannibal for something, and he actually beat me to Spiral Minaret. No great loss. The refund is as good as several dozen turns of the wonder. And I already almost can't spend cash, with two shrines and the settled artists propping up my expenses.

I narrowly beat Hannibal to Economics, in part by paying him to adopt Caste System just to inflict a turn of anarchy. It was worth the research for both Free Market and for favorite-civic with Hannibal getting him to Friendly. Then I stopped trying to research and cut to 100% culture slider. My civilization kept researching anyway even at 0%, thanks to Sankore, the single beakers from all the artists, and scientists hired in non-legendary cities.

Well, here's another answer to the problem of starvation when coming out of a Golden Age: Don't ever come out of Golden Age. As in the space game, my oversized cities (around size 30, not 50, but still big enough, especially with Parthenon and Pacifism) kept spawning rafts of Great People. And as in the space game, I hit the same rhythm on Golden Ages; allow the food boxes to deplete for a few turns and then fire another one.

The 2-man GA came with a Prophet from my original capital (Oracle, Shwedagon, AP) and a scientist from a nonlegendary city. (Incidentally, everyone knows how to choose which GPs are used for a golden age, right?) I had a second Prophet available, plus the Merchant from Economics, and spawned another Scientist from a side city during the 2-man GA, which together spawned the 3-man GA.

Yeah, those are some serious GPP numbers. It's way more than just Barcelona the GP farm, I've got them coming from all over the place.

With Hannibal Friendly, he fed me more techs in trade: Engineering (giving up Nationalism), Compass, Optics, Constitution (giving up Printing Press). With Constitution, I took Representation. Had relied heavily on HR for happy, but no need now with the culture slider up. Actually, you remember that Globe Theater in Barcelona? Now it's not even needed, we have enough happy anyway.

Representation did scary things for research. 4 turns for a tech at 0%. (Actually Hannibal started researching Corporation, so I switched to something else then traded for it.)

Monty declared war on me, with a hilariously inadequate stack. Hannibal bought in on my side cheap, which also puts Elizabeth on my side since she's Hannibal's vassal. It was easily fended off, by building a couple elephants and upgrading a few HR warriors to pikemen.

The annoying part of this war is blocking my trade routes. Research to Astronomy to turn them back on.

Anyway, the end of the game is at hand. The legendary cities hit higher culture totals than I've ever seen before, Madrid with all seven cathedrals went over 1800/turn. Barcelona was about 8000 culture ahead of Madrid and Seville, which worked out perfectly when I dropped four Great Works into the other two.

Incidentally, there's a minor debate over whether your Great Artist farm should be one of your legendary cities. More and more I think it should be. In my last couple culture games, the GA farm has pretty easily even gone ahead of the other two legendary cities in culture.)