So the next Planetary Council Apostolic Palace vote option came up, with a surprising option. I had to try this:
So I was climbing a tree, fell out of it, and landed in an Apostolic Palace religious victory! The execution was textbook: my unfriendly rivals had one Jewish city each, while my friends Hatty and Pericles both widely followed the faith. And most of that execution wasn't even my doing: Pericles got Judaism without my intervention, as did Gilgamesh and Willem get their single cities. I was responsible for Hatty's Judaism and Catherine's single city, but both for other purposes (diplomacy and flip target). The resulting AP election was a complete accident.
Is this victory condition broken? Only about as broken as Windows Vista trying to run Master of Orion 1. Broken like a tax cut promise on November 5th. Broken like the hearts of Chicago Cubs fans. Broken like this.
Dear Game,
The local Dadaist art gallery has more sense than you.
Love,P.S. And better graphics.
I had to do that to get an improbable 190 AD victory into my Hall of Fame.
Anyway, religious antics aside, I reloaded the previous autosave and declined to take an AP victory vote. :) Sorry, but as adherents of Judaism, our messiah Treesus is not due to come yet. G-d's Chosen Arborists, under the banner of the Styrax of David, will have to unite the world some other time.
This is after all still a scored game, with speed to the cultural victory being our goal. I have a plan for that too. I've taken care to set up Song of Planet as a pure and extremely strong Great Artist producer. And for total maximum Great Artist production, I'm going to slingshot Liberalism into Biology and build the National Park in Song of Planet. Thanks to having Scientific Method for free, this was only twelve techs away now.
For the next millennium, I kept my research tightly focused on this beeline, starting with Metal Casting - CoL - Civil Service - Paper - Philosophy. Along the way, I traded for several techs both on and off the beeline: Currency (for Metal Casting), Construction (Currency), Machinery (CS at late-civ devaluation). Also along the way, I built Angkor Wat and University of Sankore, mostly for the culture, but also for decent effects with lots of religious temples everywhere.
My Heroic Epic city kept cranking units to keep me on top of the power graph. For a while it was catapults, as the longest-lived unit available at the moment, then macemen.
The National Epic finished, and my next Great Person went for a Golden Age. It hurt to spend a Great Artist on a Golden Age in a culture victory, but it was desperately needed here to avoid four turns of anarchy from civic changes. Plus the Golden Age boost would recoup the GPP anyway (remember I still have the Mausoleum.) The civic swap was to HR / Bureaucracy / Caste / Pacifism.
Before leaving Organized Religion, I made sure to spread all my religions everywhere, plus stockpile three extra missionaries of each faith for future acquisitions. (Monasteries are obsolete with Sci Method.) Now I could stay in Pacifism for the rest of the game.
Ha - The very turn before I was going to trigger the GA and revolt, Louis came asking for me to make the HR switch. I complied, then fired the Golden Age to cancel the anarchy. :) (Full disclosure: I saved before doing that, not being fully sure if the GA worked that way.)
There's
the magnitude of Great Person production I've already got going in this city. This GP actually spawned as an Engineer against those low odds. I saved him for the Taj Mahal, since I anticipated having to play catch-up on Nationalism after my Biology slingline. My *next* GP also came as an Engineer, from my capital with the Hanging Gardens, at odds somewhat higher but also well under 50%. He went for Notre Dame right away, entirely for the culture effect (and GA points.)
About time a forest finally grew around here. That's on the tile that France clear-cut for me. Actually, this was a reason for this game to be on Epic speed. Forest growth is always checked per turn, without adjustment for game speed, so they grow 50% faster per time on Epic. I dislike Epic speed and hate games on it that have no reason to be so, but at least we had some rationale here.
And lots of nothing happened for a while after that. Just lots of temple and cathedral building. The AIs had kindly supplied me with access to five religions, which was about as many sets of cathedrals as I could build anyway before game end. Well, a couple more wars happened, but again no concern of mine.
France even lost their capital - wow, bad times for Louis! He capitulated to Hatshepsut shortly after that.
And Chiron Preserve picked up its first culture flip. This happened extremely quickly - the first revolt came only a couple turns after I gained 50% culture in the city tile, and the second only a couple turns after the first ended. It really contributes nothing other than as a site to build more temples, but it's certainly welcome.
So I got my Liberalism into Biology. I'd worried a little bit about having the economy to reach Chemistry in time, but I needn't have. No AI even got Paper, much less Education. Also, I'd avoided trading away Philosophy. I've noticed that the AIs prioritize Philosophy very low once Taoism goes, so I avoided trading it to them. The AIs definitely aren't smart enough to look beyond Philosophy to the Liberalism slingshot beyond it.
