re: Priests and Beakers, what comes to mind offhand is the government civ… Representation, maybe? The one that gives a bunch of happiness in your largest cities… it also makes specialists of any kind produce 3 beakers. If I get pyramids I usually end up sitting in it until I have enough Towns to make Universal Suffrage worth it.
re: Chopping, I try to leave one forest up next to each of my cities, for the easy health. Anything after that is fair game. Even on the higher difficulty levels, I tend to only have health issues when I am late getting to medicine. For some reason, though, I virtually never see any flood plains, so that usually isn’t part of my picture either.
re: Religions, I have been trying a few religious-based strats the last couple of days… and I just don’t think they work well with how I play. Unless I take a mysticism leader and beeline straight for one of the first ones, I don’t get it. If I get one of the later ones, it seems to be way too much trouble to spread it enough to be worth it. And either way, being religion-dependant for income severly restricts a bunch of early-game diplomacy possibilities. The only thing I’m really feeling about religions is that Great Prophets are really good super specialists. Likely has a lot to do with my play style, though.
Played through a Monarch/Continents tonight, as Elizabeth. Trying to work on my early conquering strats when Quechuas aren’t part of the equation. I got pretty lucky and had one of the ends of my continent with both Copper and Stone close enough that I could place my second city and grab them both. After getting used to grabbing Stonehenge and sometimes even the Pyramids WITHOUT stone, it seemed almost too easy to get them with. With choice of government and really early axemen, I absolutely ran the Greeks over, and had the largest land mass of any civ by the time the mid-game had filled everything in. I was well on my way to dominating until the modern era. The plan was to be the first one to Modern Armor, run over the rest of my continent for some military practice (I still had Romans and Chinese to destroy!), and grab whatever victory would get me out of there alive. Well, one problem. When it’s time for aluminum to be revealed, I don’t have a single spot of it, in my entire (enormous) empire. I’m on the biggest continent in the world, and as far as I can tell, we only have three aluminum spots - two on the far side in China, and one in the middle of the Roman Empire. I do a little checking, and while I’ve been dominating the wonders-built and culture races, I’ve been doing it by having two dominant cities: London and York have 20000+ culture apiece in 1800 without really even trying, and none of my other cities are over 7k. So much for going for a culture victory. Diplomacy? Nope, been playing peacenik while I’ve teched and have been denying other civs key techs, so I have a ton of negatives from not going to war when asked, and not giving up tech for free when bitched at. Cyrus has been playing hug-kiss-vote-for-me from his nice huge all-to-himself continent, so there is no WAY I am getting more votes than him in the U.N. Don’t really want to try to dominate over the oceans, so I guess that leaves me with the sissy way out: bringing the glory of tea out into the stars.
… the only problem is that this doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have aluminum. I start pumping out tanks and battleships, as our continent is thin enough that most cities are coastal. I save up a couple of artists. The plan is to make a run for Hun, the barbarian-turned-Roman city that has aluminum one space diagonal from it, while I defend all of the other border cities. Peter conveniently starts a war, and as soon as Caesar’s hordes take to the waves to invade, I jump him from behind. Everything goes mostly as planned; I even sneak around and take Rome. By then, though, I’m not in the best of shape - war anger is starting to hurt my cities, my tank numbers at the front lines are down, I’ve lost a bunch of peripheral health+ resources so disease is becoming an issue. I let Caesar have peace without even sucking him dry - after all, I’ve got what I came for, right?
Well, wrong.
I pop both culture bombs in Hun. Despite an instant 8000 culture, it only takes control of 7 of the 8 spaces immediately around it. What is it missing? The hill with the aluminum, of course :smack: So now I’m sort of floating, with no defined way to victory. By now, I don’t have Apollo quite done yet, and 3 of the AI civs do. I have no reasonable chance of grabbing any of the other victories before a spaceship goes up.
Thankfully, as soon as the war was over, all of my cities went back to happy, healthy, and ultra-productive. Long story short, my sheer mass paid off: I pushed as much tech as possible before even STARTING the spaceship, bought the space elevator with a couple turn’s worth of gold, and did spaceship parts in pretty much all of my cities at once. When I started my ship, both Mao and Cyrus already had 5 casings, at least 1 thruster, and at least 1 other part; I still beat them into space by 5-10 turns. I was saved by a bunch of size 12-16 cities that could do the grunt-work on casings and military defense (once Caesar decided he wanted to go back to war, of course) while my four huge cities (my first two, plus the two best I took from the Greeks; Athens in particular was in an AMAZING spot this game) blew through the hard stuff even without aluminum to speed it up.
A ton of cities might be hard to support before your financial system kicks in (be it courthouses, towns and the techs that benefit them, or whatever else)… but being able to exploit the biggest Civ seems to be my most successful way of making up the stupid AI tech bonuses. (Oh, yeah, in this game, I got beat to Liberalism by precisely one turn, and Mao took Economics with the free tech, which was coming up soon for me. I didn’t need ANY of that free stuff, thanks!)
The other notable thing about this game was the sheer amount of Great People I got playing as philosophical (not a trait I usually use). Not really impressed by their power so much as their utility - got a great mix in just the order I wanted them in, and they were great in support. (A few prophets early because of stonehenge/pyramids that made my first two cities monsters… two scientists after I put up the Great Library, building academies in those cities… merchants and engineers in the mid-game, keeping me rich and getting me every wonder I wanted… plus the sheer number generated by philosophical + parthenon + national epic + specialists from early wonders. Can’t complain.)
Damned annoying…