u/Rabny

Apparently I played really well on a pretty average looking start with a mediocre civ, Portugal

From the mid-game onward after building the National college after the mainland cities were settled it already looked great. After stealing iirc 4 workers from Lhasa with a single war (to avoid city state penalties) the sim city train was rolling and I even managed to win the world's fair by 100 hammers. I spent A LOT of gold on paying the AI to war eachother so I could live in peace for the whole game.

Settings: Large, Continents, Epic, Deity

Game speed comparison for context:
Epic Turn 352 (1.5x) = Standard Turn 234.67 (1x) = Quick Turn 156.44 (0.67x)

Epic Turn 352 (1.5x) = Standard Turn 234.67 (1x) = Quick Turn 156.44 (0.67x)

I think I did great. I did buy all the spaceship parts with gold and waited to engineer Hubble the same turn that my last scientist spawns.

I also did build labs before factories in my expands

Looks like I will have good culture and faith since I am adopting the Incan Catholic Faith which has Mosques and Monasteries (+desert folklore) and it even has For the Glory of God allowing me to purchase writers with faith. That should allow me to comfortably pick a second policy tree to do before Rationalism and ideology.

I could be looking at a very fast science victory if I use Portugese sea trade routes combined with purchasing Research labs and all the Spaceship parts with Commerce purchasing discounts and Freedom.

All that to say I could also do exploration, since I am planning on building a settler for the stone island nearby right after National College and workshop.

I am sort of scared to go military route since this looks promising for a fast science win.

Settings: Large size Continents (Standard resources and players), Epic Speed, Deity difficulty

Decided to roll a Mongolia campaign. Started with awful production with just floodplains and no horses in capital.

Liberty shines with minimum distance cities along rivers with low production. This is because they can share tiles early on and each work only a couple hills + river farms + universities, since their pop will be lower. Tradition cities would suffer from huge population and no production.

I keshik'd Celts but I was conservative with the warmonger penalties since my start was not good enough to try and rush down the entire continent before meeting anybody else. That could have been done on lower difficulties or better land. Then Sweden and Venice declared a surprise war on me even though Sweden was my friend. That is when I took both of their capitals and took a couple cities in a peace deal for no warmonger penalties.

I plan to conquer a couple Celtic cities still with keshik's but science shouldn't be an issue since I have been stealing techs like crazy and even got Scholars in Residence passed first proposal. I am just getting secularism, and will try to rush down Modern Era for ideology.

Germany doesn't want their OP bonus from Hansa. They have both Honor and Patronage...

Also I have been enjoying Large Map size and Epic Speed quite a bit despite having a ocd tendency to go for the extremes. I usually had done either Huge and Marathon or Small and Quick. After playing Standard Standard, the campaigns became less Grand or quick. Now with Large and Epic I have found a really nice balance to have lots of fun.

Byzantium SUCKS, I have NO BONUS as a civ I lost religion even with One with Nature and Kailash. This is the pain with DEITY. YES I HAVE GONE INSANE... at least I had faith to buy Pagodas from Venice's religion :)

Also Liberty is really nice for sim city as long as you manage to not have unhappiness and focus on production and prioritize Colosseums/Workshops into aqueducts, which should be ready as you get civil service. This allows you to have the infra ready to spam universities along river city chains close to each other.

Liberty really saved this game, since it was a terrible Jungle plantation lux spawn.