Bam, challenge accepted, and challenge completed. Turn 267 isn't to bad for a first time completion. And the play is definitely to become a vassal or orange or red early, and cruise for a portion of the game, but i decided to take it one step further this run. Took a lot of save scumming, but i went through this run as a free man, i never had a liege. Will definitely do another run of this challenge, and will be a vassal for a period, but i wanted to see if it was possible without doing that. Much better event this time

Swedes Turn 267.ctr

Very impressive. How did you avoid or survive wars in the early eras?

And which Cultures did you pick? All scientist like the Swedes?

PS: you might want to rename the thread and make a new save file

• On your victory turn, create a manual save with your G2G username and turn number in the name 
• Create a thread in the Scenario 03 Contest Section, please mention your victory turn in the title or text

I went Harappans->Mauryans->Aztecs->Ottomans->Germans->Swedes
The easiest way to survive early wars is to surrender to someone and become a vassal of thiers. The hard way is to just spamm ranged troops that don't need los (like archers) to whittle them down with chip damage. The ai also don't have very good transports early game, so if there's troops in the water you can destroy them pretty easily withrange troops on land, just need to make sure thier boats aren't nearby

Thanks for breaking the ice! Now I have a good sense of the time commitment :)

Of course, I think vassalization will prove key, but out of curiosity, around when did you advance to the Ancient and Classical eras?

Was exactly turn 52 for ancient, i believe it was somewhere in the 80s for classical

Thanks! I'm curious how long you have to spend in each era to clear that 18k... And congrats on standing your ground as a free man :)

After much restarting and much reloading, i finally got a time that i am happy with

Turn 169, almost 100 turns faster, with this game i followed in komodo's footsteps and became a vassal of black as soon as possible (turn 18). Had to restart back in classical era multiple times because i kept trying to move to quickly and it was impossible to pass black in fame.
Australians Turn 169.ctr

T18 vassalization is quite impressive. I am curious how you managed the influence... Congratulations!

On my try, killing all the mammoth was a very nice source of early influence.

Thanks! And sorry about your computer performance :(

I was skeptical about mammoths, but looks like you can reliably get around 200 or even ~250 influence on a good roll (if you can stomach the bad ones).

saxogrammaticus wrote:

T18 vassalization is quite impressive. I am curious how you managed the influence... Congratulations!

I was able to get vassaled only offering surrender once. I belive part of the reason black was willing to accept it, is i did this before making my first city

Thanks! My go-to before was using influence to minimize debt upon vassalization. I do not love the starting debt, but I do appreciate not burning 250 influence on negotiations. I knew from tests where Red would reject all treaties that they accept immediate surrender, but it did not occur to me to try that with Black...