Part 15: Another side, Another story

We're going with the same difficulty and map settings. The thing with Fractal is you never quite know what you're going to get. It's pretty random and I like it like that.



Pacal gets free Great People once in a while once he researches Theology, but it should be noted that when he does, it increases the opportunity cost of other great people--it takes longer for him to generate them the normal way. With that in mind you need to make sure you waste none of them. I'll probably be using them to create great tile improvements, and to get the most out of the tile improvements we might be going Freedom instead of Order. We'll see how it goes.



Hot damn, marble! This is a pretty good start, we're next to three luxuries and one of them is marble. Marble increases your production rate on wonders. Since this is a SCIENCE VICTORY I'm moving my initial city right next to the mountains, ideal placement be damned--I want that 50% boost from the Observatory mid-game.



This is the first of the Maya's uniques, a cheaper archer you can build at the start of the game. This will probably save our asses if anyone tries to rush us.



Instead of getting a Shrine, the Mayans get a Pyramid that gives us double faith and two science points too, probably because of the advanced science needed to even build the thing.

Some players like to try to go for an Infinite City Sprawl where they spit out a ton of Mayan cities and build those pyramids quickly, so they can rapidly get extra science points early-game. I don't know, I'm pretty bad at infinite city sprawl…you need to make sure there's not too much rough land around you so you can spread quickly.

I'll probably try out Interfaith Dialogue once things get rolling just to see how it goes, but depending on how optimized our society is for science in general I might get something else with it. No promises.



Barbarians here next to some pearls. We should probably kill them quick so we can get at the pearls and establish a second colony as soon as we're able.



Salt and more marble! Hot diggedy, we need to grab this stuff up as quickly as possible. That's two potential expansion sites we need to snap up soon as we're able.



…someone's founded a pantheon on turn 12. That means one of two things. Somebody got an ancient ruin with extra faith points, or…



Last time, I showed you how great Liberty was. This time around, we're going Tradition, because I've already bumped into several city-states and I've got a horrible feeling we're going to be more crowded than we want to be on this continent. That means "make existing cities grow" takes priority over "spread out as fast as possible."

Taking Tradition now doubles our current culture output and also will make our borders expand faster--very important. Last game, I had to gold-buy a lot of border tiles because they just weren't expanding fast enough. I probably won't have that problem here.



My scout circles south and discovers this city…wait a minute. Edinburgh!?



AAAAAAAHHHH!

The Mayan Apocalypse is already upon us!