GOTM 2

RBCiv4 Epic 1
Theta Tau
RBCiv4 Adventure 2
RBCiv4 Adventure 1
RBCiv4 Adventure 3
RBCiv4 Adventure 4
GOTM 3
Fatal Errors 1
RBCiv4 Adventure 8
RBCiv Epic 4
RBCiv Epic 5
GOTM 8
RBCiv Adventure 9
RBCiv4 Epic 6
RBCiv4 Epic 7
Adventure 42 - Joy to the World
Adventure 45 - Hannibal's Muse

The 2nd Game of the Month over at CivFanatics:

Civilization: England - Unique Unit: Redcoat
Leader: Elizabeth - Philosophical, Financial
Difficulty: Prince
Map size: Standard
Map Script: Lakes
Climate<: Tropical
Sea level: Low
Starting Era: Ancient
Speed: Epic
Barbarians: Normal
Rivals: 6
Victory conditions: All enabled

After my decent showing in GOTM 1 (finishing 41st out of 623), I wanted to continue my good showing. I doubt that I'll be able to get too high in the rankings, because it takes a certain milking and/or knowledge of the scoring system, which is not something I truly aspire to.

So, the goal for this game will be Fastest Cultural victory. I'm aiming for 1700. In GOTM1, there was one cultural victory in 1600, and a few in the early 1800s.

I ran a shadow game as Elizabeth, and I ended up with a cultural victory in 1851. But, I did learn a few things from that. But before I mention my learnings, I will share my basic gameplan.

The basic framework was the "Catherine Cottage Spam" strategy. The gist of it, if you don't want to wade through that thread, is that you take advantage of the Financial trait by building tons of cottages. You also land-grab like crazy, sacrificing some early teching (you end up having to put the science slider way down due to lots of city maintenance) for becoming a monster tech powerhouse when all your 3+ gold cottages come in. Works well with Cathy because she's Cre/Fin, but Elizabeth (Phi/Fin) is also a good option.
I started off beelining for HinJewism. My first 6 techs were Mysticism, Polytheism, Masonry, Monotheism, Hunting (hut) and Archery. Also Bronze Working was in there somewhere. After that I started sending Jewish missionaries out, first off to the capital cities of my neighbors (Cyrus, Qin, Kublai Khan and Saladin). Several civs converted to Judaism right away, and I think 2 or 3 were Jewish the whole game.
Tech-wise, I then went up the top of the tree, getting The Wheel, Potter, Writing, Alphabet, Literature, Music, Drama and then founding Taoism with Philosophy. Alphabet allowed me to pick up a bunch of the worker techs that I had neglected.
I tried to be somewhat agressive settling. I went with an early settler and founded York very soon. I only ended up with 6 core cities though before the land grab phase was all but over.
I made my living selling techs. I was the tech leader pretty much the whole game, and was able to make good coin selling my discoveries when I wanted to the other powers. Also I had a Great Merchant for like 2000 gold at some point. Science was set at 100% pretty much the whole game, till I started putting the culture slider up.
I was 2nd in score most of the game (behind Kublai Khan). He looked to have expanded quite a bit and eventually he eliminated Mansa Musa. I was involved in no wars, though there were lots of wars among the other civs. I was constantly getting requests to stop trading and/or fight with other civs, which I always declined. I did give into quite a few gold/tech tributes, especially in the later game.

Mistakes:

I stopped researching after Physics, but upon further review, I should have stopped sooner. Physics did get me the free Great Scientist, but I didn't have much of a use for him, since I was shutting down science. I think I should have definitely stopped before doing Physics, which would have made the win come in 1818. Though now I'm wondering if I should have stopped after Democracy. I don't think I really used the Kremlin very much, so that would have allowed me to skip researching Communism, Sci. Method, Astronomy and maybe even Economics (though the free Great Merchant was handy in keeping the cash flow going.
I didn't realize (though I should have) that when I switched from Organized Religion to Pacifism that I wouldn't be able to build missionaries anymore. I should have built at least one Jewish Monastery before discovering Philosophy.
I only ended up with 6 cities (7 with a flip about 3 years before I won). For some reason, I was thinking that you could only build one of the Cathedral-type buildings per religion, when really you can build one per 3 temples. So I should have had all my cities building temples to allow 2 Cathedrals in each of the big 3.
I probably could have managed my Great Person farm a bit better. I ended up with 14 (not including my 3 free ones from Music, Econ and Physics). But one of those 14 was a Merchant (not sure how he got there - probably the stupid governor), one was a prophet (intentional to build the Temple of Solomon) and one was another Scientist because I stupidly built Oxford U. in my GP farm (London) instead of the Globe Theater.
Speaking of the governor, the guv kept putting scientist or prophet specialists in my outlying cities (and sometimes in the big 3 of London, York and Nottingham). I had to be constantly checking F1 to see if this was happening and switching them out. Though, now that I think about it, it might be okay to put some scientists or priests in my off cities, as long as I make sure that city never actually produces any GP, which should be easy to do if I keep the GPP high in my GP farm city.
I possibly should have farmed my GP farm city (London) more. I had a lot of cottages and it was on flood plains. At the end, I got it up to about 120 GPP/turn, though that's on Epic. I think a better strategy would be to farm it to get it to pump even more artists.

So. The plan for GOTM2 is to follow the same basic strategy, modified to take care of the mistakes I made and listed above.

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