Is it possible to get Gunpowder before 1AD?

[Ghetsis]

If so, what is the best way to reach that goal?

[red255]

Not a big fan of gunpowder. Macemen are 8 strength, musketmen are 9 strength.
Macemen have the ability to get city Raider promotions.
If I wanted to defend a city longbowmen are easier.

If you want to tech fast, I suppose the fastest start is generally grassland gems, near a river. i think financial also adds a coin. On an extremely low difficulty.

Dye is also very good commerce after Calendar.

Commonly I like to place my brain cities near flood plain tiles and cottage them up, but thats not super fast.

the super fast early tech thing is to farm great people and use them to rush key techs.

Not generally how I do business though.

[mattoanes]

The question needs to be refined more. To simply put it, there are many factors that would affect the answer to your question. Such as, the difficulty of the game, the game speed, and other contributing factors, such as tech trade and tech brokering which might impact how fast you may progress to gunpowder. Additionally, the civ you play as might also have unique builds and bonuses which improve your tech yield.

[red255]

Assume a game with 12 friendly Player controlled civs with grassland gems capitol cities on river banks. with some food for good measure.

lowest difficulty and they pop a pair of early settlers and workers from nearby goody huts.

and trade techs with each other liberally like one big happy well coordinated family. Burning great people like its nobodies business.

now they'd have to redundantly research certain things like mining. because you can't trade techs before alphabet.

I've decided its too silly to continue this exercise.

[ghpstage]

There are 3 BC space wins in the hall of fame, all carried out on settler/huge/marathon.
A credible attempt at doing the same on Deity/large/marathon was started, but AFAIK never finished, and most of the million plus scoring games that I have seen have picked up gunpowder at around 1100-700BC, usually while playing deity.
So yes, on a technical level it is more than merely possible.

These games however tend to be entirely reliant on a fairly narrow range of settings (marathon, plus size maps), with good starts and leaders along with epic amounts of micromanagement.
Even the people that pulled them off can't match them on a random map on other settings. On standard settings the kind of tech pace required to hit gunpowder before 1AD is unusual. Its not impossible to achieve, but you really need the right map.

If you want to attempt it on standard size/normal speed then Liz or Gandhi are probably the best choices, and your going to want a lot of Great Scientists.

[Purplefairy22]

Your best shot is Builbing Great People like crazy. and tech trading like a fiend.

[чирики]

I think no