So I am a very casual solo player who started doing my masteries after the season 5 patch this past July. I did not have any masteries completed at that point and the farthest step I had reached was like step 3 on English and French of beat the easy AI.
Since the July Season 5 patch, I have pushed forward and completed all masteries for 9 civilizations (I have yet to do Malians). However, I see many forum posts about people stuck on various masteries and I’m genuinely confused.
I do not know what is causing these masteries to fail for some people, but I thought I would offer my game settings as a sort of template in case there’s one specific edge case cursing someone.
Completely standard installation, no mods ever subscribed, no cheats ever used. I verified the files on steam (and the xbox app has a verify option too now if you use windows store version) If you have mods maybe they interfere, and you might have to do a “unsubscribe, disable, delete, and restart your game” method to lose them.
I have only used completely standard game settings except for resource count and needed AI difficulty. I mean this very literally. I have never adjusted other settings including stuff like map reveal; it has always been concealed for me. I have had to scout every single time I needed to.
For resource count, I have only used “standard, high, and very high”. I have NEVER used “maximum”, so I do not know if that causes issues. When I want to put up a wonder or rush the AI I have used “very high” where I start with like 50k food and that’s it.
I did some masteries on megarandom, some on the pitt, but about 95% were done on micro mountain clearing. I have used multiple biomes, including the new Halloween one.
When I finish a mastery I make sure the game is either a defeat or victory. When I needed to win, I won, but otherwise I would “surrender”. I do not think games “quit” count. I have also always waited for the “view postgame summary” button to appear and waited for that post-game stat screen to load before then hitting the quit button.
Regarding some specific masteries:
Chinese #9 I see a post about this on the front page of the bug forum. I’m checking steam stats and I completed this September 18th. What I did for that one was play by myself in a micro mountain clearing and very high resources.
I made 3 villages, made the 2 landmarks for song. Then I made 3 granaries, made the 2 landmarks for Yuan (plus castle age). Then I made 3 pagodas and the last 2 landmarks for imperial and ming in that order. After being in ming dynasty with all dynasty buildings created I simply clicked on spirit way and reserached everything inside it. I then made other buildings to see if anything added to spirit way (nothing). I researched all techs available to chinese from other buildins then won with a 10 minute sacred site timer in the middle. I did it this way to avoid a possible bug so I do not know what is causing issues for others, but by building these buildings and the dynasty buildings in order with no researches elsewhere at all, I did complete the mastery.
The HRE mastery that requires 1000 gold from relics. I first tried this with just regnitz, but it appears regnitz doesn’t count…I was also curious because the little “i” mentioned tithe barns but the mastery description listed only gold needed. What I did was I went up without regnitz, made 3 outposts, went to imperial and researched tithe barns. I then put one relic in each outpost and waited until I had gained at least 1000gold food stone and wood. So @90 resources a minute from tithe barns I waited 12 minutes just to make sure. I did not win either, I surrendered out when I met 1000 of each.
Other than the HRE mastery and any Malian masteries, I completed every other single mastery first try with no apparent bugginess and all within the last 3 months. This is why I am so confused.
It could be a localization issue I guess. I am from the United States. All I can think is that maybe it’s one setting messing folks up like maybe they play with revealed map, or maybe someone is quitting out or just not waiting for the full post-game screen. Maybe maximum resoures doesn’t work. Maybe if you didn’t have standard settings on in the last game you have to reset to default settings, quit out of game and have it begin back at default. I don’t know… I don’t know. I’m not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m just genuinely puzzled that these are buggy for others, and hope that folks can figure out what the issue is and complete them.
Best wishes.