The game details are available at Realms Beyond but I have summarized them below.
Difficulty: Prince
Civilization: Greece
Leader: Alexander
Map Size: Standard
Map Script: Archipelago
Rules: No Tech Trading
Victory: Any
Variant Rules:
- If you lose your capital to invasion, you lose the event.
- You may not move your Palace.
- You may not build any Great Wonders in your capital.
- The first improvement (building) in every city must be Walls.
- Every city must build a Castle before it is allowed to build a University or Observatory.
- This is a SIX CITY CHALLENGE. You may not ever possess more than six cities.
- Your six cities must all be self-founded, using your own settlers, or else captured from barbarians.
- You are not allowed to deliberately lose a city for the purpose of "getting rid of" one you regret.
Well, the title of this Adventure is an obvious reference to ...
- The blog space Sixth Column which, to quote them ... "P-C-free analyses of current events; exposing the anti-American unholy alliances and all other fifth column contingents; and providing antidote of reality, reason, rights and individualism, capitalism, and objectivity. Unsettlingly NOT multicultural, or ideologically relativistic. Principally focusing on Islam and national security, particularly regarding illegal immigration."
- Robert A Heinlein's book 'The Sixth Column' (wikipedia) where America is over-run by the PanAsians army. Only 6 scientists in a top secret research unit survive an accident there (unrelated to the invasion) and these 6 have to build the resistance and reclaim America.
- An obsure reference to the Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8 (sample) which is a collection of funny things that happened to people recently ... record of the first blow fly of the summer ... and other useful stuff. Here is an example ... "Gavin Gollogley, of Ultimo, writes, under the heading "The meaning of monorail" that he has been observing tourists in Darling Harbour. "Here's a query overheard on Sunday, from a group of English ladies buying tickets at Paddy's Market monorail station: 'How will we know which line to use?"'
Anyway - here is the game plan that I have chosen for this adventure ... and also because my last few games have been fairly poor at teching and gold. Obviously, I will be building walls in every city but I will be reviewing the map closely when selecting my 3rd through 6th city. With an Archipelago map, I want to get my boats out early scouting to grab the circumnavigation bonus and also to meet other CIVs - reduce the cost of techs. There are a few critical resources that we must know the location of prior to settling our final city / cities ... these are Iron and Oil. I think the future will hold the situation where the Greeks have distroyers and other civs to not ... thus we need Oil and we need to restrict their access to Oil.
Here is my initial tech path for Blake ...
agriculture
mining
masonry
animal husbandry
bronze working
wheel
Ok, on with the story ...