A gentle adventure ... after the PETA drop zone game, just what I am looking for. As it turned out, it was a very gentle adventure. You play as the money-grubbing scrooge, Mansa Musa and the starting tech is locked on Currency, 5 techs into the tree and you cannot change it. This will make the usual religion rush, early whip, CS slingshot type game slightly more difficult. More details on this game can be found here at Realms Beyond.
I settle in place, start a worker and send my warrior out scouting. He pops a few huts and gets gold, gold and a bit more gold. Just right for this type of game. He also picks up a map which shows two more huts, one gives him a friend (another warrior) and the other ...
27 turns into this game, and I can swap to slavery already! You got to love that. This enables me to whip my settler, and get that second city out just a little quicker. Naturally, this settler goes to the gold site, future home to two religions with shrines and all the money multipliers I can bring in.
With this second city starting to assist in the commerce, I finally discover Currency on turn 60 ... 1600BC. Not bad. I set tech to alphabet so that I can trade with my two neighbours ... Huayna Capac (Hindu) and Washington (Buddist). I use them to catch me up on some techs and find that my capital just got better ... horses. I also have my second settler out looking for a military city. I put a sign where I wanted my city, and was happy that the computer thought it was a good city site too ... This city got Heroic Epic, Forge, West Point, etc. If this had been a warlords game, this is the city that I would have settled all my Great Generals in too.
And that was my third and last city for a very long time. Huayna made the mistake of taking some of my prime city locations - the belt of grasslands down my island was screaming out for cottages (after the jungle / forest was removed) and I put a few cities down there (eventually). Most if not all of my other cities when on the coast because my capital went wonder mad ...
It also built ...
- Colossus
- Great Lighthouse
- Great Library
- Hanging Gardens
- Taj Mahal
- Notre Dame
- Statue of Liberty
- Broadway
- United Nations (nicely popped a GEng about 2 turns before this was available to build)
As I said, a mistake by Huayna and so it was war! My commerce rate was excessive and it stayed that way through the whole game. Its not often that it only takes me 5 turns to research Iron Working ...
The war was very straight forward, advanced units against out of date units. I pushed him off my land mass and moved straight onto Washington. By this stage, I had also met Catherine, Elizabeth, Victoria and Qin Shi Huang. I was in a poor situation when it came to Iron (ie none) and so I had to go searching for some. Washington had some but that was miles away (at the stage I was looking) but I found some on an island to the East. Unfortunately, Qin had just settled within 2 tiles of where I wanted my city. I declared war, raised the offending city and then just sat back waiting for a change to sign a peace deal.
After clearing out my continent, I picked up biology early and then went for the UN (Diplomatic victory). I also spammed settlers and any legal tile got a city with food infrastructure (UN votes equal the sum of the city sizes). I picked up Liberalism first (and adopted the required civics), finally decided to trade for Divine Right and decided to make a push for Versailles (that tech had been out there for ages). I took a sleepy little Cuzco with about 7 hammers per turn and chopped, mined, railroaded it up to a 56 hammer per turn city and built the wonder in 8 or so turns. These mini-games within a big game are fun. Thinking back, I probably should have whipped in a forge to get even more hammers per turn. My forbidden palace went in Washington ... that was a nice city with food, lumbermills on forested hills with railroads - churning units like crazy.
Anyway, I build the UN in 1812 and ...
... lost the first SG election even though I had enough votes all by myself to win the election. Unfortunately, everyone else voted for Catherine. I didn't even have enough votes to veto any forced civic changes. However, I did have enough to stop her winning diplomatically (she actually put that option to the vote ... first time that I have seen an AI do that). This just meant that I had to tech flight, build bombers and take all her cities with cavalry and bombers. I had massed units on transports outside her borders ready to start killing her when the second SG election came around, this time ...
... I win. I might be able to win this without killing her if the same people vote for me again. I try and NO, some abstain. Oh well, guess this means WAR.
15 turns of bombing defenses to 0%, bombing for collateral damage and then killing the units with my horses later, I have decimated Catherines mainland, keeping all the cities and I have enough votes to win by myself.
