And did the game help? Yes, a little bit (note: this occurred before the "Please look after me" requests from Catherine and Louis XIV) ...
Hmm - ok, I can war against the Egyptians (Turn 177, 55AD). I have a few cities that can generate some nice units. On a tech front, Civil Service is 8 turns away and after that I will head towards Machinery (for maces), construction (for cats) and the Heroic Epic. Sure, that will take me a while, but I have time.
Meanwhile, Louis XIV gets a nice little event / quest that results in Judaism being spread to 5 of his cities. Hatshepsut has founded Judaism and owns the Holy City. She must be getting a nicely little stipend from that (Edit: it turns out to be about 50 gpt with all of the ‘Spread Judaism’ events). I've also caught the Jewish bug and made that my religion. The game also helped out here...
Now, if you remember my earlier quest - no, not the chariot one - the Horse Whisper - well, I had finally got my 7 cities to complete those 7 stables ... so, I successfully finished that quest and picked up some nice little options. Option 2 was "All mounted units are promoted to Sentry" (that only applies to existing mounted and I had 1 mounted unit who had already been promoted to sentry). Option 3 was "Stables: +1 food". I went with option 1...
At this stage, I am 3 turns from Feudalism, heading towards Guilds (8) - I'll take those 7 horse archers, upgrade them to knights and take that Holy City. The RNGod is really playing a good game - build stables, land some horse archers, upgrade those to Knights and capture a rocking holy city.
This is where both Louis XIV and Catherine turn up asking to become my vassals - so they also join the war against Egypt. I direct them both to attack Hatshepsut's Northern city. Lets see how they do.
While I am waiting to upgrade my Horse Archers, I build macemen and catapults and start to bomb down Memphis' defenses. On turn 218 (670AD), Memphis falls. The option for completing that quest were 4 instant warriors, the Jewish Shrine (greyed out as it already exists) or spread Judaism to 7 cities (I selected this option). The three southern Egyptian Cities fall to me in quick succession and then I head North.
Catherine has finally turned up with some units in her attempt to follow instructions ...
Next turn, she only managed to kill off all bar 1 unit (a heavily injured sword) - talk about laugh! I take that city, raze the last Egyptian city and that kills off Egypt and brings my city count to 12.
Here is a snapshot of the 7 graphs just after I took Memphis. This is the BUG version and I have removed the other 7 Civs' lines (click on their name in the legend). If you click on the graph title or background of the graph, it gets blown up to full screen size and you can quickly flip to the other 6 or return to the 7-in-1 screen by clicking on the graph title or background again. Also note the 'smoothing' dropdown in the top left. The higher the smoothing factor, the quicker the graphs get rendered but the smoother the lines.
Anyway, back to the game - 12 cities is more than enough for getting my culture multipliers rocking so it is full steam ahead on the cultural victory. Boring ... not worth reading the next page ... are you forgetting the mystery objective? I promise to include it on the next page. I'll also show you something that you don't often see on a normal speed game.