What i love most about reading these forums is reading about games people played that were absurd, or really became a nice story front to end, or were just plain silly. And, occasionally, everything just goes right, falls into place.
I hope this thread will be filled with nice stories bout games you played.

ill start out with my best game, in all respects.

Im a pretorian nut, i play other civs but about 50% of my games i play with Jules, mostly because he's org and has prets.
Recently i moved from prince to monarch and its been giving me a hard time, but after winning it with jules, HC, Willem and Darius (all conquest), i decided to give it another go with Jules and see if i can do it again easily with the civ i love, before giving the next difficulty level a go.

Map: Large, temperate, fractal
Map turned out to be one major massive continent

Settings: Monarch, aggresive AI, Raging barbs, no goodie huts, marathon, 18 civs (ghandi as usual included) as i usually play.

I started off decent , with a river and some forests. had some resources but nothing fancy, but BUT i did have stone in my capitals BFC. WOOHOO! :goodjob:
always love it when that happends.:D

Since its raging barbs as usual, GW is a priority. I manage to chop it with 2 workers before founding the second city.
As i found the second city i wonder if stonehenge is build. I alwas miss this wonder to the AI, and since my start was fast and furious, and i had stone, i looked at the log and found out it wasnt. i chopped it with remaining forests in capital and finally had that wonder on monarch. Nice, since im not a cre civ.

Then the gamechanging event comes.... this would make this the sickest game in my civ history, which dates back to civ I when it was first released. All melee units +25% vs archery!!!!!! R you kidding me!?!! i havent even finished my first pret yet!

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

i switch to iron working, screw economy, screw wonders, screw catapults, screw " maybe ill rush somebody".

:goodjob:Ill rush EVERYBODY! :goodjob:

tried for pyra's and missed it by 4 turns, which annoyed me offcource. The pret production was ok, finished 7 by the time i missed pyra's. Who build pyra's? Mansu, my direct western neighbour. hmm, I could have 1400 gold AND pyra's.... 12turns later that was the case. MAN these anti-archery prets kick ass!

From there on it got pretty sick. my prets got the city raider promotion whenever they could and i build new ones in every city. economy wasnt a factor as i lived off the plunder. i killed 4 civs before 1 AD, 12 civs by 1000 AD. Won the whole thing on conquest by 1750 because ghandi was on an island (the only island) and i had to build some ships.

my previous record was 90312 points, this game was 297813 points, man what an ego trip. :)

I just HAD to start with this one, since i finished it last night, but i am sure better stories are to come :)

OK il go next!
Standard size/6 AI/pangaea/epic/noble
Tokugawa of Japan
I chooses him becoz i was goin for all out WAR!
as soon as my captial was size 2 it was workin a 3 hammer tile to pump out warriors in 5 turns! i built 4 + the startin one, i sent them over to Hammurabi to find just a single warrior guarding his capital. Gone! movin on, Paris was next, again only a warrior so i took that too!! i now brought 4 more that i had built from my capital. The Thebes was the Hindu holy city but amazingly only had one warrior in it! Captured!!
So, now i had 2 start gettin my economy together!! it took a while and i had to drop research to 0% just to stay in the +output. i also needed 2 start takin up all that empty land before Moa Zedong did! Sitting Bull and Joao were the others.
i sumhow managed to build the oracle to get code of laws, the courthouses were a life saver!!
i got a great prophet which realy helped!
As soon as i got IW i put research to 10% and mass produced units!
i declared war on Moa but it was so hard with him bein protective. I took his capital and a few other cities but had to make peace.
i put research back up until i got catapults and Horse archers, i tried again and made him my vassal.
I upgraded to knights & samuris as i invaded Sitting Bull, he was easy and made him my vassal too.
I got a domination win in 1740 AD, with my best ever score of 83,690 i was very happy with that!!

sorry for such a long post, i could talk for days about some of my games :lol:

Winston Churchill RPC on the strategy forums.

Rules? No libraries, no caste system, and you can't attack until you have alphabet.

How did it go? Very well for me :lol:. It was one of the first BTS monarch games I actually won. I'd been on a losing streak since buying BTS, lost about 7 monarch games and then eeked out a culture win just before the AI won space. Then I play this game...

I can't go into the details, because it would spoil it. However, it sits as my 2nd highest score of all time (I only surpassed it in the previous week), at around 125k. I got a bit lucky, I'd say :). Principles from that worked in other games, but the pure strategy was situational, or so I thought. Taking pieces of other strategies, I can now win consistently at monarch! Talk about a catalyst game for some confidence and understanding...

One time I declared on my nearest neighbor with just a warrior, on the 3rd turn. I was trying to steal his capitol. His warrior, though, was one square closer to my capitol. I lost. :D

This wasn't the best game I ever played, but even though I gave up because I realized I couldn't win, it certainly was among the best ones - best in the sense of most enjoyable. I have previously posted the story on Usenet; I hope nobody minds that.

The game was thrilling, all right, though I finally gave up because I was pretty certain what the end result would be. I'll try to get all the details right, but this game was *eventful*.

I played as Elizabeth (I love her combination of leaders traits, the redcoat and the stock exchange.) Noble difficulty level, fractal map, epic. No special settings such as raging barbarians. I discovered that my closest neighbours were Hammurabi, Montezuma, Peter the Great of Russia and Saladin. Oops! Not good. Then I learned that "the Vedic barbarians were on the march to exterminate civilization". I braced myself and hoped I wouldn't be the one affected. Then I learned that the Arabic civilization had been exterminated. A bit later I learned that Russia (immediately to the west of me) had also been exterminated. Then the Vedic barbarians attacked my capital city, which was still the only one I had (this was very early in the game); it was only defended by an unpromoted warrior, and their invasion force consisted of a single spearman; I suppose the others had been killed capturing Mecca (which was west of Moscow) and Moscow, or were guarding them. I was certain I was doomed, but my brave little warrior managed to hold his own and kill the assailant. I then founded my second city, beelined to Masonry, built walls around both cities and beelined to Bronze Working. I managed to found Judaism. In the absence of any luxuries (at that stage), a religion was very necessary. Then repeated waves of barbarian warriors, and then archers, and then axemen, kept coming out of Moscow and attacking my second city, but by then I had archers who fought them off.

There was barbarian Moscow, barbarian Mecca somewhere to the west of it and another huge barbarian city, founded by the barbarians, south of me. North of me was Hammurabi, and beyond him Montezuma to the nortwest, and Huayana Capac somewhat further away beyond Hammurabi to the northeast. In my scouting, I had also learned that Suryavarman of the Khmer lived somewhere to the west of me on the same continent. In fact, both Surya and Huayna Capac lived on middle-sized continents with a tile of water between them and the continent shared by myself, Montezuma, Hammurabi, Peter (extinct) and Saladin (extinct). I later realized that Surya and Huayana Capac were saved from the fury of the barbarians because of the water, though Surya later on moved across the sound, founded cities and also captured Mecca.

Lincoln lived on Surya's home continent, on its western half, and had a
nice little empire but no Wonders. Tokugawa had a nasty little continent of
his own very far away from every one else - his wet dream come true. He
achieved nothing throughout the game. And Huayana (northeast of me) moved across his water tile and founded additional cities to the ones on his home continent. Let me stress again that I did not have "raging barbarians" enabled; that horde of barb spearmen were simply very, very lucky, and then barbarians bred in Moscow (and perhaps Mecca too) became very, very numerous and determined to take out my second city. OK so far?

I might as well say here that throughout the game, I did not manage to build a single Wonder, unless one counts the Jewish holy shrine and Sid's Sushi. That's because Huayna and Surya were always there before me, particularly Huayna. He built the Oracle, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Hanging Gardens, Parthenon, Taj Mahal, the Sistine Chapel, the three modern entertainment wonders, blah blah blah. He also founded Buddhism. As I said, I think Surya managed to build a couple of wonders, but apart from that, Huayna was the king of Wonders. I was too busy fighting battles. I did try to build Stonehenge, and later on the Pyramids, and then Parthenon, while my second and then third and fourth cities churned out more troops, but I was always forestalled. (I did build improvements and libraries and monuments and so on - and most definitely barracks.)

Montezuma founded Hinduism, and it spread to Hammurabi, who converted and immediately became cautious towards me. Then, there was another bizarre twist: Judaism spread to one of Hammurabi's cities, and even though Hinduism was all over the rest of his empire, he promptly converted to my religion and made an open borders agreement with me. I built some Jewish missionaries to spread my faith to his major cities and make him really committed to it.

And then Montezuma attacked me. Hammurabi lived between his land and mine, but it was me he attacked; he still had an open borders agreement with Hammurabi. He sent a whole wave of jaguars, spearmen (I think) and chariots. By then, I had archers. Fortunately, Monte did not bother to destroy my cottaged tiles or farmland; his troops went straight to my capital city, where they were all killed when attacking. Then a second and a third wave arrived and were also promptly killed. While my war with Monte was going on, the barbs kept attacking my second city. I kept shuttling troops back and forth; they were becoming very highly promoted. Barracks, barbs, Monte - you can imagine. Then I suggested to Montezuma that we sign a peace treaty, and he agreed. I had a horse tile and a luxury tile (gems), but both were very distant from my cities, near the Babylonian border, and I knew I could expect a second Aztec sneak attack soon, so for the time being, I didn't try to improve those two plots. Instead, I built an iron mine on the southern border, guarded against barbs by an axeman, and another iron mine very cosily tucked away a bit west of my capital, out of harm's way. I then built up an army of axemen and swordsmen. It should be understood that I simply hadn't the time to build more than two workers, and I couldn't risk them trying to do something about the gems or the horses. The barbarians kept attacking my western city; by now they were also giving Hammurabi (and to some extent Montezuma) a hard time. Aztecs managed to slip an escorted settler through the barbarian lines and founded a city south of barbarian Moscow. Then Montezuma attacked me again. He still focused entirely on my capital. My spearmen killed his chariots, and my archers and single garrison axeman held off his other troops. After a while, I suggested peace again, and he agreed.

I founded my third city, within reach of another gem deposit, and beelined towards Feudalism. I also founded a fourth city (by the eastern sea) and captured the big barb city south of London. And later on, I founded another city by the sea, south of the first port city. And at some later time, a military city in ideal production terrain; when I abandoned the game, it contained the Heroic Epic, West Point, a War Academy and three military specialists, and it churned out a new unit every turn.

When Montezuma made his third sneak attack, he concentrated on my third
city. He failed to take it because I had crammed it full with troops and built city walls. I think it was about this time that a random event gave me lots of money because my citzens were so well protected by walls. The money came in useful for updating warriors to axemen and spearmen, and later on updating a couple of highly promoted archers to longbowmen. I got my first
Great General and attached him to an axeman. (I still had no mounted troops.) I also captured the Aztec city south of Moscow. Then I suggested peace to Montezuma, and he agreed.

Well, I won't be so detailed about most of the rest. I finally hooked up the other gem deposit, and the horse pasture, and stationed troops, inluding
my GG, on the horse pasture. I captured barbarian Moscow, which had gold
and bronze - nice! Despite my complete lack of World Wonders, my culture was excellent and my borders wide. Twice, my buddy Hammurabi suggested I join him in a war against Montezuma, and considering what had happened before, I thought my reputation could take it. However, Huayana, who was annoyed with me even before then, now really started to hate my guts. In the first of the two wars fought against Monty with Hammurabi as an ally, I captured two Aztec cities, the second on the western seabord; during the second war alongside Hammurabi, I captured an third Aztec city north of the other two and razed it to improve my cultural borders. Montezuma then vassallized to Hammurabi. By this time, I had redcoats and knights.

However, by then Huayana Capac had infantry. Here comes another very bizarre event. After a fairly long period of peace (I wasn't constantly fighting wars after having got rid of the barbs, and after Monte's three attacks) I espied three Inca galleons at sea outside the northern of my two port cities on the eastern seaboard. I realized I was the target. The port city was well garrisoned (I have learned my lesson about that); there was a redcoat, a war veteran, there, and also macemen and some longbowmen. I hastily upgraded a maceman and a highly promoted longbowman to redcoats and
hoped for the best.

And then Huayna attacked, straight from the ships. That was clever of him,
because troops from my other cities were streaming towards that city and were one or two tiles away when he struck. Nevertheless, of the three infantrymen, two cannon, two riflemen, one cavalry and one knight he threw
against my city, not a single one survived. My redcoats killed his infantrymen. My macemen accounted for the rest, except that the knight was killed by a bowman and one cannon was killed by another longbowman! I got another GG out of that attack.

Well, then there was peace. Huayana had founded some minor cities south of
me, and I should have captured those two nearest to me before suggesting
peace, but I felt I was lucky to get a peace deal. However, peace didn't
last. When, some considerable time later, he attacked again, he had bombers
and mechanized infantry and tanks; I had airships and infantry, and my first
tank had just rolled out of my military production city. And though I had upgraded some of my most intensely promoted redcoats, I still had many
redcoats left, and they acquitted themselves well. I capured two of Huayana
Capac's five cities south of me, and I have no doubt I could have taken the
other three as well, despite the constant harassment from bombers. Mind you, when I captured twose two cites, Huayana lost most of his air force. Still, by then Huayana had finished the Apollo Program and built a thruster. He also rejected my peace overtures. I opened World Builder and discovered that I was in the same situation as Gondor after the victory on the Pelennor
Fields; I had only destroyed a fraction of Mordor's military might, Also, Huayna was only one turn away from finishing the cockpit for his spaceship. One way or another, I was going to lose. So I called it a day - or, to be
precise, an early morning.

Still, it was a truly gripping game. The AI seems to have decided that I
need some really extreme experiences so I won't whine about "all games being the same". Not that I ever say that.

The whole game wasn't that great, but I had the best start..

I've got two cities up. Second city has Stone, and my next settler is off to found my third city near Marble. I'm Huanya Capac. I build a mine on one of my capitals hills, and like 2 turns later get the Tin event. Cool, whatever. But a few turns after THAT, the hill spontaneously pops copper. So I'm industrious, have stone&marble, and a tile with 1:food:, SEVEN:hammers:, 1:commerce:. Always fun to be able to wonderhog on the higher difficulties.