Initial thoughts OOC so no cities or puppets, maybe ally military CS for additional units. River warlord so focus on taking camps, use embarkation bonus if possible, and obviously bee-line Chivalry assuming we get / trade horses. 4000BC Debate whether to settle in place or move to coast so we can get ships later. Decide not to waste time moving to coast, if we're on continents we'll just have to wait for Astronomy. Initial builds: 2 x scouts to explore, find ruins and locate our victims. First scout gets an upgrade to archer, my favourite :) Science: Animal Husbandry to see if we have horses, and we have x2 next to capital and another x2 in 3rd ring, nice. Find Moncao to n/w. Other scout gets a map - are we on an island!? 3480 Meet Washington scouting from south, so at least one other civ on our land. Build worker for the horses. Scouts eventually work out that we are on a peninsula with a choke-point to the rest of this continent. Meet Japan and China in the next few turns. Bee-line Writing to sell OB. 3160 Find Sidon to s/w. Scout-archer is getting XP vs barbs. 2720 Adopy Honour, find 2 more camps nearby. China is s/w, Washington to s. Start Masonry to upgrade stone and marble. Met Sulieman at some point, not sure where he is though. Building monument and then granary to get capital running nicely. 2400 Next SP - Aristocracy and GL? No point in Liberty as we are OCC. Don't need Discipline just yet as we barely have any military anyway. Legalism? nah. Arbitrarily choose Warrior Code, don't need GG and it will cost but want Military Tradition ASAP. Plan is GL for Iron Working then build some HBRs, to upgrade later. Warrior + GG take a camp. Monaco helpfully asks for other camp to be destroyed. Ally them after returning a worker. Get gold from Monaco, handy. Start Bronze Working ready for when GL is completed. 2040 Adopy Military Tradition. Buy another worker as we have plenty of cash at the moment. 1760 Complete GL and take free Iron Working. x4 iron in total, nice. Start Archery then HBR. Building warriors to upgrade once iron connected. Warrior and scouts checking out neighours. 1520 Still 3 civs not met, and 2 of them in front of us in score - another continent? Adopt Discipline, aiming to complete all of Honour before anything else. 1280 2 x swords and 2 x archers heading to Washington directly south of our peninsula. Take camp on the way for Sidon. HBR completed, Calendar next for the x 2 sugar. At negative GPT now! Build a stable for production bonus before starting HBRs. 1200 Sulieman helpfully declares on Washington just before we do. Buy stoneworks and complete stable. Start building HBRs. Still at -ve GPT. 775 Raze Washington with help of another archer and our first HBR. China to west and she is next. Get another GG, on way with next horse. Start Hanging Gardens, seems logical even for a domination OCC game. Start Currency to improve our woeful GPT, then bee-line Chivalry. 625 Attack China, one city between army and her capital. Don't quite take it first go but will fall next turn. Japan has a city between China and us, he declares and horse that was passing only just survives. Check diplomacy screen to make sure that Japan has other cities! Yes he has, but not sure where his capital is? S of China, or W? Scout has revealed most of the map to the S/E so almost certainly not there. Adopt Aristocracy cos we can, HG is 3 turns now. We are +10 happy so sell our only sugar to Sulieman for gold to help our empty coffers. 500 Wu offers everything for peace, ordinarily would carry on and take her out now but Japan is proving to be a major irritant with his city right in our way, so accept. Next turn 3 Japanese units turn up at our capital. Doubt they could do much damage before we take them down but don't want to risk improvements getting pillaged, so accept peace from him too. This slows us down a bit but means can re-arrange units better to take out China when peace expires. Buy a catapult to join the fun in the meantime. Build Heroic Epic then all-out units to take out China and Japan. Get our first GA. 450 Sulieman declares as we are waiting to renew the fun with China. Oh well his few units give us some more XP. 325 Sulieman offers straight peace after we wipe his paltry army and we accept. 3 turns until we can attack China. 225 Attack China again. Sidon asks for Marble which we already have connected - thanks guys, ally them with some gold. We are still at -22 GPT though! 175 Beijing falls. A stupid Arab unit is healing on our peninsula (on a hill) meaning we can't get our units out - get out of the way you clown! Realise Japan must be to the N/W of China, hmmm this is going to be a long tedious trek. Either we split our army to take out Japan and Sulieman at the same time, or Japan first then hike all the way across the map. Can't really support any more units, so building another army isn't an option. Capital starts a market and convert some farms on rivers to trading posts to try and sort out our leaking economy. 125 NExt SP, select Military Caste. Not much use but want Professional Army after it. 75 Take out last Chinese city, largely because going round would be a pain. Realise Japan only has one city. Monaco wants Oracle which we can build in 8 turns! So start it now. 75AD Japan is sending a horde of warriors and a settler past Sidon and our troops, so decide to attack now. Kill several and capture the settler. Thought I could gift it to Sidon but cannot, so disband it. 175 Reach Kyoto and start attack with swords, archers, HBRs and one cat. Barbs at our capital and we have no garrison, whoops. Complete Oracle and take Professional Army with the free SP. Get gold now for killing enemies, nice. Get another GG which use for second GA. Start Mud Mosque, not a great help in this game because we don't really need the culture but seems a shame not to build our unique building. Capital is at 11 pop (on production focus the whole game). +22 BPT, +18 CPT, still -7GPT. Spend 250G to re-ally Monaco and then realise they'd asked for the Oracle so get even more influence next turn - waste! 275 Kyoto down and Japan is out. 3 x swords, 4 x HBR, 1 x cat, 2 x archer and 1 x war chariot (from Sidon) start trek towards Sulieman. The terrain is horrible, hills, marsh, jungle. This is going to take some time! We have support for 12 units but have 16, so -40% production penalty, but doesn't seem to be slowing down the capital much. Start NC which is completed in 10 turns. Plan is to build National Treasury and some more TPs to finally sort out economy, save some gold then ally Kuala Lumpur which is on the borders of Sulieman, should keep him occupied while we attack from the west. Another catapult is on the way (slowly). Check demographics, we are first in soldiers (good!), 3rd in population which is surprising because we have been on production focus almost all game. We are 5th in score. Bizzarely we are 2nd in approval. 580 Complete Chivalry. In retrospect should have bee-lined this much sooner and/or tried to get a GS to bulb it. Also realise that units cannot be upgraded in allied CS, argh! Get a GS and save it for Education. 640 Miscalculate how much influence we have with KL and don't quite make ally. Sell everything we have at bargain basement prices and just about make ally. No gold for upgrades so will have to make do with what we have. There are two cities we will have to go through to get to Instanbul. Complete NT and get to 0 GPT with gold focus - hurrah. Start Theology and later use GS for Education. Want university for more GS and Oxford. Attack first city and take it 720AD, lose a horse though. Stupidly lose scout, so start another one, still parts of this continent we haven't explored. 1040 Take Instanbul, but lost several units though. Was a bit awkward to get units in the right place, probably should have taken the other city to the north rather than trying to squeeze army between it and CS to the south. Was also scared that he might ally them but he's skint thankfully. Sulieman won't accept peace yet so heal up our of range of his remaining couple of cities and then army will head for home for upgrades. HBRs are already on the way for upgrades to our nice UU. KL did a great job of keeping him busy and wiped quite a lot of his units. Start building more cavs. Plan is Compass and then Astronomy. Should have prioritised these earlier, instead messed around with techs at the bottom of the tree that we don't really need yet. 1430 Nothing much happened up until this point: got Astronomy via GS and sent units in all directions to find the other civs. Meet Genghis Khan who only has 3 cities, Monty and (later on) Rome. Monty and GK are at war so might not have to fight him at all with any luck. Used Oxford to get Astronomy as GS is miles off (forgot to use scientists specialists duh). Army is upgraded to longswords and cavs and starts swimming west towards GK at the top of the other continent. Buy or trade OBs to explore the map while main army is heading over. For some reason we are researching Navigation! Switch to Machinery to upgrade our archers. 1480 Main army and scouting units meet up and we attack GK, take Karakorum via another city. More LS and upgraded crossbowmen are on the way. 1545 Attacked Monty next. This was also tricky because the terrain meant there was a bit of a pinch-point that most of our troops had to get through, others went round via the coast. Take city on the way to his capital, missed taking it out in on turn leaving 1HP, waaa. Take it next turn though and accept straight peace. Monty is afraid and keeps popping up to tell us how great we are and would we please be nice to him - he he. Should have bargained for all his stuff. Oddly enough he doesn't make peace with the CS we allied. Demand OB cos we can. Rome is helpfully right next to Monty's borders. Rome declares on Monty next turn and starts trying to re-take Antium that he must have lost in a previous conflict. Out troops are streaming down towards Rome, thankfully through largely flat territory / roads for a change. Wait a couple of turns to heal up a bit and give Monty a chance to wipe a few of Rome's units for us. 1585 Rome takes Antium. We declare, destroy about half of his remaining units and raze Antium next turn. Lost my scout-archer :( 1625 (turn 235) Take Rome to win a domination victory. Got a little cocky and almost ran out of melee units. Rank: Loius XVI, base score 379, score 806. We are still first in soldiers despite virtually suiciding our army to finish off Rome. Lessons learnt: - you cannot upgrade units in allied CS! - don't forget to use specialists! - need to focus much more when bee-lining a tech, keep getting distracted (for example the economy sucked but should still have got Chivalry before Currency)