Me getting addicted? Waaaaaaay too late for that advice! Today in class was painful. Trying to form coherent sentences in German on 2 hours of sleep--not fun. But still, I'd say it was worth it!
I got to play until past liberalism last night. This game has taken a really interesting turn.
Of the civs that, as far as I can gather, were the original ones starting the game, 2 have died, 1 has been relegated to a couple of puny island cities (Pacal II), and the leaders of the game are me and a bunch of barbarian-civ-upstarts:
*Montezuma (2nd place, 8 cities (on a small map), teching decently, and a real powerhouse, but at least I have him at pleased),
*Ragnar (3rd place, teching really well for having spawned along a riverside tundra corridor, and would be doing better if he hadn't lost a bunch of his better (greener) cities, in turn, to the:
*Zulu rebels, who are in their own right no pushover), and,
*Suryavarman (spawned pretty late on a separate galley-reachable continent down south, and actually doing pretty well after I liberated a few distant cities to him. We're best buds, and I'm trying to do everything I can to get him to friendly (easier said than done with a -2 diplo hit per refusal!) because he's actually teching pretty decently for such a late-comer, and maybe I can get him to voluntarily vassalize to me...anyways, his cities are too far away right now for me to want to conquer and maintain, and I'm not ready for another war yet).
*Asoka, the early-game powerhouse, is stagnated in the middle-ages at 3 cities, fighting pointless mini-wars on and off with his worst enemy,
*Victoria of the English, as well as everyone's favorite punching-bag this game,
*the longbow-spewing, haplessly boxed-in and resourceless Austrian City-State of Vienna (which, according to my scouts, is about to be taken by Monty's hefty medieval stack-o'-doom).
I've pretty much got this game in the bag after taking out Hammurabi's 3 cities and then Hatshepsut (one of the originals with 6 cities, but a real pushover militarily--like, only 2 archers, a spear, and a horseman per city. Not even any SoD) during the middle ages. So yeah, I've got 14 cities (4 settled, 3 from Pacal, 3 from Hammy, 6 from Hatty, liberated 2 to Sury), and after I recover from this last war with Hatty I'm going to run away in tech and production.
It has been an interesting game, with the starting civs getting overtaken by the upstarts. This rarely happens when I don't use the "barbarian world" feature. And, you know, I kinda think the barbarian world option makes sense historically. Like, around 4000-3000 B.C., it wasn't as if the rest of the world, apart from Egypt and Sumer, were devoid of people and tribes. Some of those tribes had even settled down yet (Marija Gimbutas' matristic neolithic "Old European Culture", the Corded Ware culture of northern Europe, the Varna culture in Bulgaria, the Vinča culture of the Balkans, the Pit-Grave culture of southern Russia, the Mehrgarh culture in Pakistan, the Jomon culture in Japan, the Dilmun trader culture along the Persian Gulf, the Meluhha culture (probably the early Indus), neolithic China, etc., but these cultures didn't have writing yet so they haven't been preserved for historical posterity as real "civs."
I also had a strange instance of extreme migratory diaspora this game with Hammurabi. When I originally took Hammurabi's 3 cities to the east, I thought that I had finished him off. I saw his tech rate go flat and his city counter go to zero. I assumed he still had a workboat or something out there, and I had "require complete kills on," so I just made peace and forgot about him.
About 500 years later, I hear some conquest wailings, and I look up at the notifications and see that Hammurabi has conquered London, waaaaaaaaay up to the northeast on the other side of the map. I'm like, "whaaaa????? Is that the same Hammurabi...the...wha...huh?!" Apparently he must have had a stack wandering around, probably pursuing someone halfway across the continent (again, what is with the AI loving to pursue civs halfway across the continent?!
) when I declared war on him, and my war with him ended so quickly that he didn't even have time to get his stack back in time. So then when we made peace he probably just wandered around with his stack until he found another target that he liked/resumed going after his previous target (I wasn't really paying close attention to his diplo situation at the time, so I'm not sure what he was doing. All I knew was that his cities were only defended by like 3 units each, so I went after him). So the wandering-Babylonian came back from the dead. After I finished my war with Hatty, I healed up and sent only my horsies, without siege or any 1-move units (it was going to be too far away for anything other than a scouting/hit-and-run mission for curiosity's sake), to go see what was up with Hammurabi. He was defending London with 2 axes and a spear. I re-declare, hit him with my withdrawal-promoted horsemen, and put him out of his misery, liberating the city to the English.
Overall I thought the Babylonian diaspora was an inspiring and romantic episode that I, nevertheless, made sure to give a comical and less-than-majestic ending.