My second GOTM and first attempt at describing a game...
This was quite an unusual game in that after 3900BC pretty much everything went according to plan. I could almost say that it was dull. I think this was due to the following:
1.) Even the nearest civs were very far from our starting location and nobody started to the South from us, so grabbing those horses and iron to the South, even though they were relatively far, was quite easy.
2.) The choke point where the Romans started effectively sealed off half of the Civs from us. So even though I was in war with most of them for a long time, they didn't bother me apart from the occasional lone spearman or knight that they dropped off from a boat.
3.) The other civs waged war on each other a lot.
4.) As a result of the less than spectacular starting position, I made a rather conservative plan. For example, I haven't even tried to build any Ancient or Middle Age wonders.
Anyway, rough timeline (after the fact, from memory, so a bit vague):
4000BC
Settler moves NE, mainly because I convinced myself (based on what I read in the speculation thread) that the tile under the fog to the NE-NE is a hill. I figured in worst case I will settle on that and have an easy to defend location with two bonus grasslands within reach. Accordingly, I was highly disappointed to see that the tile to the NE-NE was in fact a mountain. Nonetheless I moved the
worker West, as I had planned, to get optimum view of the surroundings. For the record, had I not read the speculation thread, I would probably have moved the settler to the North and eventually settle on the tile N-N from the starting position. The capital position I ended up with wasn't too bad either, it was next to a river, fortunately it still had two bonus grassland in the radius, and there were wines nearby. Not the best but workable.
3950BC
Settler moves N, worker moves back to the starting position.
3900BC
Settler builds Athens, worker starts road (and later mine) on the starting location.
3850BC-1000BC
Athens built 3-4 scouting warriors, some hoplites for protection and happiness, a granary, and then settler+hoplite combos at a steady but rather slow pace. We researched
Writing at minimum speed and made a killing in trading it to the other civs. I might have researched Literature the same way but its trading value wasn't noteworthy any more (so as a matter of fact I might have bought Literature from someone). The next thing we researched ourselves was Industrialization, everything inbetween was bought or "learned" from others as a courtesy of the Great Library.
I
started to scout towards West on the North edge of the jungle. The second warrior went towards
South-East to the shore and then up North, and the third to the
South across the jungle (I think there was a fourth one as well, perhaps replacing the third that died an early death).
I
met the Indians and the Chinese quickly, and then the
Romans later on. Traded for contacts to the others. All the scouting warriors were killed by barbarians, but not before we made contact with every other civ and discovered the horses and iron to the South. So in a sense losing the warriors was a blessing because they accomplished what they were meant for and I didn't have to bring them back and "feed" them. It also made me realize that barbarians were quite active in this game so I started to guard my workers with hoplites diligently. I lost only one worker when a conscript barbarian horseman killed my veteran fortified hoplite. I remember this because this was about the only outrageous thing the RNG did to me during this game.
The first wave of settlers built a
single ring of cities around Athens, plus an
extra city to get the furs near the Eastern shore. A major barbarian uprising sacked this fur-city like 20 times over shortly after it was built, but I cleverly spent all the money beforehand on building embassies and population was at 1, so the barbarians destroyed only about 5 shields and stole around 10 gold.
Shortly after we met, the
Romans demanded tribute (some technology I think). We had a deal going where we were paying large amounts of gold per turn for contact and/or tech and I didn't think they would break it, but they did and declared war. This saved us a bunch of gold, but strangely enough it also
screwed up our reputation. Nobody was willing to make gold-per-turn-for-tech deals with us afterwards. I was quite pissed about this at first but ultimately it didn't matter.
We
engaged our Indian and Chinese friends to provide a protective cushion between us and the Romans (read: military alliance), and they did such a good job that we never saw a Roman unit during this period. The Romans also dragged in someone from the Western half of the continent but those units never made it to our half, see again choke point.
Shortly after the discovery of Map Making, the
Chinese also demanded tribute (territory map and cash), which we handed over without hesitation.
1000BC-10AD
The project of
bringing the southern iron and horses within our borders was started and successfully finished during this period. You can see the project underway in the 570BC screenshot I attached. I built a city to span the distance across the jungle, another one next to the horses, and a third one next to the iron. These cities were quite far apart from each other and from the core but I figured it was worth anything to get horses and iron. Plus at that point I wasn't sure yet how far away the other civs were so I was kind of in a hurry. The plan was to connect the horses first, start building horsemen, then connect the iron and mass-upgrade to knights and teach the Chinese a lesson.
The
Indians built the Great Library in Delhi in 730BC. This further clarified our plans: grab the Great Library before we buy Education to take full advantage of the fact that the owner of the GL can learn advances past Education.
10AD-750AD
The time has finally come to
punish the insolent Chinese. We didn't have enough money to upgrade all the horsemen, so the offensive was launched with a 2:1 mix of knights and horsemen. The
Chinese went down with surprising ease, one might even say that I overengineered this attack a bit. A
Great Leader was generated right on cue, just before I was about to occupy Beijing (see second screen shot, from 580AD), so a Forbidden Palace was built in the former Chinese capital, by the books. You can see that Mycane (next to our iron ore) is building a Colosseum. That was supposed to become a Forbidden Palace until the Great Leader appeared and the opportunity of building the FP at a better location presented itself.
As a matter of fact, we were at war with the Romans, the Indians, the Egyptians, and one or two others as well during this period, so
the war went on on three fronts (to the North with the Chinese, to the West with Romans/Indians, and on the Eastern shore with the others who landed units there) for more than half a millennium. This might sound scary, but thanks to the
Golden Age that we used to produce almost exclusively knights, in reality this was all a piece of cake. The long war also produced several more Great Leaders which were rather inconsequential since there were no wonders to build (more exactly I didn't have the techs). I think I used all of them to make armies, which then also didn't make much of a difference.
At the culmination of the war, we
marched into Delhi (which, just like most other Indian cities, was now owned by the Chinese). At this point the game was, in essence, won. Via the Great Library, we learned almost all mandatory Middle Age advances, plus a few optional ones, most notably Democracy (but not Military Tradition, unfortunately).
This also reminds me of government issues. Greece was a
despotism for the longest time. A switch to
monarchy was made shortly before the Great War to be able to make the most out of the inevitable
Golden Age that started when the Chinese hordes committed suicide on the impenetrable wall of hoplites (those guys really rock, hehe
). I was debating with myself for long whether to choose
monarchy or republic. Eventually I decided in favor of monarchy due to the 2gpt unit maintenance that I believe is now standard for republics in GOTM. Still not sure if this was a good call. We stayed a monarchy until the successful introduction of Universal Suffrage, at which point we moved on to
democracy. I am sure this was a good call.
At the time I finished the first war against the Chinese, I think I would have had the choice to
continue the war on the Koreans, Romans, Chinese, and maybe Egypt, using knights, then cavalry and eventually a cavalry/infantry/artillery combo, but I decided to knock it off and
go for a research lead and tanks. The former might have yielded an earlier victory in terms of in-game time, but the latter was definitely the more time efficient in real life. This way, the late Middle Ages and much of the industrial era was an almost-zero-maintenance effort with setting up build queues and sometimes moving workers around.
Moderator Action: Went a bit further than the middle-ages
I've copied your original to the staff forum, and to save you re-writing it, I'll post it back when the final spoiler opens.