Four Thousand Years

When I started this game, I assumed I would be doing some heavy duty warring. My plan was to pump out a scout, then 2 workers and 2 settlers to start. After that I was going to build Stonehenge for culture, then focus on military. I would settle one city near horses and one near bronze. Research order would be Mining=>BW=>Animal Husbandry=>Mysticism.

I settled in place, sent my scout out to explore, and started working on another scout. Within 2 turns, my scout popped a hut for another scout so I immediately switched to a worker. When my first worker was done, he farmed the corn, then started chopping. My 2 scouts popped a few more huts for some gold and yet another scout. Eventually, my 3 scouts explored all of the land and it turns out that we are on a pretty small continent by ourselves. So the plan now is to settle the whole continent as fast as possible. My first settler settled a nice cottage spamming site to the east and my second settled near some copper. I could've grabbed horses, but I figured it was a waste of a settle since my capital would grab it before time ran out. After Stonehenge, my capital worked on a 3rd settler while my other 2 cities built a worker and some warriors. When my cities expanded, I hooked up copper and captured a barbarian city with axemen. I then used axemen/warriors to bust all of the fog on the continent, and I had 4 of my cities each produce another settlere. Meanwhile I was researching towards COL, and I probably should've waited until I finished it before settling those 4 settlers. At this point though, I figured research wasn't too important anymore so I set science to 0 and settled all of those cities. I used my workers to build some cottages, and used my cities to build granaries and a couple more settlers that would fill in the gaps when I was close to my deadline. After that, I was basically wasting time. I soon realized that there was another island close enough to reach with galleys so I tried my hardest to research sailing and get a galley out before time ran out. If I was paying attention, this would've been no problem, but with the ammount of maintenance I was paying, it turned out to be quite a struggle. I managed to barely settle one city on that island before my deadline. If I had been paying attention and researched sailing before killing my research. I probably would've been able to settle every available tile there was.

Organised three immortals factories and started looking for trouble

Declared war on Wang Kon but realised he had a warrior scouting near one of my cites.Only just got to him with an immortal from my capital.

Realised that protective capitals are hard to beat. Lost 5 immortals to Seoul before giving up. Got peace with korea to focus on Victoria. Met Isabella in 500 BC and took a couple of cities.

Basically made a huge mess of it, and realised I should have move workers up with the immortals to chop monuments.

Around 50 BC started losing units to strike.

1 AD posted embarrasing save

Built a few cottages in the capital. Teched towards catapults in order to take Madrid and London. attacked Korea and just took the small third city.
Declared on Isabella.Took Barca and started to chop monuments. But.. econ fell over again because of too many immortals/cities.
It is hard to get it right. i think it's necessary to tech to catapults with only 3 or maybe 4 cities, then produce the stack and attack with workers in tow to chop monuments. The pre catapult rush is hard because both capitals have religions and therefore high culture. My second attempt got less land than the first!

I started this game off a little differently... I did worker first, then a scout to replace my first scout who got killed. Then a warrior until I grew to size 3, then 2 settlers. First settler settled by the horses and built a worker, second one settled up north.

I researched Mining=>Animal Husbandry=>BW=>Wheel=>Pottery=>Mystisicm=>Writing=>Alphabet. After that I shut off research and went to war. Once I had 4 cities, I started mass producing Immortals and took Korea's cities 1 by one. He had about 5 cities I think. Then I started filling in some empty spaces with settlers.

Around that time, I realized that I could keep up a decent research rate by setting some of my production cities to "Research". I basically did that for kicks but it turned out to be a pretty solid strategy. And for some reason, none of the AI wanted to build the Oracle in this game. I somehow managed to grab CS around 375BC I think. In the end of the game I had a couple of settlers stocked up and settled them a few turns before 1 AD. At that point my economy was pretty much steady at 0% research. As I said, I could've done better if I had figured out that research strategy earlier and got COL earlier. I would've been able to set up a few courthouses then expand more. Oh well maybe next time.

BTW, I think Stonehenge helped me out a lot during the war phase. I wouldn't have had time to build/chop monuments while needing Immortals. Afterwards though, it wouldn't have mattered so much. And cottages were very helpful for funding my huge empire without going on strike.

I've also went to war with Immortals and razed a city and captured two in the next war.

My main mistakes:
- building settlers way too late to grab some more land. This would have made better use of the Imperialistic trait.
- going to war that far away wasn't the best decision. I wonder if just filling the gap between me and the Koreans wouldn't have been much better?!
- had no estimate about the number of techs I could get. Should have stopped research earlier and shift the money toward maintenance. Also, my decision for which techs to go proved really weak. I had Monarchy, Mathematics from a GS, but no Code of Laws until really late ("You need it for expanding! D'uh!") and no Alphabet so at times I was left with nothing useful to build when I could have built Research.

In my game the Oracle was the first wonder to get built, then either Stonehenge or Great Wall, don't remember exactly.

I guess I just got "Immortal-frenzy".