Tasting good wine is a greatly rewarding experience, especially if you have the privilege to do so when wine bottles are properly selected to match a pleasing sequence of fine courses...
Of course, your wallet will have to be larger than your bladder
(btw, mine is definitely not
)
I tried COTM1 just to be among the ones who played it, so that I will be able to tell my offspring, seventy years from now, that I was actually one of the first COTMers...
It was my first real C3C game, so I missed a lot of opportunities and I ended with a 1170 domination victory which won't even compete with the best ones.
Just a few notes, then:
Start and initial expansion: I settled a couple of tiles from the starting position, along the river and between the dyes. I totally missed the point about clearing forests.
I built four Scouts and quickly explored the entire continent: when I saw the Flood Plains downstream, I decided to build a couple of "slow settler factories" there, which were in fact my second and (IIRC) fourth city.
I did get a settler from a hut, but it was a couple thousand miles from any useful place...
Without any significant food bonus, I also thought that I would spill settlers from other cities, which caused me to decide that I wanted the Pyramids as soon as possible, without waiting to capture them. So, I built them in the capital.
The rest of my expansion was towards Arabia, with which I had a couple of wars.
Soutwhards, it went very slowly across the desert, and I waited for Sumer and Babylon to reach me there.
The only exception was some penetration towards the western coast, where a hut gave me a city that I didn't really want. It was close to Iron, though, so I made some efforts to connect it in a reasonable time (a few centuries, that is...
).
Forbidden Palace: I built it fairly close to Hattusas, in the "Arabian grasslands". It was probably too close to be really effective, but I haven't got a good feeling of its effectiveness yet.
Research: I got most of the AA techs from huts. I completely forgot about the Philosophy thing, though, so I had to research the Republic myself, which took me a lot of time.
In addition, being used to Vanilla, I didn't pay too much attention to the Middle Ages free tech. I remembered that when I gifted Korea into the MA and saw that they got Engineering instead of Monotheism.
So I did the same the other scientific civs, who all got Engineering -disappointing...
I personally don't like too much this reintroduction of a free tech with Philosophy (was it in Civ2 or even in Civ1?). I mean, it more or less freezes your research path in the Ancient Ages...
Talking about that, the free city from a hut is also something that reappears from the older civs, and I do not like that either. I mean, just give me a settler and let me decide where I want the city
Wars: I started with Arabia because they were the closest and had reasonably good lands. They also got horses...
I had also forgotten the increased upgrade cost, of course
so I couldn't upgrade quite as many warriors as I wanted.
Their Spearmen must also belong to a powered-up batch, so after capturing two or three cities I had to make peace with them as I was running out of units.
The war was resumed much later on, when I wanted to start my Golden Age and I could finally wipe them with Swords and Chariots.
After wiping Arabia, I used the GA to reach Miitary Tradition while building Leonardo's Workshop.
This was done around 900 AD, and from that point on it took really a short time to wipe Sumeria and conquer enough of the other continent to reach domination.
Sumeria was really aggressive in my game.
They expanded incredibly fast, and declared war at least three times on me. I just fought defensively until I was ready to counterattack, but were they a nuisance!
Is the agricultural trait so powerful?
I also found Armies to be really effective, even more so now that great leaders won't be useful for anything else. The extra movement and the multiple attack mean really much.
In this game, I only used two-units armies, but they were more than enough.
All in all, a great game -even though I wished it would be the Incas...