It wasn't easy at all! I had been traumatized over this game for many months. It took me over 4 months and over 200 hours through many sleepless nights in the attempt. The milking itself took less than 50 hours, but beating Sid required at least a hundred hours of game time and another 500 hours dreaming about it. I do mean 500 hours or more of planning for the next moves (sometimes, I did it in my sleeps). There were many nights I lay in bed thinking about what I should do next. Should I invade Persia or Greece? Should I wait for cavalry or should I launch my horseman? Should I spend all my gold to arm my knights or should I save it for future trading opportunity? There were a lot of questions and usually not enough answers! Even after I had made a decision to invade Persia before Greece, more questions needed to be answered after that. Should I invite the Greece to join my quest for Persia or should I not? Can they be trusted? While most of my troops are away from home, they could easily storm my palace with ease! What should I do to prevent that from happenning? A lot of questions need to be answered before I even actually play the game. Sometimes, I debated with myself for weeks about my next move. Looking back, I really don't know how I was able to do all that. May be it was just pure luck that the Greece didn't storm my castle or the Persian without Immortal nor they have anything better than spears and arrows.