Game 2 - Asoka of India
Today is November 12, 2025 in my time zone. A couple weeks ago marked the 20th Anniversary of Civilization 4 and Rhye's Earth 18 map. It also marks the 20 Episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Fall of Civilizations. It features Persia. I am listening to it while I type this report and set up
This tempted me for a long time to switch our next game to Cyrus of Persia. However, it is also tanks to this podcast that I learned how to confidently pronounce (or mispronounce) Vijayanagara, the City of Victory. Our start is in a slightly different location.
All games on this thread have the same settings.
Emperor Level - The actual level of difficulty will vary based on the tier level of the empire we are playing. This is not a real Emperor Level game. It is a Noble Level game where the Player gets Emperor Level handicaps, and the AI Civs get some of the Emperor Level bonus. They get no bonus level technology. The Barbarians get no bonus level technology.
Epic Speed - This might make some games easier than others. For Egypt, this extended the number of Turns War Chariots remained relevant. This is a very big map and units become obsolete on crossing the continent.
Raging Barbarians - I do it for the entertainment value. It provides a little bit of challenge for some empires. Others are sheltered from the storm. It looked like Mali struggled for a while in the previous game. It was less of an issue for our Egypt game, because we were doing a War Chariot rush. For a while, we had lots of Barbarians to kill. We also had to fight hard for the southern part of Africa.
Aggressive AI - This might help us. It might hurt us. We do not know yet. It would be really funny if this reduced the level of relation at which an AI will start a plot. Suddenly everybody is plotting at Friendly!
Choose Religions - I have this on for flavor. The drawback is we do not know which religion technologies have been taken and we can only guess. We have a better chance of guessing who got the religion. We are guessing if Monty or Wayne in the New World get a religion, then they will select as close to normal as they can.
Here we will introduce Asoka, the third ruler of the Mauryan Dynasty in what is now Northern India. Looking at the map, it is a good thing that our game starts at India and not where the map says Pataliputra is, about two tiles east of the Warrior, surrounded by nothing by Jungle.
Spiritual - We keep Hatty's Spiritual trait. We had good experience with this. Our main use was changing civics on a whim. We tried to synchronize whips into a 5 turn cycle, then switch to something else. The other use is cheaper Temples. Whatever.
Organized - Here we are trading in Creative, which we will miss terribly. Creative gave our cities an early 2 culture boost and 8 turn border pop. It also gave us cheaper Libraries. Now we have to be more somewhat more deliberate with our city placement if we want to capture resources in our first ring. Organized gives us cheaper civics, which we are likely to find amazing, especially as our empire grows. It also gives us cheaper Courthouses.
Fast Worker - Out goes the War Chariot. The good news is we have a Unique Unit that is useful right away and in all ages. We have a Worker with a movement of 3. The bad news is it is not a combat unit, but whatever. We should be much more efficient clearing all that Jungle and bringing India up to its potential as a world superpower.
Mausoleum - The Obelisk we built before might have been nothing more than a distraction. The use we tried to make was to get an early Great Prophet and Holy City. This might have been a dangerous distraction, because we spent the entire game in a different religion and we spent a bunch of resources spreading our own religion when we could have been letting the AI do it for us. From looking at the Mausoleum, it arrives late, which means we should never be building it. It also does very little, which means we should never be building it. In the even that we are building it, then we are likely in a wartime war weariness emergency, and in addition to the reduction of war weariness, we get a happiness boost.
Mysticism - Given that we are not pursuing the early religions, this is a wasted slot. It gives us a small discount towards Masonry. We might save 25 to 30 science on this. It is unlikely to be trade bait. However, we are shielded from having to pickup Mysticism in order to trade our way up the religion tree. Further, we are not Creative. In the very early game, it might be an option to build a Monument and get an early border pop. However, we will make our best effort to avoid this.
Mining - The combination of Mysticism and Mining gives us the best discount towards Masonry. It also gives us a direct route to Bronze Working and, more importantly, Iron Working. It opens up Mines right away, but we have nothing to mine.
The bad news is we have a mismatch between our starting technologies and our starting position. Of the other 4 starter technologies, we need all four. Speaking of the starting position, here it is.
We mentioned the Mauryan Empire and Pataliputra. We believe that is two or three tiles east of the Warrior, surrounded by nothing but Jungle. We have Delhi, instead. We cannot see very much yet, but there are lots of resources.
1. Green River Rice
2. Brown Wheat
3. Desert River Wheat - not a Flood Plain, but the Farm makes it equivalent.
4. Green River Sugar
5. Green River Cow
6.
@Plains-Cow
7. Brown Elephant
8. Green River Jungle Dye
Not counting the Brown Elephant, we have 7/21 special tiles. We can also take out the Desert Wheat to make it 6/21. It's a solid capital and appears to have amazing potential for a Jeep Farm.
The plans we have so far are:
What Gummy suggested. Roleplay the Vedic Aryans. Roleplay the Scythians. Roleplay Tomyris of the Scythians and kill Cyrus the Great of Persia.
What Plains Cow suggested. Beat China to Southeast Asia. Take out China. Win.
I was thinking about a Great Lighthouse attempt. If we win the race to Southeast Asia, then the Spice Islands and Australia will be open. Those cities will be much more profitable with 2 extra trade routes. However, we see several problems:
1. We do not have a coastal start. We have to choose a coastal city.
2. We have a lot of land to secure against Barbarians.
3. We need Iron Working.
4. We compete with Louis, who is coastal.
We are not saying this cannot be done. We believe it can be done with a solid plan and a solid backup plan.
Overall, we believe this run will be two tier levels more difficult than the Egypt run and we might make some ratings as follows:
S Tier, Cheat Mode - Rome, England and China are our guesses.
A Tier, Easy Mode - We are putting Egypt here for now.
B Tier
C Tier - We are guessing India ends up here.
D Tier
F Tier
We are giving this about 20 hours for planning and our initial thoughts will follow in the next post.
