What a totally evil,
evil map!
I settled 2S to get the plains hill and 2 cows. The scout quickly got eaten by a bear, but not before he'd discovered we were basically completely boxed in by Zara and Gandhi. 2nd city to pick up all the food on the East, built with a size 2 capital working 2 cows to get it out before I lost the spot. 3rd city South for the wheat, and 4th on the island South for the horses. And that was basically it. I took advantage of the high production in the capital to build an early Stonehenge and Great Lighthouse, and then had little choice but to axe-rush the neighbours. So I declared on Zara, who promptly brought both Frederick AND Genghis into the war. This must've been around 2000 BCish, and from that time until around 1000ADish, I seemed to be constantly at war - usually against 3 opponents at the same time. I dread to think what my science rate was, but I didn't get to civil service until - if I recall correctly - sometime after 500 AD, and I didn't even have construction then. I was basically wearing down opponents by sheer force of numbers of axes and swords (which I have to admit, turned out to be more effective than I expected, even if it was a very expensive strategy for unit costs)
And the worst of it was - even when you axe-rushed your opponents, there was still no sodding food! Almost nothing but plains everywhere. I mean, there's only so many plains that a single grassland corn will feed. I don't think I've ever built so many farms and so few cottages. The only thing that kept my science going at all was the great lighthouse, and that sometime around 500AD I built the Colossus - in the capital. Using the capital as a wonder-farm isn't usually the best strategy but, needs must...
Actually I tell a lie. There was some good lush grassland - around Germany. I hunted high and low for a place I could make a decent capital before deciding that Berlin (captured around 500ADish) was the best option. Only trouble was - Huayna Capac had built the Apostolic Palace and had clearly decided that Frederick was his friend - because he kept proposing votes to give German cities back to the Germans. I couldn't afford having +5 unhappiness added every 10 turns for defying resolutions, so had figured the least bad approach was to vote 'no' and then when the city got reassigned, promptly declare war to take it back. Usually that works well - but when the city being reassigned is 3/4 of the way through building a palace ... Ouch! After that episode, I gave up on Berlin as a capital, and just stuck with a wonder-producing almost-no-science capital in Ulundi.
Finally - around 1000 AD - breakthrough. My lands now covered amost everywhere East of Berlin, apart from the Corner where Gandhi still lived. Somehow I'd become big enough to pay for the army and science suddenly started to shoot up. That's the first point that I started to draw ahead of the AI. I was weary enough of constant fighting that I took advantage of the situation, and just started building libraries, markets, banks and so on everywhere. This meant that around 1500 AD I was able to declare war again, but this time with cannon and infantry against - well, mainly longbows and Mongolian keshiks. I removed Mongol from the starting continent, then then - now with tanks - turned my attention to Africa (mainly Germany), and finally Europe (mainly Incan, his riflemen against my modern armour. I
like that kind of war
). By the time it ended, I had about 94% of the World's population. Frederick was my vassal, with one size 1 city in Florida, Huayna and Genghis also had a couple of cities in the new world.
Oh yes, I won the space race in 1886AD. Probably not going to get any medals for that kind of date, by hey I won the super-evil, fight-your-way-out-of-the-cage, no-food-anywhere map. And a base score of 8153 isn't too bad
) After settling a few cities in Australia and North America, I decided it would be a good idea to try to militarily entice my neighbors to trade me some techs as I was behind. Before I could get around to declaring war on Mansa, my 'friend' Genghis declared war on me and 10 turns later Mansa pulled a religions victory. Majority of votes came from the Germans, I think they has been drinking.
