Thanks to Stormreaver I did a nice start in this months GotM 8.
If I did not take his tips in the pregame discussion on hand, I might not have succeeded this good and may not have learned the things I learned by doing this. It does make me aware of how important it is to plan ahead when playing Civilization!
Unfortunately my initial scout went westward, so I discovered soon enough that there was not much land there. When he went east, he was soon killed by some devious lions, so it was the Americans who met me in 3080 BC rather then me finding them.
The initial plan of Stormreavers help was to first produce a workboat, then a worker, then a unit and then a settler, thus maximizing the growth of Berlin and the rest of the empire. This worked really well: in 2160 BC there was a fishing boat for the fish and the gold, pigs and copper are all in production. This meant Berlin was a powerful city! By this time I also found Hamburg just south of the corn NE of Berlin sealing of some needed land for my empire. It wouldnt surprise me if the Americans would develop rather quickly so I had to hurry to claim land for myself.
In 1320 I produce the first galley. Now I can go on exploring. It would be nice to meet some new people and be able to trade with them.
After building a lighthouse in Berlin I wanted to build a Great Lighthouse
but I could not. Here comes in my low knowledge of Civ 4: I just needed another tech (masonry I guess) to do this, but did not look this up until it was too late and it was build by someone else
.
By 1000 BC a Barb city was on the land near the wine. This was a problem, I wanted to claim the land as mine, but did not have enough axes to take the city which was founded on a hill. It took me quite long to get around this problem, by that time Washington had taken most of the land on the eastern part of the island. I probably could have done this better, but I did not have a lot of military and took more focus of settling the rest of the land first and building some more galleys.
925 BC met Tokugawa
200BC met Isabelle
175AD Catherine
600 Cyrus
680 Victoria
Around 500BC I started to doubt if I could hold up my economy. I was at 70% research and was at doubt if I could keep this up if I wanted to grow (which was my plan: to settle on 1 or more islands for needed resources). An option was to go and build lots of axes and go for US land, but that would be not so good for economy in the short run. Also the US was the bigger player, so chance would be big he would kick my but. Still my few cities were quite big and spewing out quite some axes. I decided I could try, but never got there (luckily I guess).
By 500 AD I am doing better then I had expected, for a monarch game. Catherine and Washington have a higher score (about 100 points, but then there is me and I lead Cyrus and Toku by about 100 points. Not bad at all.
Research is still going at 70% which keeps me up to date, but not in the lead.
My cities are fairly big, I can whip a lot and I have the hanging gardens in Berlin (since 300 AD). This just might get me somewhere.
I built mine around 1400BC and thought it was perfectly safe. I never seen the AI build it before 1200BC and only a one or two times before 1000BC on monarch. Guess it is the effect of archipelago maps, though in my game I didn't experience and wonder craziness from AI. Anyway, it only make such approach even stronger, It is nice to get MC with Oracle, but you don't loose anything if you fail. The next games will hopefully be at Emperor and Immortal levels (and maybe even Deity after that). I don't think many people will try a direct CS slingshot then.
), prophet - islam.
