Well, this was my first ever GOTM, and it didn't go exactly to plan.
I play all the time on Diety, so I wasn't too worried about that bit. But for the past few weeks I've been playing exclusively on real world maps. While I've pretty much memorized all the city locations on them, I'm way out of practice on random maps.
So anyway, I sallied forth on this GOTM with little idea of what I was in for. My first big mistake was not destroying the Carthaginians. I hate early wars - everything is so hard before nice, modern age units! - and I try to avoid them, but now I know sometimes theres no other option. However, I entered into an alliance with the Carthaginians that held until 1948 ad - almost five thousand years!
I did my best expanding anyway, and by 1850 ad I had about 16 cities, about 10 of which were actually any good. But these were all scattered about around the Carthaginians. Meanwhile, the evil Zulus had long ago eradicated the Spanish and were now taking up pretty much two thirds of the huge supercontinent. They pushed on the Celts, between them and the Carthaginians, and they declared war on me and orange too. By 1922 they were unstoppable, first pop with about 22 million people (I was second with about 13 million). However, now the Celts cracked and the buffer state defending my western colonies went down. The Carthaginians couldn't help, and I lost about three big cities. On top of this, Zulus grabbed SETI, raced ahead in science (I was 2nd here too) and whilst dealing with all that I had to clean up heaps of pollution.
While I managed to steal all the techs I didn't have, and delay the greens for ages in the west, I was still going to go down unless I came up with something first. Never having had much experience with nukes, I thought maybe they were the answer to my problems.
well, its 1948 nowand theres been global warming once. I still have 21,450,000 people, but that wont last. After my spy got caught planting nukes in a Zulu city the turn after I built Manhattan, everyone declared war on me (including my eternal allies, the Carthaginians.) Although I'm back at peace with orange, I still see no hope for victory against the Zulus. After all, they'll have space-flight soon and I have 12 cities, only about 5 of which are any good (and they will starve down to small sizes soon, seeing as how they're all on swamps cos of global warming.)
Hmmm, I guess the Zulus made me so mad, I forgot all about my score. Oh well. Maybe next month
