PtW, Open, goal: moooooooooo! <chews the cud> histographic
I think I only played warlord once before; my very first game of Civ3. I can see why we don't play it very often: it's pretty difficult isn't it?
Scouting: Worker W sees that there is very little land here. There is nothing worth moving to, so settle in place. Fresh water looks rather unlikely here. First build is a scouting axe. He confirms that I am isolated. There is land to the east with an elephant on it, and something else in the fog a couple of squares south of my island.
Build order: After the warrior, a settler and a temple. No granaries as there's no need for a lot of settlers or workers on this tiny speck of land. The temple I built because I misjudged my food for building the next settler, and would have had to wait several turns on 30 shields while the food bin filled up.
City locations: RCP 3 fits well on this island. There are three cities in the ring, with two on tundra and one on grass. The western city, Ur, shares the powerful bonus grass tiles with Babylon, and I use it to build Colossus, which actually isn't very useful when its city can only work a limited number of land tiles.
The dash to Mapping: Pottery (3350bc), Alphabet (2430bc), Writing (1575bc), Mapping (1050bc). I actually stunted my research quite a bit by building several city improvements, which I then had to pay upkeep on, so the science slider was not usually on full. These improvements only got built because I had a surfeit of shields relative to my needs; the forests should have come down early on and the grass used for more commerce.
Contact! My first galley slips out of Babylon in 1025bc, carrying a settler combo, and meets the Greeks, who have built a city on the elephant peninsula. Alex is way ahead of me but doesn't have Mapping, so I give it to him for contacts. By the end of the turn, I have also met Abe, Wang, Gandhi and Joan, learned War Code, Masonry, Ironwork, Mysticism and Wheel, and got all their w maps.
Abe is the tech leader (he still has Polytheism over me). Wang is the runt of the litter, with only one city, no terrain improvements, and no contact with the civ just in the fog to his north. This looks like the symptoms of raging barbarian predation to me.
QSC Stats...
4 towns with 10 happy citizens and 66 (including 17 sea) tiles claimed.
4 temples, 2 barracks, 1 colossus.
10 food in the bin, 134 shields in the box, 31 gold in the coffers.
1 settler, 2 workers, 1 galley, 4 regular warriors, 2 veteran spears.
Contact with 5 civs, embassy with 1.
All first tier techs, Ironwork, Writing, Mysticism, Mapping, Riding, 16 beakers towards Literature.
Strategy? My QSC log ends with the musing "My task now is clear; make bucketloads of bowmen and charge off for an ancient age conquest." What tosh! Luckily I decided against this plan. Bowmen against hoplites is just going to waste a golden age without any appreciable chance at military victory. I mean, a despot GA with only five towns?!?! No, what I need are swords and for that I will need iron. Of course there is some near Greece, but I can't easily connect it to my island; my elephant town is blocked in by a Greek settlement, and the iron is a fair way from its nearest coast. Then it hits me: I don't need to connect the iron to my empire, I just need a barracks in the iron town and do my upgrading over there.
Implementing the plan: Uruk founded next to Greece's iron in 650bc. In 130bc, it whips a barracks to completion (I am still a despot

, minimum researching Monarchy), and I start upgrading axes to swords. Dow on Greece in 10bc and capture Sparta and Knossos, which is the town seperating Uruk from my elephant town, Ellipi. It has recently used the whip to finish its harbour, and iron and ivory are now connected to the island of Babylonia. My swords have been doing well against the Greeks, and I capture Thermopylae in 70ad, but in 90ad I lose almost my whole army at the gates of Athens. I need to regroup, so give Alex peace for Republic in 130ad.
Political and scientific uphevals... Monarchy finally finishes in 110ad and I switch immediately. The river-bound Americans are still ahead of me in tech; they hit the medieval in 230ad, while I still need Currency and Construction. I research Currency after Monarchy and in 260ad trade it to the Greeks for Construction. We both hit medieval at the same time, and our free techs are .... [a cliffhanger]
Thoughts? What a grind. Just as with the Greek GOTM40, crawling to Mapping on one's own is an agonisingly slow business, and I wasn't hepling my cause by building improvements instead of wealth. The struggle for strategic resources was fun, and I'm glad I overcame the temptation to use the excerable bowman. In terms of my milking, I have been expanding very slowly. I need to find a way to speed up my conquest of the continent. Now, where are the nearest horses? Oh look, underneath Athens!
