Settled on hill, got to 3pop and got myself 2 quick settlers. First city was settled close to north with jungle gems in expanded border. Second city was used to claim the city to east against rapid expanding india. Claiming horses and wheat.
Original idea was to do an early war against india and steal a worker or two, but he wasn't interested in moving a worker close to the border and so I abandoned that idea.
Expanded to 5 cities and teched my way peacefully to Currency. India was pulling away both in techs and cities and I realized around 400 BC that he didn't have access to any metal and seemed to be power building wonders and religion and didn't seem to tech against fedulism. So I decided to go all out horse archers and set my research slider accordingly. He had iron in a border city close to me but it only had trade routes through me, so I immediately closed borders with him to make it impossible for him to build spearmen in his cities until he hooked it up by roads.
At 25BC I had 6 keshik and captured my first of his cities. At 125AD Delhi and Pataliputra fell (got stonehenge and pyramids) and at 200AD I captured Agra and Bombay and had only around 5 Keshik left alive so I decided to stop the war for a couple of his techs (Theology & Monarchy). And started pondering on what to do next.
I decided to build Apostlic palace since hinduism had spread to almost all my cities and me and India were the only people with this tech, and he was in buddhism. Except for India, the tech rate of the other players were kinda slow so I decided to win lib race and do a race for cuirs.
Built up my infrastructure (temples, monastaries, forge, courthouses), expanded my capitol. Won lib race around 1200 or so, and had close to 30 cuirs at 1310 AD. And
decided to knock on the doors toward babylon, scoreleader who was weakly defended
(no elephants) and had a decent amount of cities and seemed to be doing good in techs at the moment, but lagging behind me.
Wiped him out at 1450AD and had 75 Cuirs alive at that point, Korea was close by and last in scores, declared on him and capitulated him only a couple of turns later. At this point (1510 AD) The celts had managed to tech to chemistry and had grenadiers and had started a war against Sumeria and they wanted my assistance. I decided to be of assistance and captured as many cities as I could. Sumeria peace vasseled to Brennus just when I was about to wipe him out. Brennus got cavs, grenadiers and rifles and I had 100cuirs or so. I decided to give him a push and a long slow war began where each city had lots of culture and 4-5 riflemen defending, killing ~10-15 of my troops before they finally fell it and he had an army of 20-30 troops running around and killing me. After many fights I managed to get him to capitulate to me, I was running ~100 negative gold on 0% slider and was pretty drained from 300 years of whipping.
After that it was only a matter of time before the culture spread and my domination victory was secured.
All in all, a fun game and I finally got around to get my 2nd Immortal win. In the game, I built 288 Cuirs. That's a personal record
