I don't have any great or insightful comments to make (although the game is still within reach, and actually not too far behind in some ways, what I'd expect to be on emperor at this point), but I just wanted to give a shout out that I'm in & playing again, I'd sat out the last few (since last Oct or Nov?) while the lower difficulty levels were cycled through again. I started a couple weeks ago but then had to leave it, but finally found the time again & went through and well past 500 over the weekend. Fun game.
I settled on the plains hill (the one that turned out to be iron -- alas I put off iron working so long it almost didn't matter -- I went for BW right away but then went on a different tech path after that, the game might have gone different if I'd just gone for IW right away, but I didn't and I did not get it til ~600BC-- and so did not have any metals to build axe/sword and be very offensive ;( My second city I also inadvertently settled on a resource, on the horse on the west coast, but this time it was a little more useful -- when I got AH I instantly had horses & could build chariots.
Wars and Competition with AI
I'd already started harassing KK by this time, pulled of an early worker almost as early as was possible (turn 21). But since I did not have the firepower to do anything more (just warriors, then eventually archers, then chariots, and then finally sword/axe, and my first build was a worker so the 2nd warrior was far too late to matter), I just parked on the forested hills outside his capital to make sure he did not expand. It was pretty insane what he did, he kept whipping archers, at one point he had maybe 8 of them in there. I was worried that he would be able to expand again, he had enough archers for escort of both workers and settlers & could ignore my archers, so the chariots were perfectly timed.
I never did wipe out KK, but I effectively neutered him, by staying at war with him continuously for 4000 years, from 3450BC to 415AD, positioning units around his capital to box him in, attacking whenever he tried to venture out. Meanwhile I expanded to E, W, and N. He did expand to a second city around 500BC, one on coast to NW of his start, but I almost immediately captured and razed that, and he did not again get a second (and third) city again until after we signed the peace treaty in 415AD. But neither that second city (on the coast just SW of his capital, with an overlapping fat cross with it) or third (in the SW desert, in an almost useless spot) would amount to much, so I felt I had effectively knocked him out of the game, although I was impotnet to kill him at first, by the end of our war I was only letting him live because it served my purposes (see below).
I signed peace in 415AD for two reasons:
- Because Gandhi demanded attention. He had expanded massively while I kept KK down, he had far out-teched and I had < 2/3 the score of him at this point, was also building wonders like crazy (including GL, before I even had aesthetics). I also had < 2/3 the cities -- and frankly that was too much, I did not have CoL yet and my economy had just about crashed, I could only manage to stay green at maybe 20% research rate. He was friendly with me (we had the same religion, there was only one founded one our continent, Confucianism by him), but I discovered to my dismay that he would not give/trade me techs that he believed he had a monopoly on (and at this point the only other civ he knew of was KK, and he was largely irrelevant by this point), even when we became friendly (I thought he would). I had tried to get friendly because I thought I read on boards that he would give me tech if we were friendly. Oops. So I was behind him in tech, falling further behind, and also behind him in size and unable to expand because of economic problems. It looked like "now or never" to take him on if I wanted any hopes of winning.
- KK had just discovered Horseback Riding and was willing to give it to me in peace treaty, meaning I would finally have a fast complement to my swordsmen in any action against Gandhi.
Wonders
The only world wonder I built (or even tried to build, beyond maybe a couple turns of the hanging gardens) was Pyramids. IMO this was the most critical wonder too, that +3 happiness for representation was a godsend in that early game until I got calendar, and with my economy on life support for so many hundreds/thousands of years specialists & subsides from pillaging were the only ways I managed to keep any research going. It was a minor miracle I got the 'mids, I did not start them til 470 BC, and even when starting I was mostly expecting to just get cash out of the hammers because I would be beat to them (there were all sorts of early wonders being built in "far away lands" by then, including oracle, before I even had the tech to start them). I finshed the Pyramids in 65 BC. My guess is that the New World had marble, but not stone???
500AD Status
So my status at 500 AD: KK neutered, but Gandhi pulling way ahead of me, so I turn away from KK and start prepping for war with Gandhi. Using the HR I just got from KK in 415 AD, I start building stables, more barracks, and horse archers, while I decide to continue to ignore CoL and instead focus the meager research I can achieve on getting catapults -- I don't think there's any way I can take down Gandhi's cities without them, and if I don't take down some of Gandhi's cities, I will never catch him. I get mathematics almost the same time I settle for peace with KK and start working on construction. But I don't get that til 550 AD, so that will have to wait for another spoiler.
During the game a few of the rankings come up ("most advanced," "most powerful") come and and reveal that, as much as I'm behind Gandhi by this point, he is behind at least two other civs in "far away lands." KK is at the bottom of this list, but I think I was always at best just a couple slots above him. It's clear to me that not only do I have to take a bite out of Gandhi before his tech makes him out of reach for our own relative purposes, but even if I do pull that off, it looks like it may still leave me with little more than a prayer of catching up with these far-away civs
Thoughts
Nice map, it made for a different game than I'm used to, this "two worlds meet" thing was looking to be neat, all the time I was playing my game I kept getting these great general was born in a far away land messages, left & right. Ouch, must be some warmongers over there! It's getting a little ahead of this spoiler, but it had the very neat effect of
making this BOTM almost two games -- the battle for our starting continent, and the jockeying for position in "the final showdown" with whatever you meet in "the New World." A very fun game to come back to BOTM to, thanks DS!
In hindsight, besides the already mentioned unfortunate bad luck of delaying researching IW which limited my early offensive effectiveness -- and made it impossible to knock out KK, until the point that I n longer wanted to knock him out, since my economy could not absorb any more cities & if I razed/took it, it would just open up a lot of territory for Gandhi to just expand more -- I wonder if I made a mistake going after KK at all. If I had let him grow, not only might he have kept Gandhi more in check, but he would have also teched more & then there would be some non-monopoly techs for Gandhi to trade with me. Oh well. I had this idea (read it somewhere her I thought) that Gandhi would let me demand monopoly techs from him once we were friendly, when I discovered that was not true it was far too late to change course.
edit: Wow, you are super strict on what's considered spoiler. *sigh* right back at you. I'll just shadow from now on. Regards, cas 
But by 500 AD things are improving -- eight cities, research at 60% with a profit and growing.
I do not know what the other AIs are doing, wherever they are in the world, but they have not been building wonders. The Colossus, Parthenon, and Great Library are all still available, and I have a settler on the way to the far northern marble to help boost some late tries for the various marble wonders.
Either that or the extremely difficult difficulty level, my economy just couldn't handle it. Through the first rounds of the game was okay. KK decided to declare war on Ghandi and asked me to join, so I said 'ok'. So I decided to switch to a military production (since I couldn't build any new buildings anyway) in most of my cities, and put them all in my southernmost city. After KK declared peace with Ghandi, I tried to do the same, but Ghandi was arrogant and wouldn't have peace unless I gave him that city where all the units were sitting, so i said this is it, and overproduced crazy amounts of military units, and took a city of his, then tried peace. He wanted it with the condition that he got his city back, and i was cool with that since my units were going on strike anyways, so I couldn't afford the upkeep anyways. Declared peace and now I'm gonna have to radically change my economy now :-/ Obviously not gonna win, just trying to finish the game for the hard difficulty experience.
