Leowind
Emperor
For good or ill, my story of conquering the Romans. Prince level, large random map, 7 civs, raging hordes. I started on ENTIRELY plains squares, my first 3 or 4 cities. Eventually found a river to found my science city. Bottled up the Greeks on a penninsula until I had the troops/diplomats/gold to conquer them. By then I had determined that I was on a large continent which was basically a network of penninsulas strung together. The only other civ on *my* continent was the Romans far, far to the south, across a very barren area, but occupying a rather nice bit of land themselves. I posted units on either side of them at good choke points to keep an eye on them until I could get some settlers sailed down there to build cities at both choke points. About this time I expired the Great Library they had, which was the only thing keeping them in the tech race, as they had no contact with any other civs. Unfortunately, they had recieved Gunpowder from the Grt. Lib. before then, so I knew they had Musketeers. Best I had was cannons, and their capital was walled, so I was leery of a frontal assault, fearing if they had veteran Musketeers my cannons would die on their walls. I wanted to try going after their capital first, which would make the rest of the cities cheaper to incite, keeping them largely intact. I kept throwing diplomats at the capital and destroyed everything but the walls, but never got the walls down. After discovering Espionage, I threw a few Vet spies at the walls, also, to no avail. Finally I got fed up and just attacked with my two cannons, knowing they had 5 Musketeers. Amazingly, both cannons survived. A third cannon was able to join them the next turn, and Rome fell a couple turns later. Took two more turns to buy up the rest of the Roman Empire(about 5 more cities), and now I have a nice city base from which to explore the Eastern ocean and find the backside of the large continent containing all the other civs, who are all at war with me, incidentally. What did I learn? Sometimes it doesn't pay to wait *too* long.
Off to conquer the Sioux next
(after the GOTM2 is finished, of course)
Off to conquer the Sioux next
