I need to crop some of these pictures that appear to large right now (now cropped, original edited). But here is a draft.
Team Smackster SGOTM5 going for gold
dmanahko, Wotan, smackster, Tarkeel, MjM, tomasjj
In the start location we saw three mountains and we have three units. Now, its tempting to send one unit to each mountain to determine the best location, but we decided that Mad-Bax is unlikely to make the first move based on luck, so that each location would be largely similar.
The instructions were, move the scout to any one mountain, if you even see a hint of green then follow it with the rest of the crew. We moved SE, saw enough green and settled down there.
Plan was to jump the palace ASAP, so would not develop too much in Moscow. No thoughts about leaving the palace there and building the FP for rank corruption usage, that may just take too long to setup.
We didn't take long before we settled and began to explore. We made a decision early that we would find somebody close by so started researching WC, but soon found its an island and should have gone Writing->MM.
We built another scout, warrior, then Temple. Decided there was no point building the barracks until we were ready to start building the military.
We popped some workers and warriors, and the precious wheel that showed we had horses. We disbanded one popped warrior when unit support kicked in, and dropped some workers in Moscow.
After the temple we started on Collossus, although when it was built in 1750BC it didn't give us much being Despot.
In 1500BC we got MM, and switched Moscow to our galley pre-build, plan was to pump a few galleys and find out whats out there.
We now started research on HBR, and had decided that we would build horses all the way, and didn't need IW.
In 1325BC our first galley made a quick suicide jaunt and we met most of the world. We took all their gold, techs and maps, but they were fairly backward. We could also see that there were more islands north.
When our first galley went north, we found that there was a good route to India, and made them our first target. We also liked the land in Mecca, so the plan was invade India, jump palace, build FP in Delhi, invade Arabia, jump palace to Mecca.
We were pleased at the route to India, as we didn't need the Lighthouse. We now started to mass build horses and send them north, a few galleys went round the coast to the east and prepared for invasion.
We set the target at 6 horses, didn't really think the Regent AI would hold us back.
550BC we had the horses in place and attacked Bombay, with some very unlucky RNG is held first turn, but was soon taken, and India put up very little resistance to the steady flow of horses that was coming.
During the war our eyes were turning to barb huts at home, but all military was being sent north, things started to look dicey as barbs were coming, and the MA were approaching, I really don't want to be around in Moscow when the revolts come
By 150BC we had India begging for peace they would give us 4 cities for the peace. At that same time Monarchy was affordable and I wanted to get that and revolt before we got too many cities. Republic was not available and we were planning at least two palace jumps so Monarchy seemed overall a better option for us.
So we got Monarchy and a 4 turn anarchy, then took 4 Indian cities and peace.
Next turn it happened, somebody researched Currency and the uprisings happened.
We traded for it so that we could get our first MA tech and put our heads down towards Chivalry.
There were about 3 huts on our island, and we had a warrior and an archer for defence.
Our targetted jump city (Calcutta) was ours and we had peace with India.
Would the barbs come, would we get out in time. You'll have to find out, next time, in the SGOTM5 spoiler thread.
smackster
It's the reason I run the games.
