Archaelicos
Warlord
After my initial success with Pericles, I decided to play Dido. With the Pericles game, I had a road map laid out for me by a "pro", but I've never watched anybody play Dido. My strategy was to go with an Archipelago map, which I figured would benefit Dido and disadvantage the AI, but I went random on basically everything else. Here's my set-up screen:
My opening spot wasn't amazing. I almost moved to settle on the tobacco but I decided that I needed to take advantage of Dido's seafaring abilities ASAP and having to wait on sailing and getting a Cothon up before I could build biremes seemed like the wrong approach, so I settled on the coast. This shot is on turn 23, on the verge of pushing out my first settler. The island I started on was basically a donut with a big sea in the middle, and city-states one either side of me that REALLY slowed down getting to the east end of the island, which is where all the good settling spots are. I got an early pantheon and went with God of the Sea (+1 production from fishing boats).
By turn 73 I only had 4 cities. Spreading out was proving difficult. I wanted to make sure I covered my own island before I branched out. I didn't pay as much attention to Dido's continent-based loyalty system as I probably should have. There could have been forward-settling opportunities. At any rate, I befriended everybody early on except Peter, who hated me throughout most of the game due to lagging behind in science and culture. In the shot below, I'm trying to work settlers over to the east side of the island and working on getting Cothons out. My idea was to maximize trade and use that to generate money to buy buildings. Also you'll see I had Wilhelmina in my game, so of course, she loved me for it. I was dreading Norway or Kupe being in the game and competing with me.
I originally had designs on using canals to open up that inner city and going navy-aggressive, but the game just didn't evolve into war so I just went peaceful. Other than a few archers I upgraded for eurekas moments, I never built much in the way of land units. The shot below is from turn 179, when I was in last place in science and begun to save money and work on Big Ben. I got the timing down pretty well, but not perfect. When Big Ben was built, I had about 14k in gold, and quickly bought libraries + universities + sewers basically everywhere, and finished chemistry shortly after and put in research labs.
Within 100 turns I had catapulted to first place. Bear in mind that I believe in the screen shot above, Kongo already had a spaceport. I closed that gap and took the lead in 100 turns. I also churned out spies and destroyed at least 2 dozen spaceports, starting with them, and then making the rounds. Between that and the utterly ridiculous rate at which global warming hits (even after the recent changes), the map killed off my opponents pretty aggressively. Just check out the plight of Australia:
That's absurd. I build 2 coal plants the entire game and we hit MAX flooding. It literally drowned the Pyramids. DROWNED THE PYRAMIDS, folks. And since there's literally nothing you can do about it (which, as an aside, is I'm sure NOT the scientific message the publish intends to send, if they intend to send any), I just build flood barriers and ignore it. Why bother? You can't fix it.
And here's my victory lap screen just before I won:
Turn 316 it looks like. Overall a relatively easy game. I don't like though that once the industrial age hits, you're basically on a clock to win or your entire civilization is swallowed by the ocean. I don't want 100% realism to our world's time frame, but we've been aggressively churning carbon into the atmosphere for 200 years and there's been some warming, and some sea level rise, but the PYRAMIDS ARE NOT VANISHING UNDER THE WAVES, not now, not in the next 1,000 years. The mechanic is so aggressive that it's not fun or interesting, it's just an annoyance that causes the fall to fall apart on an absurdly short time span. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish with it, but whatever it is, I hope it's got nothing to do with game design.
My opening spot wasn't amazing. I almost moved to settle on the tobacco but I decided that I needed to take advantage of Dido's seafaring abilities ASAP and having to wait on sailing and getting a Cothon up before I could build biremes seemed like the wrong approach, so I settled on the coast. This shot is on turn 23, on the verge of pushing out my first settler. The island I started on was basically a donut with a big sea in the middle, and city-states one either side of me that REALLY slowed down getting to the east end of the island, which is where all the good settling spots are. I got an early pantheon and went with God of the Sea (+1 production from fishing boats).
By turn 73 I only had 4 cities. Spreading out was proving difficult. I wanted to make sure I covered my own island before I branched out. I didn't pay as much attention to Dido's continent-based loyalty system as I probably should have. There could have been forward-settling opportunities. At any rate, I befriended everybody early on except Peter, who hated me throughout most of the game due to lagging behind in science and culture. In the shot below, I'm trying to work settlers over to the east side of the island and working on getting Cothons out. My idea was to maximize trade and use that to generate money to buy buildings. Also you'll see I had Wilhelmina in my game, so of course, she loved me for it. I was dreading Norway or Kupe being in the game and competing with me.
I originally had designs on using canals to open up that inner city and going navy-aggressive, but the game just didn't evolve into war so I just went peaceful. Other than a few archers I upgraded for eurekas moments, I never built much in the way of land units. The shot below is from turn 179, when I was in last place in science and begun to save money and work on Big Ben. I got the timing down pretty well, but not perfect. When Big Ben was built, I had about 14k in gold, and quickly bought libraries + universities + sewers basically everywhere, and finished chemistry shortly after and put in research labs.
Within 100 turns I had catapulted to first place. Bear in mind that I believe in the screen shot above, Kongo already had a spaceport. I closed that gap and took the lead in 100 turns. I also churned out spies and destroyed at least 2 dozen spaceports, starting with them, and then making the rounds. Between that and the utterly ridiculous rate at which global warming hits (even after the recent changes), the map killed off my opponents pretty aggressively. Just check out the plight of Australia:
That's absurd. I build 2 coal plants the entire game and we hit MAX flooding. It literally drowned the Pyramids. DROWNED THE PYRAMIDS, folks. And since there's literally nothing you can do about it (which, as an aside, is I'm sure NOT the scientific message the publish intends to send, if they intend to send any), I just build flood barriers and ignore it. Why bother? You can't fix it.
And here's my victory lap screen just before I won:
Turn 316 it looks like. Overall a relatively easy game. I don't like though that once the industrial age hits, you're basically on a clock to win or your entire civilization is swallowed by the ocean. I don't want 100% realism to our world's time frame, but we've been aggressively churning carbon into the atmosphere for 200 years and there's been some warming, and some sea level rise, but the PYRAMIDS ARE NOT VANISHING UNDER THE WAVES, not now, not in the next 1,000 years. The mechanic is so aggressive that it's not fun or interesting, it's just an annoyance that causes the fall to fall apart on an absurdly short time span. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish with it, but whatever it is, I hope it's got nothing to do with game design.
