NIC - No Improvement Challenge Example game and Spoilers

[badams52]

I will get to the first Screenshot and retelling of my game tomorrow, and you may be surprised when I get to the results, but today I will let you know the set-up. Others may post their games to this thread as well.

My settings:
Standard Map, Continents, 70% Land mass, Temperate, 4 Billion years old.

I chose the Chinese because I was looking for leaders and quick promotions of units (given I wouldn't be building barracks) as well as quick workers. A good case can be made for commercial as well since your corruption will be reduced and you will have much of it without courthouses or the forbidden palace.

The rules I used are illustrated in the NIC Proposal thread so I won't restate them here.

Some things to think about before the stories begin: without harbors and airports, trading of resources can only happen with civs that started on your continent or civs that build a city and harbor/airport on your continent. The resources you have for your productive cities will come from your starting island only (better hope you're not placed on an island without many resources or luxuries).

You will have many, many unproductive cities, now is the time to find the best use for them.

Next post: Saturday

[yxhuvud]

Please post a savegame, so that other people can try.

[badams52]

I wish I could post a 4000 BC saved game (and I should have saved it), instead, I can post a 580 AD saved game early Saturday so you can try from there. Maybe if you ask Dominae, he can post his 4000 BC saved game (if he has it) so that you may try.

Edit: AD date correction.

[Dominae]

Here is the 4000BC save from the NIC game I'm currently trying to finish. I'm not off my island yet, but things have gone fabulously well otherwise. Actually, you could almost say this map was tailor-made for NIC. Anyone who wants to give it a try with me, you're more than welcome.

The game is with AU mod 1.16 (just a warning for those who despise mods).

Edit: Here are the settings:

Emperor difficulty
Carthaginians
Small world, continents, 5 billion years, wet
Restless Barbs
Everything else more or less standard


Dominae

[Bluefrog]

What difficulty, Dom? Emp?

[Datajack Franit]

Screenshots?

[badams52]

Settings:
Civ 1.29f
Monarch, Chinese, non-culture related placement, everything standard.

Mao began his reign in 4000 BC with a hatred of culture and a desire to eradicate the world of all civilizations who produced culture. Mao lays down the groundwork by founding 9 cities grabbing 2 luxuries and much needed iron in the process, but was unable to secure any sources of horses as the Americans control the continent’s only source. Shunning development and all scientists, Mao ingeniously buys all the techs he need from his neighbors and wheels and deals grabbing the necessary knowledge to build swordsmen. It would only be a matter of time till Mao purged the three civilized societies – Iroquois, Americans and Japanese - from his continent. Mao goes forth with his massive armies to conquer the lowly 7-city empire of the Iroquois, who lay next to him. The Iroquois without a source of horses for mounted warriors proved little resistance to Mao as he wipes them out before 580 AD.

[badams52]

Save game from 580AD

[badams52]

During Mao’s rush on the Iroquois, Japan decided to get into the action and declared war on the Chinese. Seeing a great chance to wipe out the Japanese, Mao obliged by sending forth a large detachment of swordsmen toward the Japanese empire while keeping the pressure on the Iroquois. The Japanese-destroying soldiers razed Edo with ease giving them great ambition to take down the capitol city Kyoto next. But their ambition was not enough as Mao watched as swordsman after swordsman died at the city walls. Seeing a great stalemate if both wars were allowed to continue, Mao quickly made peace with the Japanese and focused his forces on destroying the Iroquois.

After capturing the Iroquois city of Salamanca brought the Hanging Gardens, The Great Lighthouse and much needed spices under Mao’s power. Having built galleys, Mao sets forth to explore the world to find other civilizations. His first galley traverses the ocean unharmed in a stroke of luck and finds the Egyptian island. Continuing their exploration Mao becomes disheartened as he makes contact with the Persians, the Indians and finally the Aztecs while finding out his continent is the smaller of the two and all the other civilizations are more advanced than his. Mao negotiates with the eastern countries, especially the Persians who are behind the others, as much as he can while leaving the Americans and Japanese in the dark about his newfound scientific advances.

Having learned Chivalry and wanting to add riders to his arsenal, Mao looks forth at the Americans and declares war. Seeing the Japanese borders are between he and America, Mao makes a right of passage agreement with the Japanese to ensure quick reinforcements. Mao dispatches his swordsmen to quickly capture the American cities and begins to learn that capturing isn’t going to work well as a few of the captured cities dispose of the new Chinese government in favor of the culture rich American government. Mao takes quick note of this and believes razing cities is the best way to go for future wars.

[badams52]

To complete Mao’s dream of global domination, he sought to rid his continent of cultural contamination; though doing so would eradicate any trade possibilities with non-continental nations. Mao believed the 4 luxuries he found on his continent would be enough to keep the people happy.

Mao fearing the rise of the Japanese samurai having tasted their cold hard steel before, devised a plan to keep Japan from building such a world dominating force. He would quickly dispatch his riders to disrupt the supply like to Japan’s only source of iron. The other problem facing Mao would be the temporary disruption of his own horse supply line staying his ability to build more riders. Mao realized that securing Kagoshima would be the fastest way to regain usage of his horses and moved a large dispatch of pikemen, riders, and swordsmen to quickly overwhelm the defending forces of the key city. Upon the expiration of the right of passage agreement, Mao declared war on Japan, and put his master plan into action. The quick riders cut off the Japanese iron supply without much resistance and held off retaliatory attacks long enough for the pikemen to secure a defensive position. With Kagoshima unable to hold up under the sheer numbers of swordsmen and riders, it fell quickly as did the Japanese hopes for stopping the Chinese horde. Japan’s death came quickly and now Mao began to scheme and plan the downfall of his next victim, whoever that might be.

[badams52]

Having secured his continent and nearby islands, Mao now focused his desires to eradicate the other lands from those culture rich elitists! Without embassies or spies to help him with intelligence, Mao used his galleys, caravels, and the bargaining table to learn what knowledge and defense units his enemies possessed.

Mao saw that he would need a large armada of unit filled galleons if he wished to invade the elitists, and as the Aztecs declared war on Mao (Mao laughed as he never saw any invading forces from them), he knew someone would be ripe for the taking.

As the elitists’ research forged ahead, Mao’s 33 gpt seemed to be enough to keep him slightly behind their lead buying what he could when he could. Mao quickly bought his way up to military tradition and then realized hid riders couldn’t learn to ride with guns. Though he had the money, he would have to keep or disband the outdated riders and produce new cavalry as regular units.

As Mao started producing the Cavalry he needed for his assault, he bought and, gasp, researched his way into magnetism. For the first time, Mao realized the price of new technologies became too great for him to buy and decided to enlist the aid of a scientist in one of his size 6 towns. At this point, most of his size 6 towns were producing settlers (1 every 30 turns) and using 3 citizens as taxmen and three citizens to work the land for the necessary 12 bales of food they needed. The sheer number of size 6 towns produced enough settlers to support the war effort as slow as it was going.

Also at this time, Mao learned that his town placement had been abysmal on his home continent and finally figured out that each town being founded 4 tiles away from the most nearby town would yield the gapless cultural border he was looking for. This knowledge he would take with him to the elitists’ continents if his forces would give him the chance.

[badams52]

Once Mao finally learned the ability to build galleons, he searched out to find that all his nearby neighbors’ cities had defended themselves with riflemen. Mao asked and found out that riflemen, though known to all the elitists civilizations, could not be bought, so he began researching knowing the riflemen would be 40 turns away. Mao worried that his mass of cavalry, riders and musketmen wouldn’t be enough to take cities defended by riflemen on the elitists’ continents and to repel the counterattacks. But he knew that strength lied in numbers, and the sheer numbers of his forces could be enough to turn the tide.

Mao looked at Egypt as a possible target. Their home island looked relatively easy to take having few cities and having taken longest to get riflemen was a plus. But when Mao looked at the Aztecs, as they were the top dog at the time, he asked around to find out that the Indians, Persians, and Egyptians were all willing and eager to sign mutual protection pacts with him since they all knew Mao’s army was strongest and largest. Having allies encouraged Mao and after 17 galleons were built, Mao felt he could finally make a move to grab his foothold in the elitists’ continent.

Mao loaded up his 17 galleons with 23 regular cavalry, 22 riders – 2 elites, 8 veterans and 12 regulars – and 7 regular musketmen and sailed off for the closest Aztec city, Atzcapotzalco. A caravel with 2 settlers and a mustetman followed close behind to settle a city if the attack became a success.

In the meantime, Mao signed MPPs with India, Egypt and Persia, knowing that a multiple front attack would be very beneficial. Egypt and Persia required money to seal the deal once India signed for free. Mao’s largest assembled force to date landed on the mountains next to Atzcapotzalco and waited to see what the Aztecs might do seeing such a large army.

[badams52]

Mao’s landing force met little resistance to his surprise. According to CivLackey’s Civ Combat Calculator, a regular Cavalry would have a 7.7% chance of beating a fortified veteran rifleman in the city on a hill. The riders would have less chance, but it so happened that most of the initial force remained unscathed and didn’t fight. So after founding New Canton on the elitists’ continent, Mao rushed forward and quickly razed Teotihuacan and founded New Nanking to secure a strong hold on the elitists’ continent.

With renewed hope, Mao went about slowly and systematically destroying the Aztecs. With the help of his allies, the Aztecs’ supply lines to saltpeter were blocked and trade embargos kept the Aztecs from acquiring such resources in the event of a MPP not being resigned and a peace negotiation signed between the Aztecs and one of the allies. Mao feared trades with Egypt the most since they had the only source of silk and gladly shared with those less fortunate than themselves.

As the war raged on year after year, communism took its toll on India and the Aztecs as their pop rushing became extreme and their once large cities became a small unhappy town once again. This became advantageous to Mao as he began to wait till cities were reduced to towns and then use his forces to attack thus sparing the lives of many, many soldiers. But the waiting made the war linger on as his one army took towns one by one.

Edit: slow moving army

[badams52]

Forgot the image

Edit: Image with armies' movements

[badams52]

As the war raged on, Persia became disillusioned having only gained one city from the attacks and dropped out of the alliance. Egypt later dropped out as well leaving just India and myself to destroy the Aztec cities and town. India took the northern cities while Mao razed the southern cities. After having wiped out all southern Aztec towns, Mao noticed Persian troops heading towards his territory. He knew this couldn’t be good as he saw infantrymen for the first time!

Persia turned sides and declared war on China! A mistake Mao would make them pay for. Still having an MPP with India, India declared war on Persia as a new development took place. Mao saw that the war against the Aztecs had kept them behind in research (no infantrymen to be found) but he devised a devious plan to learn some science while deceiving his enemies. Mao signed a peace treaty with the Aztecs getting the corporation and then bought electricity from the Aztecs requiring 133 gold per turn! Mao realized his devilishness would probably keep him from ever being able to secure a gold per turn deal again, but to gain the knowledge of infantry, he was willing to make the small sacrifice. After a few years of peace with the Aztecs, the inevitability of the MPP with India reared it’s head and caused Mao to declare war on the Aztecs thus breaking his previous gold per turn deal. Mao then quickly took what he could from the lowly Aztecs and left the rest to the Indians. A few years later, Mao bought replacement parts from the Indians (the Indians always discounted techs when compared to the Persians or Egyptians. Mao still doesn’t know what affinity the Indians have for him).

Now knowing how the Persians are getting their infantry, Mao sends his crack regular rider army and another rider to do the pillaging over to the Persians only source of rubber. Mao learned from previous wars that the elitists were afraid to attack his large armies and started using his quick moving cavalry and rider armies for defense purposes during resource blocking schemes. Through experience, Mao also found out that he could kill infantry in towns by attacking with an army of cavalry, though it would take the cavalry many years to heal and once in a while, an army would be lost. So Mao’s strategy against the Persians started out as one of waiting for communism to take its toll and attack towns with his armies while denying the Persians from building more infantry. This attack was slow going, and Mao had no definite knowledge of how many armies he could have so Mao began searching for alternative ways to attack.

Edit: changed image

[badams52]

While denying resources and waiting for people to die off worked well for Mao many, many years, the war with Persia began to take its toll and he needed to speed up their destruction before the other elitists would decide to gang up on him. After buying replacement parts, Mao found an answer. He had toyed with captured cannons before and found them ineffective, but after testing out the new artillery, Mao decided this is just what he’d need to speed up his assault on the Persians.

Having spent money to hurry artillery units in many of his cities, Mao massed together a multitude of artillery that he used to beat infantry down and kill of the rival civilians to make the cities become towns quickly. After having laying siege to the cities and wearing them down, his cavalry and armies of cavalry found it easy to quickly dispose of the weary units left, thus minimizing his losses.

Mao finished off the Persian civilization in 1840, but his blood still ran cold and though the Indians had been his allies, Mao’s taste for blood and the destruction of the evil elitists would not abate. From the start of the end of the Persian empire, Mao began planning the destruction of the Indians and hoped his domination of two continents would be proof enough to ensure Egypt’s capitulation. But Mao was in for a surprise when he attacked.

Edit: changed image

[badams52]

Mao looking at India knew he needed to keep Egypt from helping them and attacking him, so before the fighting began, Mao signed an MPP with Egypt for a paltry 30 gold. Also, Mao realized that much land on his home continent was lying fallow and could be utilized to increase income and production levels and filled in the holes with new towns and sometimes cities.

Mao talked to his military advisor that he had amassed an army large enough to destroy the Indians, but when conversing with his science advisor found out that he was hopelessly behind technology wise, as had been the case from the late middle ages. He hoped the other nations had not figured out how to build tanks yet.

[badams52]

Mao looked at India and decided that a denial of resources would be quite helpful, but very difficult to pull off (see map). Gandhi had many, many resources at his disposal in various places and Mao lacked the required number of armies to keep all sources of rubber, oil and saltpeter blocked.

Map legend:
Blue circle: rubber
Red circle: oil
Green circle: saltpeter
Blue line: Indian border
Pink line: Chinese border
Yellow arrows: blocking of resources path
Red arrows: Chinese planned path of attack
Blue arrows: Egypt’s bombardment

[badams52]

In the first wave, Mao retook Xinjian 2 and New Ningpo, rebel cities that preferred the likes of the Indian government, then watched in amazement as Indian cavalry made a clean sweep taking out all three infantry in Xinjian 2 and pushed into the soft underbelly of the Chinese forces capturing Tsingtao 2 as well. Mao quickly retook both cities and urged his troops to push forward to take the resource rich cities close to the border and then work on moving up through India’s gut to take control of their last oil resource.

Meanwhile, the supply-like-blocking, cavalry-filled armies moved without resistance through Indian land as they protected cavalry units who would perform the necessary disrupting of the resources. One army disrupted one rubber resource then met no resistance in disabling the saltpeter resource next to Delhi. The other army disrupted the first oil line and proceeded to the second knowing the oil line next to the border could not be repaired easily. They reached the other oil resource safely and disrupted the supply lines.

Mao continued his relentless attack on the close by cities creating a solid front while Egypt took the former Indian cities on the island chain off the coast of India’s mainland (those cities were in constant ownership as they used to be Aztecan, Indian, Persian and Egyptian cities on those islands but war after war induced by MPPs caused constant control changed) (red dots = former Indian cities before Egypt’s attacks).

[badams52]

After capturing India’s closest oil resource city, Lahore, Mao’s infantry found itself attacked by tanks! Then Mao watched in great surprise as a tank attacked his cavalry-laden army blocking the oil supplies and almost destroyed them. The army being deep in Indian territory took heavy damage and was unable to heal itself. Mao quickly dispatched the other army that had disrupted the saltpeter resource to the more important oil resource, but they would never arrive. En route to the oil resource, the army was assaulted by another tank destroying the army but the remaining cavalry unit held its ground and the tank unit was destroyed. India’s later attacks freed up the blockade.

Mao seeing the awesome power that oil provided the Indians quickly dispatched another two cavalry-laden armies for defense with 3 cavalry units to again disrupt the oil supplies. Upon arrival, the armies noticed the Indians had reversed the previous damage and Mao worried as he hoped never to see the tanks return. Fortunately for Mao, no Indian tanks did resurface and he proceeded to break the Indian territory in two and captured the northern most city of the Indian empire. Later negotiations with the Egyptians yielded Mao with the knowledge of building tanks (though Egypt by this time knew of radio, amphibious warfare, and flight) and switched all cavalry production to tanks to begin the last push against the Indians.

As Mao turned west to destroy Calcutta and Delhi, he noticed endless Egyptian bombardment had rendered the India’s western coastline devoid of improvements and weakened their coastal cities. As Mao’s forces moved closer, he watched in horror as Egyptian bombers laid waste to Bengal and launched an amphibious assault against the city then landed a heavy cavalry and infantry army ready to take the city. The Bengalese fortunately held the city, as Mao did not want to see another Egyptian city invade the former Elitists’ continent since they already had Bombay, and Mao quickly used his tanks to destroy the city. The rest of India’s demise went off without a hitch.

[badams52]

Mao talked with his military advisor and for the first time became surprised when he said our army compared to theirs was just average. Throughout his campaign to rid the world of evil elitists’ attitudes, Mao always had the strongest army, but now, the Egyptian’s rivaled his own. Mao saw the power of the bombers and realized that Egypt must have built them while they traded with the Indians who had an extra resource, but now, Mao controlled all the oil of the world. In fact, in the three islands held by the Egyptians, they only held 2 sources of horses, 1 source of iron, 2 sources of coal, 1 source of saltpeter and 1 source of rubber.

Mao engaged in conversation with the Egyptians (who were furious with Mao) and used his wealth to persuade the Egyptians to part with the knowledge of flight giving Mao the necessary knowledge to produce fighters.

The Galleon Convoy certainly worked when bringing troops back and forth between the two continents, but the Egyptian invasion would require mass amounts of artillery to be transported so Mao rushed transports in neighboring cities to help alleviate the need. Mao also rushed some battleships for protection. While Egypt did have bombers, they were unable to build destroyers or battleships and had a 20+ armada of ironclads. Mao believed Egypt would use them to bombard the coast and leave his battleships and transports alone.

[badams52]

The war itself was quite uneventful. A couple of times Cleopatra used her marines to successfully capture an island city, causing Mao to use resources to retake the cities, but the battle on Egypt Isle went smoothly without any problems. Fighters were dispatched and set to air superiority where Cleopatra sent bombers to disrupt supply lines and quickly destroyed Cleo’s entire bomber force. Once Cleo’s ironclads made their way to the Chinese main continent (which had little in terms of armed forces but often produced them) Mao used money to quickly build bombers and battleships to take care of the problem. Artillery sufficiently kept the ironclads from bombarding the former Elitists’ continent.

Mao’s landing party met little resistance and as the artillery pounded the cities, the rest of Mao’s armies waited and plucked off stray marines, cavalry, riflemen and later longbowmen as the regiment destroyed Alexandria, Thebes, Memphis and Giza in turn. Once Giza fell, Egypt capitulated and Mao reigned supreme with his domination victory.

Map legend:
Blue circle: rubber
Red circle: horses
Orange circle: iron
Gray circle: saltpeter
Red arrows: Chinese path of destruction

[badams52]

Tomorrow (if weather permits) final analysis

[Dominae]

Well done badams52! My game is far less epic, since I chose to only play on a Small map. I'll post a report and analysis here soon (I should finish the game this week sometime).

I'm quite surprise you did not win via Domination before attacking the Chinese. Do you know why?


Dominae

[badams52]

Thank you Dominae. Yes, I'll be very interested in your results as well. It's not obvious in my write-up, but the Egyptians had two cities on the second continent which I took. Still didn't have enough land. I think the main reason is that there were many holes on the coastline that I felt it would be easier to grab more land from the Egyptians than filling 1 tile here, 2 tiles there, 1 tile over here, etc. You can see from the image above that there are 4 tiles not inside my borders near New Tsingtao 2. I could have built a city on the hill and grabbed 3 more tiles. Better city planning in the beginning would have helped too. I ended up needing 22 more tiles than I had from the 2 continents. I probably had some 22 tiles along the coast that I wasn't using. Much harder to fill them in without temples

edit: added concrete tile numbers

[Catt]

Nice game and AAR, badams52!

Catt

[Theseus]

badams is a badman.

[badams52]

I have produced 3 images for analysis of the interesting results and to start with, I want to look at my core cities and the money that poured in. You notice from my city planner that my capital city (not on a river) produced the most at 20 (If Shanghai would have had more mountains or hills nearby it would have been top dog). You will notice that 19% of my total income came from the fully corrupted cities.

Each size 6 city could produce 3-4 taxmen and each size 12 city produced 6-7 depending upon the irrigated terrain and resources. The extra cash per turn helped greatly with buying techs. This is what I believe to be a good strategy when wondering what to do with those absolutely corrupt cities. Make just enough improvements to get 3-6 happy citizens (depending upon the size of city) and make the rest into taxmen. When I needed to do research, instead of taking 10% of my income away, I found it better to add 1 scientist from the corrupted cities. This “science” didn’t show up on the domestic advisor screen but you can see that computers is still being researched at the minimum rate.

I stayed in monarchy the entire game though wondered what it would be like to be in communism. Every core city of mine had 3 units in it for happiness most of the time. And after looking at the screenshot, I realized I should have switched to war-time mobilization when I got nationalism. Shield productions for Shanghai and Beijing then would have been up to 27 after corruption.

After the game was over, I gave communism a try and found out that the spreading out of corruption over a large empire doomed the cities production levels that even WLTK days didn’t help. The most a communist city could produce was 2 shields after corruption and some cities had as much as 35 waste. The income levels stayed much the same; just the amounts were spread out across the empire.

If you’re wondering, the maintenance I was paying for was from the aqueduct I inherited from Salamanca and could not sell.

[badams52]

The purple ring around the map shows what I believe to be the effective range of a capital city without any corruption reducing improvements like courthouses. For cities near the edge of the corruption ring (see cultural advisor shot, purple ring), taking away some productive tiles (mountains, hills) to get WLTK day resulted in better post-corruption production from the city. I ended up with 18 cities that could produce better than fully corrupted cities. Had Beijing (red circle) been more in the middle of the continent, I would have had many more cities that could produce. The circle is larger than I expected, and it goes to show that a correctly placed FP on one continent and the palace on the other will get you the most bang for the buck out of a large civilization. Of course since civilization sizes change much, the strategy of having a well-placed FP and a movable palace certainly shows its benefits here.

edit: after studying the FAQ on corruption and playing with the corruption calculator, I believe that moving the capital city closer to the middle of my original continent would reduce the size of the capital city's effective circle. Having more cities closer to the capital would reduce the radius at which the capital would be effective enough to reduce corruption. So the oval I drew on the map is only effective for this specific situation and the size of which will change when moving to a new location.

Cultural/Demographics observations:

• It looks like the cultural advisor adds up the culture and culture rating to give us our cultural total.
• Second in mfg. goods and productivity! Egypt has only 15 cities and still out produces my 17 core cities and plethora of unproductive cities. Just goes to show that having a few quality cities can out produce a large empire of unproductive ones.
• We got the minimum family size, life expectancy and literacy, would be 0% if we didn’t have literature, which reminds me, why did I buy literature since it is not needed to advance to the middle ages?

[badams52]

The histographs I thought were interesting and I’ll let them speak for themselves as well as the lack of wonders (yep only 5 remained upon victory) and the top 5 cities. But what I found to be peculiar, and didn’t notice till after the game finished was that beyond the very first palace improvement, I never got a second one. Does anyone know why that might be? I wonder what the triggers are. I know building a second city is a trigger but I thought battle victories also contributed to improving the palace. As it stands, I only got one palace improvement.

No Barracks = No Upgrades

I stopped replacing my units in the core cities after they had 3 musketmen each. The fighting on the other continent took its toll as I often was trying to transport enough units to at least have 1 defensive unit in all the cities. Sometimes I took out the units from cities in the interior that couldn’t be attacked.

The Art of War

Though my forces were stretched from time to time, and after the ancient era I never had that massive unstoppably army, the AI never had enough units to continuously push me back. And I credit this to three key strategies that I employed over and over again.[list=1][*] Denying resources taking the AI back to the middle ages. It’s always funny to see his longbowmen, riflemen and immortals try and attack my tanks![*]Fighting one enemy at a time. If you don't enlist your mutual friends to fight on your side, your enemy will and fighting one opponent is much easier than fighting 3 in most cases.[*] Use artillery and bombardment when overmatched. This became most apparent when I had cavalry going against infantry. I didn’t have the luxury of losing lots of cavalry as I had just enough production to barely sustain the war effort, so when artillery became available, knocking down metropolises to cities and then towns while leaving his infantry with 1 HP allowed me to save masses of cavalry.[/list=1]
I think one of the biggest problems with the AI though is its inability to know how to match and/or exceed his enemy’s units. It seems that the AI has x number of units that he wants to build for x number of cities instead of looking at his enemies and determining how many units he needs for defense. But maybe this is a byproduct of my signing of alliances and MPPs.

Egypt – a difficult starting position.

As it turns out, I was quite fortunate in my starting position as I had access to 4 luxuries and all strategic resources through the industrial era on my continent. I probably could have survived starting on the other continent with 3 luxuries and all the resources, but had I started on Egypt’s Isle, that would have been a rough time. Isolated till my discovery of galleys or till another one found me, only 1 luxury and no oil or rubber on the starting location! That would have made it very difficult, maybe impossible.

I feel I got very fortunate that Egypt started on an Island and took 3 islands where not a single source of oil was to be found or could be found – no desert, no tundra. Once I took all other lands that meant I could attack them and know that they’d never be able to build any oil units. They had built some bombers and fighters from the time they traded oil with India, but my war on India, which came before the discovery of modern warfare kept Egypt from building tanks.

Pollution/Global Warning

As you may have guessed, not a single city in my empire produced pollution. All cities were held below the population threshold and by virtue of being factoryless and small, were also held below the production threshold. This didn’t stop global warming from affecting my cities though. Twice the overproduction, overpopulation of foreign cities caused my land to experience global warming. It was actually quite refreshing not having to deal with cleaning up pollution for a change, and I could learn to live with a city that produces a tank every 6 turns.

Sorry for the long-windedness. Comments? Questions? Concerns? Corrections?