For original game info, click here.
A game where you start with 3 stealth bombers, now there's something I definitely haven't done before, so I had to try this. Only catch is, you have to delete a great person for every five turns you want to use them outside your own territory, so wars had to be quick and efficient to be most beneficial. Another snag is that this game is run with raging barbs, something I struggle with greatly, so I ran a quick test game on Monarch w/ Raging Barbs to get some practice, and the thing I learned is that actively fogbusting isn't an option or a helpful idea, but it's a necessity, even with the stealth bombers to help. Hopefully in this game it'll be less of a challenge with the bombers to help out.
I started out researching Meditation, figuring that since I had Mysticism, plus had a coastal start I had a good shot at Buddhism, sure enough, in 3640 I was greeted by this popup:
I kept exploring with my warrior, meeting Kublai just a couple turns later:
I then spent a good amount of time fighting off barbs, trained a couple archers one I hit archery, and realized by the scores that the AI's have all gotten several cities out and I'm pullin a OCC right now, so I really need to hurry up and expand and just cope with the barbs (the somewhat isolated position wasn't helping my cause). Looking at the replay later confirmed that all the AI's (except for Caesar) got their third cities out before I got out my first one, so obviously my weakness in this game was have my expansion greatly bottled down by barbs, more on this later. This helped speed things up a bit:
Whipping settlers seems to be an efficiency thing anyways, since you don't grow when you build them, but that's just me. Tenochitlan was a great whipping city with all the food it had, so even though it was set up mostly for commerce, I was able to get decent whip production out of it in the early years. A couple turns later and my settler makes it to my first site:
Seemed like the best site at the time, I didn't really have any strong feeling about any city placements at the time. Here's a quick 1000BC overview for comparative purposes, with a overhead map and my kill stats:
You should be able to see my third settler is on the way at this point. As for the kills, you should be able to see what I realized later, that I built far more units than necessary at this stage, 4 archers, 3 warriors, and 1 settler... At this point though the archers were starting to show up and were a bit more of a pain, fortunately I had many elite cover warriors due to all the kills, so that made life a bit smoother.
In 750 I founded tlatelolco:
My goal here, obviously, was to cut off Kublai from the eastern part of my sub-continent so I could claim that land as mine. My next task would be to hurry up and get one more settler out, as well as grabbing that barb city as mine, but because of my early mistakes Kublai would take that barb city soon after, which really messed things up as you'll see later.
I did catch a pretty good break soon after, when I saw this:
This solidified my position for the first half of the game, since now the only border I shared with anyone would be with my religious ally (who unfortunately is creative). Sure enough he converted the next turn. Buddhism also spread to Teotichuacan in that turn, another nice break.
My next city site went here:
I think this was a mistake, it turned out to be a very nice city later, but not for quite along time and IMO could've waited, there were more important places to settle.
Here's what my land looked like at 1AD:
The city of Samarqand was the biggest pain-in-the-butt city as you'll see later, since it took my iron away, which left me with no horses, no copper, and no iron.
The next two cities went here:
and here:
Calixthuaca was a solid city (moreso if I could get rid of Samarqand), Tlaxcala was a filler city.
At this point, I was struggling in tech and falling behind as you can imagine by my slow Civil Service bar. In AD475, I finish Civil Service, and on the same turn pop a great scientist from a few scientists I was running. I lightbulb Philosophy, and suddenly I have a lot of trade bait to get myself back in the tech race. Caesar had Philosophy, but no one else did, so I traded it to anyone who would give me something for it, and eventually did the same thing with Civil Service, which helped me get back in the game technologically. A few turns later I whipped the Great Library to completion in my capital, which also was a great help.
In AD1000 I found Xochi-something up in the north
One turn later I snapped a quick overview picture for comparative purposes:
I realized that there wasn't a good way to win with this amount of territory, that I needed more in order to win this thing, but I'll get to that in part two.