750BC       A Deadly Struggle With America

I had managed to survive the early battles at the gates of my cities, and now began taking the struggle to the AI civs. As I mentioned on the previous page, I had already captured Washington from the Americans and now looked to expand further into America by pushing north into the black fog. Here was my map from 750BC:

This image has been lost.

Again, this was the full extent of my world map in 750BC. I knew almost nothing about the other AI civs, except that Rome and England were to the south and the other civs were to the north. I'm going to include the 750BC demographics on the last page with the scoring table, but suffice to say that I don't think my population or territory ranked very highly at all. I did not have a particularly dominating early game.

After capturing Washington, I moved my swords to the east where the city of Atlanta was located (you can see the border peeking out to the right of the wines in the screenshot). That city was defended only by two spears, and it was auto-razed upon captured in 710BC. I quickly replaced it with my own city, as it was a good location for a fishing village. Not much happened for the next few turns after that, as a number of my swords had died and I needed to build some more before I could strike at my next target. In 630BC Gandhi showed up with another warrior/settler pair near my borders. That AI never will learn, will it? More free labor for me. Then in 610BC I finally got what I had been waiting for throughout all the early warfare:

This image has been lost.

My first great leader! Now what can I rush with him... It was never a decision at all; the obvious choice was to grab the Pyramids with him. This was not only provide a huge boost to me, but also result in lots of wasted shields in the AI civs who were surely trying to build it themselves. Maybe someone out there built the Pyramids manually, but I get the feeling Sirian put that in the scoring system as a red herring, like the Oracle build in Epic2. In any case I got this most desirable wonder on the next turn in 590BC.

I moved towards Philadelphia a couple of turns later. My column of swords punched through the city's defenses and took it in 510BC, but took such heavy losses than only a 1hp sword remained to guard it. It was retaken by the Americans as a result on the next turn, and I took it back again (auto-razing it now that it was size 1) in 490BC. That wasn't such a bad thing; Phillie was in an awkward place compared to Athens and my replacement city was put in a better location. I took another picture just after this, in 470BC:

Athens is clearly working on a settler to fill in all of that opened up space. You can also see that I have a sword walking around in the bottom-right corner of the map; I kept him on the mountains and scouted out a pretty large area because no Roman or English units would attack him. Eventually though, a couple of archers ganged up on it and killed it. Also note that of my six cities, only one is building a military unit. I spent a lot of time building up my infrastructure in this game, often just trying to hold the front lines while working on buildings in each city. It won't be until the reports are in that I'll be able to conclude whether this was a wise move or not. But in any case, it should be clear that I was slowly moving forward and expanding my reach, at the expense of America.

I couldn't move forward until I rebuilt my sword army, and that required finishing a bunch of those infrastructure projects that you see in the picture above. I just held my borders for the next 10-15 turns and rebuilt my attack force. I didn't take another city until 170BC; that was New York, located directly north of Washington (you can see its borders as well in the screenshot). This was by far the most productive American city, and its captured broke the back of their civ; from this point, it was a matter of mopping them up. Somwhat interestingly, in 10BC I had the cultural borders of four different cities expand, none as a result of rushed improvements - and I only had 10 or so cities at the time. That's very unusual, to say the least. Also unusual was the combat luck I had the next turn in 10AD, when a regular Zulu archer attacked across a river and killed a fortified veteran Hoplite in New York, causing me to lose the city. I calculated the odds of that occuring as about 1 in 40 - stupid RNG. I took back New York in 70AD. That is also the date of this next screenshot, showing my progress up to that point:

This screenshot shows more progress again, as I have expanded another city-length up my continent. Delphi was the replacement city for Philadelphia, which had grown into a fairly productive city by this point. Chicago was another fishing village captured from America at some point in the past; I didn't mention the date in my notes, as it wasn't a very big deal. I continued to get English and Roman units down by Macedon, but now Rome irritated me further by sending spears up near Corinth and keeping them on the mountains where they were almost impossible to dislodge. I ended this eventually by putting an elite hoplite on the gold mountain chokepoint tile. Fighting the Zulus and Indians in the north was a bit tougher due to all of the jungle, and I lost most of my units there at this time. My cities are all working on swords at this time to go after the remaining American holdings in the north.

Within a few turns I was ready to move. Boston, located to the west of New York in thick jungle, fell to my swords in 230AD. This was a very good thing, because Boston had dyes and I desperately needed anything to keep my people happy; I was running 20% luxuries and still needing entertainers in some cities. And there was an extra bonus present as well outside the city...

Yep, Hector popped outside the city. There was no hesitation on how to use him either: the Great Library was too important to ignore. I figured I could use it to ride the coattails of the AI civs up until Education was discovered. It was rushed in 250AD and the freebie techs poured in the next turn: Code of Laws and Map Making. That was all that I was behind, apparently. I continuted researching though just to get Monarchy, and would then stop all research until the Great Library was obsoleted.

Seattle was captured in 290AD, leaving the Americans with only the city of Atlanta left. Unfortunately that city was down by the Romans (you can see it in one of the above screenshots) and I couldn't reach it anytime soon to finish off Abe. But the power of the Americans was permanently broken, and I carved what would become my core of cities out of the heartland of America. They had been my primary foe for the early part of this game, but now I looked to a new challenge: sweeping both north and south simultaneously in the hopes of clearing out my contient.

Clearly most of the battles I had fought up to this point were against the Americans. The number of units coming from the other civs was also picking up steadily as their production increased. My losses versus the total AI losses also continue to increase, from 18:1 to 8:1 to 6:1 as the AI civs began sending fewer archers and warriors and more swords and spears. The table of losses from each civ is a pretty good indication of how strong each AI civ was (by number of units sent against me) and who I was fighting against at the time.