Njorl-san's saga
Apr. 17th, 2004 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progFinished a splendid Civ game last night. It was terrible. It wasn’t that terrible. No, I mean terribly violent. Oh. Yeah!
In the ~dozen years I’ve been playing this game in its various forms, all my best games, objectively speaking, were ones where I played the pacifist, seldom (sometimes never) picking fights, building an army only for self-defense, gaining territory through bold frontier-settling and overwhelming my opponents with culture (in Civ 3, at least). Usually I win via Space Race, though in my best-ever game I won through Diplomacy.
In the game I wrapped up last night (Japanese, Warlord level), I played very aggressively, and did a lot of things for the first time:
* Used straight-up military might to scrub my (very large) starting continent clean of opponents. I basically did this in two parts: after developing Chivalry I pumped out tons of Samurai and enjoyed quite a lot of snickersneeful knavery (including my first real use of the Army meta-unit), which (with neighbor India’s help) spelled the end of China, and centuries later I used waves of Tanks to roll over the rest of the land (sorry, India).
* Built all the militaristic small wonders (Heroic Epic, Military Academy, Pentagon, Intelligence Agency, Battlefield Medicine) and actually made good use of them.
* Planted spies everywhere. Learned that wartime is a convenient time for such activity, since it seems more likely to succeed, and can’t result in war being declared on you should it fail. Spies stay put after peace treaties are signed, too.
* Destroyed an enemy spaceship. When America had its ship almost complete (as I knew through my spy), I sent two Armies on a one-way suicide mission to Washington, where they succeeded in destroying that city and its spaceship before succumbing gloriously to the howling American pig-dogs and so on. (I had to look up a FAQ to learn how to stop spaceship construction; I had mistakenly thought that a spy could handle this sort of thing. Oh well.)
* Failed to “culture-bomb” anyone. Even though my civ (Japan) was Religious, thus letting me build culture-spewing temples and cathedrals for cheap, my opponents’ people were never lured away. (In my more pacifist games, most of the cities I capture are won through culture.)
* Had a nuclear war. This was touched off when I decided it to soften up Washington for my ground troops by lobbing a submarine-launched tac nuke at it (another first; I wanted to see what would happen). The typical Americans blew things totally out of proportion and responded by peppering my main continent with every ICBM they possessed. “Fortunately”, this was only four or five. Even though I knew through my spy that they had no nukes left, I responded in kind on my following turn, and was able to wring a peace treaty out of them soon after. (By that time, their spaceship was toast.) Then both sides spent the rest of the game cleaning up the massive pollution that resulted, while global warming ran rampant. Oh well.
* Even after so much bloodshed capped with the unspeakable horror of nuclear warfare, I managed to pull off my very first Cultural Victory through Kyoto’s accumulation of 20,000 culture points (despite the fact that half of the city was radioactive ash by the time this tally came down). This I achieved by letting it build nearly every Great Wonder in the game, from the Oracle on up.
As usual, I never “cheated” by rewinding after a lost battle or single unfortunate event, but I did rewind after accidentally winning via Space Race (I specifically did not want to do that this time around), and rewound to the same point again a couple of times more, whenever the Americans completed and launched their spaceship (some 30 years later), in order to choose a different long-range strategy.
I still haven’t won the game through land domination or military conquest.
In the ~dozen years I’ve been playing this game in its various forms, all my best games, objectively speaking, were ones where I played the pacifist, seldom (sometimes never) picking fights, building an army only for self-defense, gaining territory through bold frontier-settling and overwhelming my opponents with culture (in Civ 3, at least). Usually I win via Space Race, though in my best-ever game I won through Diplomacy.
In the game I wrapped up last night (Japanese, Warlord level), I played very aggressively, and did a lot of things for the first time:
* Used straight-up military might to scrub my (very large) starting continent clean of opponents. I basically did this in two parts: after developing Chivalry I pumped out tons of Samurai and enjoyed quite a lot of snickersneeful knavery (including my first real use of the Army meta-unit), which (with neighbor India’s help) spelled the end of China, and centuries later I used waves of Tanks to roll over the rest of the land (sorry, India).
* Built all the militaristic small wonders (Heroic Epic, Military Academy, Pentagon, Intelligence Agency, Battlefield Medicine) and actually made good use of them.
* Planted spies everywhere. Learned that wartime is a convenient time for such activity, since it seems more likely to succeed, and can’t result in war being declared on you should it fail. Spies stay put after peace treaties are signed, too.
* Destroyed an enemy spaceship. When America had its ship almost complete (as I knew through my spy), I sent two Armies on a one-way suicide mission to Washington, where they succeeded in destroying that city and its spaceship before succumbing gloriously to the howling American pig-dogs and so on. (I had to look up a FAQ to learn how to stop spaceship construction; I had mistakenly thought that a spy could handle this sort of thing. Oh well.)
* Failed to “culture-bomb” anyone. Even though my civ (Japan) was Religious, thus letting me build culture-spewing temples and cathedrals for cheap, my opponents’ people were never lured away. (In my more pacifist games, most of the cities I capture are won through culture.)
* Had a nuclear war. This was touched off when I decided it to soften up Washington for my ground troops by lobbing a submarine-launched tac nuke at it (another first; I wanted to see what would happen). The typical Americans blew things totally out of proportion and responded by peppering my main continent with every ICBM they possessed. “Fortunately”, this was only four or five. Even though I knew through my spy that they had no nukes left, I responded in kind on my following turn, and was able to wring a peace treaty out of them soon after. (By that time, their spaceship was toast.) Then both sides spent the rest of the game cleaning up the massive pollution that resulted, while global warming ran rampant. Oh well.
* Even after so much bloodshed capped with the unspeakable horror of nuclear warfare, I managed to pull off my very first Cultural Victory through Kyoto’s accumulation of 20,000 culture points (despite the fact that half of the city was radioactive ash by the time this tally came down). This I achieved by letting it build nearly every Great Wonder in the game, from the Oracle on up.
As usual, I never “cheated” by rewinding after a lost battle or single unfortunate event, but I did rewind after accidentally winning via Space Race (I specifically did not want to do that this time around), and rewound to the same point again a couple of times more, whenever the Americans completed and launched their spaceship (some 30 years later), in order to choose a different long-range strategy.
I still haven’t won the game through land domination or military conquest.