August 7, 2014 – Me Vs. Myself and I

During this whole Blaugust thing, it seems many people are overwhelmed with having to come up with topics to write about, and probably forgetting about what got them to blog in the first place — playing games! Despite Belghast challenging us to try and be a bit more personal, that doesn’t mean you have to stray from normal gaming (and writing about gaming) habits. All it means is finding that bit of time in your day to write down some thoughts about what you’ve been doing in virtual worlds — and the real one. I strayed into some personal stories over the past week, but now I’m back to the gaming at hand!

Doone recently invited me to a multiplayer game of Civilization V, and we got started the other night. Unfortunately I don’t have the expansions just yet, so he was a little miffed at the enemy AI, but overall it was a great experience. I’ve played the game to completion via conquest and the space race, but had never finished a game with friends. We put word out on Twitter but no one was available at that moment, so we started a game with two countries we hadn’t really played before, against three other teams of AI (8 players total).

I’m the lower port city, run by the mighty Egyptians, and Doone is more inland up north with his Japanese civ. Things were pretty uneventful at first, as they always are. I shot south and discovered a peninsula that I wanted to control (was thinking about my future navy) and then explored the coastline to the east. Doone sent scouts to crawl through the north and we found that most of the other Civs were on the same continent, if not all of them. Strange. We also fought the barbarian hordes surrounding us, but by turn 100 we were fairly well established with our initial towns.

I was rushing to get a settler so that I could claim the peninsula, when tragedy struck. I encountered several barbarians and a camp, and the forces I sent with the settler weren’t quite enough. My settler was stolen, and despite clearing the other barbs, I couldn’t catch up to the absconders.

One of the nearby city-states killed the escaping barbarians, but I was still out the settler. That meant Doone expanded to a second city first.

I was not deterred. I finally got another settler ready to go, and sent him with plenty of force to the southern most tip of the peninsula. We met no resistance, and Memphis was founded.

We started on trade routes between our cities, but I was hemorrhaging gold at that point, so road construction stopped until I either had more gold, or could build a middle city. I made a “different” decision in rushing so far away, but I wanted control of the resources between my initial city and the new one. I figured rushing the far point would yield greater reward later. Closing in on turn 200, we decided to call it a night. At the end of the session, here’s what our civs looked like: