I felt pretty stupid.

After my last post about this particular Civilization V playthrough, I continued on for three or four hours just to have my game crash and I believed all that progress to be lost. I had completely mowed over Mongolia, repelled the attacks from two other civs, along with quelling my own unhappy people who were rebelling against me. After the crash, I lost the will to do anything further that day.

It turns out, Civilization V has an autosave feature, and I didn’t notice until way later on. It saves once every ten turns, so I would have only lost a few minutes worth of actions, rather than the hours I had originally thought. Either way, I didn’t realize this until after I had decided to do everything over again about a week later. So basically, I picked up right where the last post left off, once again. Let’s start from there.

I utilized my budding navy to take out this island city of the Mongols, which seemed like a pretty pointless spot to put a city in the first place, considering the lack of nearby resources. It fell to my ships easily, though I had to bring in an embarked Knight to capture it. As I said, it was a poor location for a city (I later scouted around and found that there was nothing of value to the north either) so it was razed to the ground. From there, I pushed in further with my forces to take down the Mongols, and the Shoshone were pushing in from the opposite side (we had jointly declared war).

I took the city to the east here, and there were still a couple to go to the southeast. With the help of the Shoshone, we were able to wipe the Mongols from the map. Funny enough, the first time I went through this, I must have either rushed too quickly, or the random seed just made the difference. The first time all the other civs (besides my ally) decided to declare war on me and sent units to attack. This time I didn’t have that happen, and I managed my happiness just right to the point where I didn’t have any rebel uprisings either. Oh well, it was much smoother this way.

With the great Khan down, it was time to aim my sights at the rest of the world. First though, it was time to do some more researching, get improvements down on all of the tiles I now owned, and build up an even better army. My cannons, knights and musketmen were doing the trick to that point, but I wanted more modern tech, and wanted to build a navy to rival any other civ. Around this time one of the Vienna conferences came around, and I voted to start the World’s Fair. Doing so, and allotting quite a bit of production towards it netted me some groovy rewards:

As you can see, I completely destroyed everyone in terms of production. It only took utilizing three or four of my cities as well, though they didn’t really have much to produce building-wise anyway. A worthy trade off, considering the huge boost of culture, points towards a golden age and a free social policy. Most of that was put towards increasing my empire’s happiness, which tends to be the hardest stat to maintain.

Constantinople is the capital of the Byzantine empire, and though they had been a close neighbor for some time, they had only expanded to two cities from what I could tell. At some point, a rival civ took out one of those cities, and I assumed that the capital was all that remained. I looked forward to easily wiping them from the map, but it turned out that they had actually expanded elsewhere. Still, I had captured two civ’s capitals at this point. I did decide to annex this capital, as I needed a forward base of operations as I moved south to conquer Siam. The reason I chose to go south instead of to the east is because of the friendship that I had maintained with the Shoshone, who were bordering my empire there. As long as they stay friendly, I’ll let them be. For now.

Soon, I was entering the Modern Age, which meant getting “Great War” tech (and beyond), including new foot soldiers, better siege weaponry, and some improvements to my navy. Oh yeah, I also got access to flight, which means bombers and furthermore, aircraft carriers. I soon had a new target to destroy. Siam was in my sights. It didn’t take long to destroy their cities with a combination of artilery fire, bombing runs, and support from my battleships.

I captured two of their cities, but it appeared that there was still much work to do, as they seemed to be an empire that had expanded quite readily. I owned nearly the entire western coastline at this point though, so it wouldn’t be long before I was an unstoppable force, particularly with Atomic Theory research almost being completed. Before long I’ll have future tech and will be crowned king of the world, or something to that effect.

More to come as I progress.