With all three of my neighbors eliminated, I now had the whole eastern side of the continent for myself. I decided to stop with the war and start focusing on achieving a victory condition. Since domination, unlike in Civ IV, requires me taking all of my opponents’ capitals, I decided to go for the cultural or diplomatic victory. I basically didn’t care which one it will be, so I went for both. I made a beeline for the UN, while building up cultural buildings in all of my cities.

The golden age was still active when the game was over.

Thanks to the faith income I had and the religion “elements” I’ve picked, I was now able to buy great artists at an insane rate. I was basically able to stay in a perpetual golden age from this point until the end of the game, so, of course, I decided to go for it. I used the extra income to buy favor with all the city-states and basically dominated every aspect of the game from now on.

Eventually, I researched the required techs to build the UN. I’ve built it around the same time I was able to begin construction of the Utopia project, meaning both of my goal victories were competing against each other. Finally, two turns before the Utopia project was built, a UN vote began and I was forced to vote for someone. I picked the Celts and the game was won.

It’s sort of bittersweet, since the Celts actually won. The game counts me voting them in as a victory, though.

I’m thinking Civilization V is much, much easier than Civilization IV, so any future games I play will be played on a higher difficulty. In fact, I’ll be raising the difficulty after each game I manage to win. I’ll see where that takes me.

In my last session, I obliterated Ethiopia. In this one, I had a brief moment of peace before the war continued.

I started to build up my economy a bit, and managed to reach gunpowder units, before Russia decided to call me into a war with Montezuma. He only had one city left so, even though Catherine was completely useless, I managed to ruin him relatively fast.

It’s chieftain difficulty. Of course I dare.

I got his capital, which meant I now had two of Catherine’s cities surrounded on both sides. Since she started to really bug me by having her spies constantly stealing my technologies, I immediately moved on into a war against her. Thanks to a couple of cannons I’ve built in the meantime, the two cities she previously stole from Montezuma were mine in a couple of turns. Her capital lasted for a bit longer, but that to, was mine eventually.

I said it was going to get greener.

Things are getting a lot greener now.

I got the Gods & Kings expansion a few days ago from Amazon, so I decided to go for a round today. I set everything to random and got Gandhi as my leader.

Gandhi’s trait is “Population Growth”. This reduces the amount of unhappiness gained from city size by half, but doubles the unhapinness gained from extra cities. Naturally, this means I needed to build fewer cities, but plan to make them big as soon as possible, meaning my number one priority was to find places rich in food. The problem is, I was a bit rusty, so I was having some trouble spotting the perfect locations.

It took me a while to get the first settler ready.

In any case, I started the usual routine of training a scout and researching the techs needed to access the local resources. Soon, I met Montezuma, who I meet far to often in my games. I hated him back in Civ IV, so this hate sort of transferred to Civ V, but since all the AI opponents are very unpredictable in this game, I guess there really isn’t any reason to hate Monty any more than the rest of them.

Next up, I met Catherine of Russia, followed by Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Ethiopia soon turned out to be my closest neighbor, but they didn’t give me much trouble. Both they and Russia took a liking for me, actually. Catherine was the strongest of my opponents, but luckily, she focused on taking down Montezuma, so I was left alone for most of the game.

Throughout the BC era, I didn’t go above three or four cities. Instead, I focused on building them up, researching my techs and improving the tiles. I managed to found a religion to, which is a new feature of Gods & Kings. I have to say, I love how religion is handled in the expansion. You basically build your own religion from various available traits. Based on how you build it, it can be an extremely powerful addition to your empire.

I decided to mix it up, but picked production bonuses mostly, since I wanted to focus on my cities and wonder building. The first wonder I built was the Great Library, which allowed me to pick Drama and Poetry as the bonus tech, which, in turn, got me into the classical era extremely early.

I always build far too many wonders.

Sometime during the renaissance, I entered a war against the Aztecs with Russia. I captured one of their cities and decided to hold it in spite of it being a bit to far into Catherine’s territory. After this war, the Aztecs were reduced to only their capitol, so they weren’t a threat any more.My next opponent, Boudicca of the Celts, I’ve met a bit later, but still well before I entered the medieval era at 125 BC. It was only after this that I finally met my last opponent – Lord Askia of Songhai. Both of these, I had very little dealings with.

With that out of the way, I decided to expand my territory a bit, at the cost of Ethiopia. Since I was playing on the chieftain difficulty, everyone was extremely far behind in tech, so the war didn’t last long and Ethiopia was destroyed.

It was getting late by now, so I decided to end my session here.

I expect the map to be a lot greener next time.

I finally managed to get my computer working, so expect a whole bunch of posts in the future. Sadly, I have a headache today, so all I did was to play some Civilization 5. It’s every bit as awesome as I imagined, so I’m reserving a permanent spot on the hard drive for it.

I just started a random, non-custom game and I got China as my civilization. First I’ve spent some time expanding and then I encountered a total of four nation states and the Aztecs. I destroyed two of the states and allied with the other two. Then the Aztecs attacked one of them, so I decided to retaliate and destroy them. Since I was now alone on the continent, I researched the required techs to cross the ocean. On another continent, I encountered the Ottomans, Americans and the Egyptians. The first two hated the Egyptians, so I decided to cash in on that and gang up on Ramses. Pretty soon, he was capitulating and gave me half of his empire just to stop the attack. This is where the headache got to strong and I saved my game.