I'm sure some people saw the title of this page and couldn't wait to see what had happened to cause my fiery demise, even if it meant skipping the first part of the story. Others have read through the narrative up to this point and must be wondering how I could possibly lose the game from the situation I was in. There way no way in hell even an alliance of all of the other civs could have killed me by that point; most of them were overseas and I was just too strong. So what happened?
I lost the savegame file for Epic9.
Yep, that's the sad truth. I only keep one save for each game, something like "Epic9.SAV" which then gets saved over each time I play. I don't keep a bunch of back saves, just the one and the auto-save feature, which is always turned on when I play. I lose my save file sometimes, but that's never a big deal since I can always grab my game from the last auto-save. No problem, right? Well I saved over my Epic9 save file by accident when playing a turn in RBE1 succession game, which I didn't consider a big deal at all. I've done it many times before and just recovered the autosave. Except that the last 5 turns I played in Epic9 were from 1320 - 1345AD. And the last ten turns I had played in RBE1 were 1300 - 1350AD, which neatly auto-saved over my turns from Epic9, leaving me with no way to recover the game. It was a pretty incredibly bad streak of luck that the 10 turns from my succession game overlapped my last 5 in my solo game, but it happens sometimes. And... my game was over. That was it. Game over man. A pretty lame way for the game to end, and I can't say I wasn't extremely frustrated when it happened. But I plan to take better care of my saves in the future, and I can't say the game was a wash at all.
Some thoughts.This was the first game I ever actually attacked a Deity civ in the pre-modern era. It was a pretty safe gambit in reality, but it was executed almost flawlessly and yielded huge dividends. If I see an opening like this again, you can be sure I will have to try it. This was my first full Deity game under the 1.29f patch and it is an enormous step forward from 1.29f days. No more ludicriously early finishes and it opens up the possibility of doing real research again, always a good thing. Finally, I realized after this game that Deity is really the only level for me anymore. I didn't like it too much under 1.21f because it was just too intense all the time, but now that the game had been made a little easier and definitely less frantic it is genuinely fun to play. Emperor simply does not pose a significant challenge anymore, and to be honest I really feel that the AI needs the bonuses it gets there to have a level playing field with a good player. So unfortunately I can't provide a final finishing date, but I'm 100% sure I would have won the game in time - it was just a matter of mopping it up. I expect I would have finished sometime during the 18th century, though when would have been determined by how sucessful my wars went. Thanks to Arathorn for a truly entertaining, truly great game provided here and to you for reading through this long and sometimes long-winded narrative.
