Editor's Note: This content was produced for my original Geocities website back in early 2002. When Geocities was about to shut down, I reproduced the entire report in html and uploaded it to my website. Everything has been left unaltered in its original state, forming a time capsule of sorts for my early writings.
I was definitely surprised to find out that the CivFanatics Gam of the Month for May was going to be one on Deity difficulty. I had been expecting a difficult one after the rather easy April one (GOTM#6) on Warlord, which I coasted through without much difficulty. This picture does a pretty good job of showing what the game was like:
At no point in time could I say I was challenged by the game; it became a struggle to see just how high of a score I could reach. Here you can see the most important thing is that I have just discovered Sanitation and am beginning to rush hospitals to increase my population as fast as possible to get more score. I ended up finishing with the 8th highest score out of 166 entrants, but overall the game was pretty unentertaining.
I finished that game a few days before the beginning of GOTM7, so I decided to do a quick one city challenge (OCC) game using the Russians. It was a Regent game on a small map, and I coasted to a cultural victory pretty easily through excellent use of diplomacy. I did get to take this fun screen shot though:
Here, the Japanese are sending a somewhat, umm, "gratuituous" force against the Chinese city north of me. My army of three Cossacks and two Longbowmen is attempting to look tough, and failing pretty badly. I mention this game here because the trade deals I had to work with in my OCC game, as a tiny state with few resources and no real military, were excellent training for the insane disadvantages I would be working with in the Deity game. OCC games are fun, short, and good for teaching how to trade: I recommend everyone try one at some point in time. But now on to GOTM7!
The starting location was a mixed bag. On the one hand, there were several bonus grasslands nearby, plenty of hills for future production, and a luxury very close by. Unfortunately, there were no bonus resources or fresh water tiles in the initial screen that I could see. Since all the settings for the game were random, I didn't know if the map was a pangea continent or a bunch of islands, extremely mountainous or flat, arid or wet, etc. After moving my scout first (which the Iroquois, as an expansionist civ start with) I decided to found the capitol on the starting square, since I saw no significant benefit from moving. The first build in the capitol was set to a scout, since it is vital to use the expansionistic civ's early trait to its full potential.
I caught my biggest break of the game on the third turn of the game in 3900BC, when my scout popped the nearby goody hut on a mountain and got a settler. The value of a free settler so early in the game is impossibly high. My initial thought was, "Now I have a chance to compete!" After spending a few minutes of thought, I decided to put the second city very close to the first in ICS style so it could borrow tiles from the capitol as needed. My goal was to disband this city eventually, but as it turned out I never did, as I found many uses for it throughout the game. I can't overstate the importance of this quirk of luck, as it changed the possibility of victory from next to nothing to the "doable" category.
