1560AD     Act II, Scene III: China


With the elimination of Japan, all that remained to do was attack China and crush them into the ground. Did China have a chance? No, of course not. China did have rubber for infantry, but it was in their city of Chinnan, a colony next to former Japan. I made sure to capture this location right away to prevent them from drafting any infantry. In an ideal world I could have crushed China in one massive turn of fighting. Since they also lacked railroads in many places, this was not possible, though I made a game attempt at it.

I took 2 turns to reposition and heal up my panzers after fighting Japan and declared war on China in 1560AD. The battles were unspectacular, as I methodically captured city after city, using my workers to build rails where they were lacking and settlers to push out my cultural borders when enemy cities were more than 3 tiles distant. I didn't take any picutes of this going on, although I should have done so, which prevents the reader from seeing exactly what happened. Trust me, it was a lot like the Japanese picture set only even faster, since I took all but 3 of China's tundra cities in the first 2 turns and got those three on the third turn.

So China was destroyed, right? Well - not quite. You see, I had gifted China a city called Icy Exile right before the fighting started on a tundra island with no access to the sea. In other words, a town that could never go past size 2 and thus could never produce a settler. Mao was forced there in 1570AD and would remain there until the end of the game. He wasn't too intelligent about it though, as this picture would indicate:

You can see his final resting place in the picture as well. So now it was time to sit down and milk the game, right? Well, since I absolutely HATE the concept of milking a game (tried it in GOTM6 and it was not fun) but still wanted to have a nice score, I decided to try a new concept that I would call the "lazy man's" milk. The idea would be that I would do nothing except put hospitals and mass transits in every city, automate all the workers, and then hit spacebar 200 times to end the game. It wouldn't score as highly as a thoroughly milked game, but it also wouldn't cause me to bang my head against the wall with the tedium of milking. Or at least that was my thinking.

My other goals were to play a game to the ending date of 2050AD (something I had never done before) and break 10,000 points for total score. Had it not been for these goals, I would not have played it out for the remaining 230 turns. My workers did their fair share of tasks over the next few centuries, and it was almost frightening to see them in action. I thought this picture was reminiscent of a swarm of gnats:

Another interesting thing was going on in my game. If you look back in my pictures of the conquest of Russia, you'll see a barbarian galley in the little inland sea by Russia. That thing must have popped up from a barb camp in the BC years and never went away. It was still there in the 20th century, and I actually became quite fond of it:

Notice how Minsk is starving though? Whenever the barb galley ended its turn on a tile that a city was using, the city had to create a specialist and couldn't use that tile (just like when an enemy unit is on a tile that your city wants to work). Since the barb galley kept causing starvation in these cities, I had to kill it with a battleship around 1950AD.

The game stubbornly refused to die though. Just putting a hospital and a mass transit system in each city took a surprisingly long amount of time, and then I had to keep cleaning up pollution to prevent my cities from starving (no I wasn't going to let the game go THAT much). 230 turns is a LOT of turns; I didn't realize just how short my games are since I almost never go past 1800AD anymore (in 1800AD, there are still 175 turns left in the game!). These turns were played over two marathon sessions of Civ3 late on a Friday and Saturday night, from 11:30pm - 3:30am one day and 11:30pm - 2:30am the other. I don't think I've ever been so glad to end a game of Civ3 before. The "lazy man's" milk doesn't exist; it took me 7 hours to play this one out and I was cutting corners at every turn. This should be my last ever attempt at milking a game though, so I don't expect to ever have to do this again.

Something funny did happen in 2030AD when this message popped up:

This thing scared the living daylights out of me! I had never gotten it before, and it was really late at night, then BAM! End of game! I was like, "How can the game be over? It's not 2050AD yet! Oh no, I haven't saved in like 50 turns!" Then I realized it was just a warning and calmed down. Well, I did learn something from playing a game out to the final date!

I had my choice of victory types in 2049AD, but in this kind of situation there's really only one way to end the game:

Go to the next page for my (extensive) post-game commentary.

War with China: 1560AD - 1570AD
Total Turns: 3
Result: Peace Treaty


War with China: 2049AD
Total Turns: 1
Result: Conquest