To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest – a new one for me.  I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory.  It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories.  I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best.  The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through.  So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with.  And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that.  Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games.  Great people now make their buildings outisde the city.  This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV.  Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification.  A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.

I played my second game as Napoleon of France.  In this game, unlike the previous one, I had lots of research pacts; probably because I wasn’t making enemies with everyone.  I went for a cultural victory.  Even though I won in fewer turns than my previous game, I got a much lower score – 1651.  In general, the game seems to give a lot less points for a cultural victory.

My third game was with Augustus Caesar of Rome.  I was going for a science victory.  Unfortunately, I forgot culture helps me get advantages via the policies – such as increasing the science rate.  I neglected culture and I think it partially cost me the game.  I ran out of turns and lost while still working on the Apollo Project.

My fourth game, as Ganhi of India, was a cultureal victory.  I went for the Bollywood achievement, so I beat the game with only three cities.  Various other civs would come simply to taunt me for having “forgotten to expand”.  I only got a score of 895, which I thought was pretty small considering how early I finished it.  Perhaps that doesn’t play as big a role as it did in Civ IV.

For my fifth game I played as Alexander of Greece to try and get his achievement for winning before 350 BC.  I played 100 turns and JUST BARELY made it.  Obviously I went for a domination victory on  duel map.  That also netted me the “one to rule them all” achievement.  660 points.

Finally, my sixth game as  Darius I of Persia on a  small map and went for the space race again.  I chose Darius I after consultation with Dan about which ruler would be best for a science victory.  Darius has extra long Golden Ages.  So I focused on making my people as happy as possible.  This gave me lots of golden ages (over 5) in which I was accumulating tons of science.  Towards the end I started just using every great person to start golden ages and stack them all up so that I could hurry to space tech.  (Except great scientists, I’d use them for free techs)

In this game you have to get your spaceship parts to the capital city.  I thought the units looked pretty neat.

Once I had won, I wanted to get the nuke achievement.  I knew I’d never detonate one during a game, so after my game ended I kept playing and launched one.  Nukes look awesome!  This screenshot doesn’t do it justice.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the six games I’ve played so far and I will keep playing and exploring the different leaders.  There are some things I miss like setting the tax rate, but overall, I think they have the perfect balance and it’s good they got rid of most of those micromanagement things.