March Video Games

Only Civ this month as I’ve been focused on my semester work.

Civ V ( 29 hrs):

Mesa Bros:

It was my oldest game that didn’t yet have any war, but Germany broke the peace. In general, my style seems to be OK with AI warfare. Usually I can ramp up my units quickly enough to stave them off until they exhaust their units while I build up my army. However, I’ve noticed a slightly higher aggression rate in Civilization V compared to previous Civ games so I’ve started trying  to keep my unit counts high enough that most civs won’t spontaneously attack me. Didn’t work with the Germans, but after rebuffing their first advance, I may be able to steal a city. Especially since right after they attacked I was able to upgrade my catapults to trebuchets. We’ll see how this goes because at a theoretical max of 30 turns per month (usually because of our schedules I can’t do more than one turn per day and some days we miss turns), I may or may not have finished attacking the first city before April’s up.

Lefties:

I’ve become the most powerful civ on my continent. The Austrians are much more powerful and scientific, but they’re somewhere else beating up on Dave. So I’m trying to see if I can science my way into winning this game. Tough since they are in the atomic age and I don’t think I’ve even made it to the modern age yet.

A Brave New World….

Nothing major going on. I’m in a bad spot for production right now so I’m not sure if I’ve fallen too far behind already.

OMBNW2

Just slowly growing my civilization. Haven’t really met too many people yet.

Tiny Mesa Civ

At first I assumed we’d be duking it out after a few turns. Now I’ve shifted strategies for the long term. Not sure if Dave and Dan are clashing yet, but we all picked early unit civs. It will be funny if we don’t find each other until those units are no longer relevant.

Shaka Zulu

Since I started playing a few Brave New World games with my brothers before having played it on my own, I decided to play on as a single player game to get the advisers to help me out. In an unprecedented move for myself I decided to have it grab a random civ. I ended up the Zulus. As I’ve been doing for a few years with Civilization V, I decided that as long as I’m in a strong place, I’ll attack any civilization who attacks me unprovoked. I started that and eventually ended up with such a huge army that my military adviser was telling me that no one had an army compared to me. So I decided, what the heck, why not? And went for a conquest victory. I also ended up in a very good place financially so I made pretty much every city-state along the way to be an ally and gift me units. It was a fun romp and earned me about 4 achievements, including winning as Zulu.

And, I got the Julius Caesar rating. I think the Caravan system was an interesting reappearance from Civ 2 or 3. I used it to help increase my gold and science, but didn’t use it to its fullest with intra-city trade. I also just barely got into the new ideologies system. The tourism system didn’t really make as much sense to me as it could have. But it was only my first game through. In the end, I’d say that if you jumped into Civ because Civ 5 simplified and streamlined everything, don’t get into Brave New World.

• Civilization-V