Play time: 2:00- 3:00pm

After the previous play session and the demise of my greatest civilization I have built, I resumed play from a previous session. In the beginning, things were going well. I was fortifying my city and building a new palace. And then…

I seemed to have gotten myself into a loop. My cities were not producing any new militiamen, so each turn became a short period of time in which I would stare at the map and wait for something to happen. And then, my city experience civil unrest. It was like deja vu. I was hoping that I would not have the same experience as I did during my last play session, and thankfully this was not the case. But I seemed to have dug myself farther into the loop. The navigation panel to the left kept telling me that my turn was over. My domestic advisor would warn me that the city is experiencing civil unrest and the mayor had fled in panic. Then navigation panel to the left told me my turn was over. I tried to used the menus on the top of the screen to see what I could possibly do to leave the loop. I saw no end in sight.

Finally, a German emissary approached one of my sentries and that released me from the loop. I sat in front of my screen for fifteen minutes just waiting and hoping that I was not getting some kind of virus or doing some damage to my game. But this became the least of my worries when I realized that one of the cities I had been fortifying was not my own city! I could have used those militiamen to fight off attacks from the Aztecs! But I am still questioning the loop that I was stuck in. Was this intentional from the designers’ perspective or a glitch? Or could it just be my cluelessness?