1/20, At home again on my desktop computer again. This game certainly wouldn’t lend itself to play in many other places. The game mechanics are slow and cumbersome, a product of the technology of the time. Regardless of this, the game is addicting. My second session only lasted for an hour and a half, but this one was moderately successful. I started a new game, seeing as how my last one was a complete failure. I chose the Romans again because now my stubborn gamer nature has committed me to winning this. If I’m going to win, its going to be with the Romans. So this time around, while making sure I was armed with the game manual in another browser tab, I made sure to put more emphasis on creating fewer warriors, and developing my cities. I created 3 soldiers for each city o founded, for security while focusing on building every structure and wonder on the build list, and honing my research to find gunpowder first. I got lucky in that I was spawned on a rather small rectangular island, so I was able to advance my civilization in relative comfort and safety. Each of the quizzes I aced due to the manual. But again my plan backfired. I discovered another game play mechanic accidentally and that is Maintenance. Apparently every single building constructed has a turn-by-turn maintenance cost, which must be balanced against the players standard turn by turn gold income. Well I had built so many buildings that I was losing 30 gold per turn, and if a player gets to 0 gold, then a structure is destroyed for money. So for several turns, I struggled to figure out how to increase my gold income. After I had lost four or five structures, I retreated to the Internet, where i quickly discovered that it was possible for me to increase the tax rate, as well as turn farmers or civilians into tax collectors. With this knowledge, I explored the game mechanics and menus until I found the tax rate, but even with 100% tax it wasn’t enough. I was still losing money. After creating two tax collectors in my capital (the only city large enough to create tax collectors) I brought my money loss to a stand still. Satisfied for the moment, I kept working on researching technologies, but yet another obstacle stood in my way. Rome was facing food shortages because the farmers i turned into tax men no longer were producing food. It was at this point that I almost screamed in frustration and pulled what is commonly known as a “rage quit”. Its fairly clear to me in retrospect that this game relies heavily on a persons knowledge of the manual and by extension all of the rules of the game. Like I mentioned in my last post, this game does not age well, especially in a time where manuals don’t even really exist outside of $60 strategy guides. So this means that a persons skill at this game is directly related to how many trial and error sessions that they have. I am also beginning to get the feeling that this game suffers from us being required to return to the game after breaks. Having played other Civ games, they tend to benefit from binge playing, because it is pretty easy to lose track or forget where you left off, and that leads to mistakes, which a single one can be the end of your play through. I plan on returning to this game tomorrow and trying to fix my starving, impoverished digital island empire. And maybe tomorrow I will finally encounter another civilization and give me some more insight into the dynamics of this game.