1/28. This session was 3 hours long. I sat down at my computer and decided that I wasn’t going to get up until I had defeated everyone, or my empire self destructed. My experience with this game has been that my plans will always get derailed, but for whatever reason, be it divine or mundane, my plan worked. I took Paris without much trouble, which revealed a new game play dynamic, where if a civilization loses its capital, then a civil war begins and the nation that lost its capital splits into two different nations. The French, having lost Paris gave birth to the Aztec, who captured over half of the French cities left. This divided the power that was left there, so it was relatively easy to capture the remaining cities. It was a bit of a struggle to take the Zulu down but the invasion went the same way that the French did, with the exception that i left the capital for last so that I wouldn’t have to deal with a war on two fronts. Having finished a game through domination, I feel that this game has a really steep learning curve, but once one gets a hang on how to properly conduct an invasion, then the game is almost too easy. I’m also left with questions of how one would go about winning through other means than simply destroying everyone else. Each attempt I made to use more peaceful methods were met with such stiff resistance of game play dynamics that my only option for win was to crush everyone else. Granted, once I started the crushing, I began having much more fun than struggling against starvation and poverty, but it seems that the game is set up to make the other options much more difficult. I’m still trying to climb that learning curve. For what it is worth, I will likely be keeping this link and trying to play this game again. Rome won this time, but I would like to be able to see what it is like to win the game through each of the other methods.

The captured French Capital. They now submit to the might of the Roman Empire.