Quote:
Originally Posted by Shabbaman
The last days I've been ill, so I had the time to play Beyond the sword. My second game. A good start, fast expansion: I couldn't do much else because my capital was unproductive, yet surrounded with floodplains, corn and fish. Miracle gro. So I got 5 very good cities, blocking the Celts. Founded confucianism in a city that was 1 tile next to the celtic border (tbh, it's on prince or something, lame). So. Good.
Obviously no copper. 15 hills, no copper. The hills I've scouted? No copper (although the celts have axes, so there must be some in their territory). Beeline for iron working, already got horseback so I was churning out horsemen. Guess what? No iron. Not even close! I found iron 15 tiles away to the NW, grabbed by Carthage, and 15 tiles to the E... 2 tiles south from the southern celtic border. I miss colonies! When I settled there, the celts attacked in 5 turns.
Blegh.
I like a challenge, but when you have to work really hard to get either bronze, iron or horses, why bother? I've ranted about it before, but I'll just do it again. It was the same thing that turned me off in civ3, and I fixed that by playing GOTM maps. Perhaps I'll have to give the scenario's a try. What I don't like about scenario's is that you don't play "civ", but "col" or something. It lacks the epic feel of civilization. I want to beat tanks with spearmen, and then win with a spaceship. Or something like that. I fear I'm done with civ.
The last few days it's been giving me a headache anyway  |
Hmm. Once again I'm pretty ill. It started with a soar throat for a week, which I soundly ignored. By saturday afternoon I completely collapsed, and apparently I have the flew. Or some other annoying biological infection. The symptoms are: fever, snot, headaches, snot, coughing, snot, sneezing, snot. The downside of a 4 story house is showing now, by the time I'm halfway up I'm completely exhausted. Thought processes have slowed down to a crawl, writing english is, well, challenging.
Between the snot and the coughing the main problem is that I'm utterly bored. So, by tradition, I started to play civ again. This time it's col2. An hour into the game I noticed that once again all my opponents seem to be building all their colonies around me, while most of the map is empty. I haven't completed many games in col2, but I've started a lot of games. It appears to be (at least, it appears to me) that the AI is doing some stupid Infinite Colony Sprawl, while I'm still setting up my initial colony (well, two of them). I have little workers, next to no income (shipping unprocessed cotton and tobacco, as Stapel has shown in Row The Boat) and no military. The English to the north have four, maybe even five colonies (while I have 5 colonists in total...), the Spanish to the south have 3 colonies and a lot of scouts, and they keep hoarding in treasures that seem to come from nowhere.
This game is dumb.