Civ5 and being squished between several warlike neighbors
Sometimes the only way to beat an obsession is with another obsession. After days of obsession with the minute-by-minute "live" updates about Ukraine on all the "reputable" news sites I follow, I started playing Civ5 so my "one more turn" obsession would crowd my brain and push everything else out.
I spent the entire 6-hour flight to Portland last night playing part of one game of Civ5. Then stayed up until 3am with K :o) I was up more than 24 hours! Then woke up at 7am Portland time.
I'm stuck in the middle of a large continent with three aggressive civs hemming me into a triangle of territory, and about half of the time I'm at war with at least one of them, sometimes two of them. But I'm surviving. There's no way I can win this game, I'm just trying to survive until the end the best I can. I've been honing my defensive strategies. At some point they'll get Flight and start bombing my units and cities routinely.
My previous game was too peaceful, sort of boring, so I searched online for advice on how to make the game more challenging along the violence dimension. The advice was to turn off all the victory conditions except for domination, and then to have one big continent so nobody can develop in relative isolation like the island nations of Japan or Australia. So I'm in the middle of the big continent, sort of like Poland, and I'm just trying to survive.
Playing at the "Prince" difficulty setting, where neither the player nor the AI get bonuses. The AI aren't that smart, but when you're surrounded by them and the only way they can win is by conquering everybody else's capital cities -- it's tough. But so far, each time I'm invaded I manage to destroy the incoming units with walls of flanking ranged fire followed by mobile units that pick off the stragglers. I've got a network of fortresses on the frontier that have protected my three cities so far. During the peaceful years I build up my caravans to pile up gold for spending on emergency unit building during the war years. Sometimes the citizens get unhappy, sometimes they're starving because the farms are occupied by invaders. But we're surviving.
I spent the entire 6-hour flight to Portland last night playing part of one game of Civ5. Then stayed up until 3am with K :o) I was up more than 24 hours! Then woke up at 7am Portland time.
I'm stuck in the middle of a large continent with three aggressive civs hemming me into a triangle of territory, and about half of the time I'm at war with at least one of them, sometimes two of them. But I'm surviving. There's no way I can win this game, I'm just trying to survive until the end the best I can. I've been honing my defensive strategies. At some point they'll get Flight and start bombing my units and cities routinely.
My previous game was too peaceful, sort of boring, so I searched online for advice on how to make the game more challenging along the violence dimension. The advice was to turn off all the victory conditions except for domination, and then to have one big continent so nobody can develop in relative isolation like the island nations of Japan or Australia. So I'm in the middle of the big continent, sort of like Poland, and I'm just trying to survive.
Playing at the "Prince" difficulty setting, where neither the player nor the AI get bonuses. The AI aren't that smart, but when you're surrounded by them and the only way they can win is by conquering everybody else's capital cities -- it's tough. But so far, each time I'm invaded I manage to destroy the incoming units with walls of flanking ranged fire followed by mobile units that pick off the stragglers. I've got a network of fortresses on the frontier that have protected my three cities so far. During the peaceful years I build up my caravans to pile up gold for spending on emergency unit building during the war years. Sometimes the citizens get unhappy, sometimes they're starving because the farms are occupied by invaders. But we're surviving.