 So as I told you guys before we were talking about civilization 5, Scott and I played a 100 turns or so of a Civ game on the way back from anime Boston. We're going to continue that game hopefully on the way to PAX East. Scott does not realize how utterly utterly fucked he is in that game and it'll be fun to show you what's going on there. But in the interim the Civ 5 bug has bitten both me and Scott. So while I'm playing several online games with a giant multiplayer robot here, one of them, and actually Scott started this game so I'm fostering this newfound enthusiasm for Civ. This is just me and Scott again, the two of us, and no AI civilizations on a little Pangea map, two player, we're just playing it by mail and I figured I'd take you through the state of my empire because some interesting things are just about to go on. So 1v1 Civ 5 is an odd kind of game for a lot of reasons. And one of those, one of the big things that there aren't any other Civs, so diplomacy literally doesn't matter at all. Like I might as well declare war on whoever whenever I want because the only who is Scott. To a lot of things otherwise don't matter, like city-state relations aren't super important because aren't that many of them. I guess you could use them to get a diplomatic victory, but I don't think the game could possibly go on that long if it doesn't be shocked. So I thought I'd take you through the state of my empire, so Thebes, here's doing fine. I'm actually building a city, I got a settler who's going to come out soon, and I'm doing this way earlier than I normally do in a Civ game that's going about this way because I know the map's pretty small, I know Scott's right around here somewhere, you can't be too much further because I saw one of his scouts, and I need to settle and build up my industrial base quicker than him. These barbarians actually gave me some problems early in the game, so they came down, and actually my scout ran away, I lost a bunch of stuff up here, and I've got to slowly claw that back. But the campaign against the barbarians has gone very well, and as you can see we're about to have a final victory in one more turn. Or even now. Nice. Ooh, so now Urr would be more friendly to Lord May. I've been maximizing production, you can see right now my citizens here, I've got pretty good spread, I don't know why that's locked in. Oh, I know why that's locked in. So I assumed that Scott was going to rush the Great Library, which he did just build last turn, because in the previous game I rushed the Great Library and he seems to think that that is the primary reason why I'm winning, so I kind of let him have that even though I was Egypt, and instead all I did is build a monument, which I always do, I pretty much always push culture pretty heavy pretty early. And I built a shrine, because I assumed that he was going to ignore religion, at least in the immediate term, and I would like to get one of the religious bonuses early to push my sieve to get more science. Now I did just discover iron working, and sure enough there's some iron hanging out here, so that's good news. So let's look at the tech tree. If I want to beat Scott, I might as well start a war relatively quick, just to disrupt his plans. It's a Pangea, so the sailing stuff actually is not going to be super useful. Pretty sure he is now going toward mathematics, if he doesn't have it already. That is far too much science, so I think in the short term I'm actually going to go up here to writing and then push into this stuff, because I believe I have enough military to hold him at bay, he's also terrible at military in this game. So let's see, on a tiny map, I'm going to be able to build maybe four cities, so small empire stuff is going on. So for some context, I went oner right away, wanted to go after the barbarians, farm them a little bit, and two, I expect there to be a war, and I do want to have a great general for that war. And I'm pretty much going to fill this tier out, at least I'm going to be at here, because I want to get the extra culture, and here so I can upgrade warriors to swordsmen in the foreseeable future. I actually really want to get over to aesthetics and rationalism, probably going to skip liberty, which is odd, usually I take liberty in a normal game, take care of all my baseline stuff, Scott's guys are around here somewhere, and I'm slowly pushing up to look here, and this guy's going to circle back around to escort the settler, because I found League Victoria, this is pretty much the perfect place to build a city, barbarian camp that I just noticed hiding in there, nonwithstanding, little bones. So I'm pretty much in this game, going to move this guy back across here, move the settler up this way, and if I had to guess, I'd like to reveal more of this, I might send my warrior around to look, I might build the new city here, I'd like it to be on the hill, and if it's on the hill, I'll also be next to League Victoria, so I'll get the plus six food right away. There's cotton hanging out, there's a bunch of nice other resources around here, you see multiple bananas, I want to rush the city before Scott builds anything there, I can backfill here later at my leisure. Might be good stuff down here, with the dyes and the oasis and everything, but this is the spot that I do not want Scott to get to city, and I don't want to have to raise a city, or have a war over a city like that so early in the game, so let's see, I've got some cotton hanging out, I don't have any of the other things that are resource bound, I won't have enough cities for this to necessarily be super useful. I probably want something that'll grow me quickly, don't have gems or pearls, now I've got, I could start, I could build this quickly, which will give me a bonus to building wonders, I also am Egypt, where I have a bonus to building wonders, so maybe I'll take this and just go apeshit on the wonders in the next few turns, and build all the old wonders as fast as I can. Other good option is just to grow faster, because I have an excess of happiness here, I think growing faster is actually going to be more important than the wonders, now this is actually in a small empire also not too bad, that would actually give me a little culture boost right away, I think I'm going to go with a 10% faster growth rate, that's going to actually help me a lot here in particular.