 So, I am now allied with all four city-states, thanks to those barbarians and my marble. I am heavily allied with them. I've got so much happiness, I don't even know what to do with it. Everyone's at War with Scott, and hopefully I can push the game toward his conclusion. I'm actually going to retreat all my guys over because I can upgrade them to Pykemen and I'll very soon be able to upgrade these companion cavalry to Knights, which is going to be great. I'm going to crank out as soon as I finish the Temple of Artemis and this workshop, you see, I'm going to start building settlers just to start settling. I'm going to settle at least a fourth city, just to 100% ensure victory. Otherwise, everything's just coming up millhouse. Let's see, I at least take an eye on this. Ah, I should upgrade these guys as well to Pykemen because I'm running at a reasonable surplus right now. I guess I'm building ranged units. That's something I haven't bothered with yet in this game. You hang out there. But otherwise, yeah, check all this out. I'm pretty much good to go. No one's even targeting all the quests. I don't even need to bother with these quests anymore. Let's see, Ur wants me to build the Temple of Artemis. I'm going to finish that real soon, so that'll keep them. And there's a barbarian camp. Which one does Ur care about? I imagine that one. It's the only one that's nearby that I know about. Yeah! Nice! I'll go take that out for you, Ur. You'll be even more my allies. Everything is great, and Scott is in real trouble now. I'm going to back off on harassing him, and just build up an overwhelming economic force. Alright, so this is the last turn I'm going to take in this game. I'm done. I mean, I haven't lost, right? It's like I could still theoretically win and keep fighting. It's not like it's over, but it's not good, and it's just a pain in the ass. And it's not fun, right? So basically here's what happened. I chose Songhai, which means I have to go around killing barbarians to get money. So my basic strategy was, aha, I'll go around and kill these barbarians, get a bunch of money, run a big debt, but it doesn't matter because I'll actually be profiting by killing barbarians all the time, and build a giant army, and then march the giant army over and win. It's a military-based game, we need to do a duel, nothing else matters but military, right? Okay, so that's what I tried to do. The problem was, if you notice here, this is a bunch of hills and shit. This is a bunch of hills and mountains and forests and shit. Here's me, with some hills and shit. So basically it was really slow to move my units out to where the barbarians were. So for example, if I were to send this swordsman to kill the barbarian, I'm leaving myself, I would have to leave myself open, right, to attack. I couldn't kill as many barbarians as I wanted to and couldn't get as much money as I wanted to. Meanwhile, RIM is Greece, so Greece, you know, on this size map, about the time when you're reaching the opponent, right, you know, they get their special spearmans and they have special, the other thing, right, they get two special units at the same time, I guess their moment. You know, it's pretty, it's like early, it's like at just the right time. I think Greece is like, you know, is okay in a general game but in a duel, Greece is hot because you can just, at the right moment, get those amazing units that the other player can't really compete with, right, better spearman, whatever. So, I think the other one's a better chariot archer or something, I don't remember but, so just as the moment, you know, I was ready to do some stuff, RIM had these amazing units and he moved them across the board and he locked me in here, right, so, you know, he destroyed my pearls and whatever, that's not a big deal. The big deal is that I couldn't get money, right, I wanted, I could caravan here and caravan here but in order to do that, I'd have to send my caravans forward which means my armies need to be even more forward than that so that he would have to go through my army to get to the caravan to stop it. I couldn't get my armies that far forward, right, so because of that, he just befriended all the city-states because he's also Greece which is like super city-state power, right, notice all four city-states are at war with me and allied with RIM. And what, there's no one else, it's a duel, there's no one else to caravan with, so how else do you make money, right, the only way to make money is by having markets or, you know, roads and resources and, you know, it's not enough money, six from connections, 21 from cities, no from trade routes, those three ways to make money and one of those ways I can't use, right, and of course if you want to fight because it's a military-based game, you know, unit maintenance is the thing, right, you need money to pay the unit maintenance, so it's pretty much get money to pay for military, right, that's why I did well when I was China because China, you build a library which is actually their, their upgraded library, the paper maker, gives you money and science plus money, usually a library costs you money to have, China it's plus two money which is effectively plus three because it's minus one for everyone else, and that's how you make money just by building paper makers, also the game where I beat RIM, the city-states were behind me in the water and I was able to cargo ship with them this to get a huge pile of money and I built the Colossus even more money and he wasn't able to interfere with that, right, this game I actually did build the Colossus which gives you plus five gold but I'm not able to do the trade routes without the players generate plus two gold, there isn't another player who is there to trade with, right, and actually I did trade with these city-states, I had some caravans going but he just came over and pillaged them and even though I tried to push my military forward to create like a line like so right, it's like he just touches that camel just like on one turn, that's it, it's your whole your whole thing is over, you got to build another one, you know, I couldn't, you know, so, you know, I just want to show you like here watch, he killed that already, right, I play the guy, shoot that at least, not in range of my, and it's not really worth playing this game just to, you know, long drawn out nothing, I have nowhere to expand to, what am I gonna put the settlement like down here, I get money, I can't expand, he's already got a whole bunch of cities over here and all four city-states helping him, it's just, you know, yeah, not really any point, you know, I don't see a catch-up mechanism available to me here, you know, it's like I can hold out and survive, but I don't think I can achieve any of the victory, I've never seen this before, my American only sport 29 units, I'm over that limit by two, which decreases production in my cities by 20%, not running out of deficit anymore, however, thanks to these policies, oh I better deal with those barbarians, I guess, just in case, I guess that's because of my population, let's see, I think you need a large enough population, yeah, number of cities and population, so I'd be as like inscripted my entire civilization into this war, and it's over, the world has been convulsed by war, many great and powerful civilizations have fallen, but you have survived and emerged victorious, the world will long remember your glorious triumph, so where did Scott go wrong? So let's see, here's the map, let's watch the game as it progressed, it's both expanding, see, look, I built a city pretty early as always, turn 41, alright Scott built a city but in a really shitty place, yep, and then I got my hold here, and he never tried to push over to settle up here, I would have settled here if this was a real game, and that's all BS in the end, so Scott quit right there, so that's when Scott quit, our scores are actually pretty close, this was when I just actually pushed the attack, wow, once again, check out these city states, I'll put the white one there, our scores weren't comparable to city states until I got my boost for building a city, and then Scott got a boost for building a city, right here where I just kept growing and he didn't, I was always beating him on culture, I got rid of these city states, pretty substantial, oh reasonably, I was always ahead of him for all intents and purposes, oh we were even, his economy actually wasn't worse than mine, until here, but look it dipped, his economy was not nearly as bad as he was making it out to be, huh, that kind of seals it though because remember I kind of just surrounded him and prevented him from expanding out and harassed him and he didn't really push through in any particular direction, I kept his caravans and everything away from the city states, I can see that show here in military might and that were pretty even, I mean I got a slightly better army, but then he catches up, everything's fine, but then I built enough of an army to hold him at bay for the entire rest of the game, don't remember what was going on right there, science-wise pretty even, in fact he was ahead of me for most of the game, which is interesting, and while I got a boost and I was ahead of him on culture, he was keeping step with me, he never fell behind, I didn't pull away there until I had a third city and he out-produced me, look at this, he out-produced me for basically the entire game, well I guess in the very very early days I out-produced him, but now he was out-producing me and had an okay economy throughout that whole span which is real interesting, he also had more gold than me, look this is when I took out his caravans, really messed him up, he never recovered from that, that seems to be it, it seems like all his stuff was going fine, I guess I can play the game when I'm the only civilization, well my economy's okay and my unhappiness isn't unreasonable, I could basically keep this going, I did not put myself into a burn everything situation, I could basically at this point, station of military units around this board to make sure barbarians never spawn and then disband the rest of them and just play forever in a perfect utopia, so by killing Scott and all of his people I made a perfect utopia, nice, but yeah it seems to me that the only reason I won was that Scott did not at any point really try to break out and even though Prague was right here, he never secured this area, he should have settled down here, I mean look, look at all this iron and stone and stuff, he should have built a city like here somewhere and he shouldn't have built Timbuktu there, he should have built it up here somewhere or he should have pushed through and tried to build over here, because these city states were right next to him, look at this, he had direct access to Lhasa and direct access to Prague, he should have pushed through, he needed this city, this game would have made more sense if he had built a city here, but he didn't, he was afraid of the actually admittedly relatively weak military presence that I had up at these edges because while my military was bigger than his, it was spread among two completely separate fronts, he should have just pushed on one and broken through, because there's a great spot to settle there and so it goes and that's the end of game four, I'm now up three to one and I think Scott is not going to play any more duels or at least not any duels on this Inland Sea map, I'm gonna see if we can get a game going that's actually four players, so still a small game to go quick, but four civilizations, either me and Scott in two AIs or I'll see if we can get some of our friends to jump in, in which case Scott will probably try to convince them to all gang up on me and then they'll all instead gang up on him because it's funny