Okay, time for an after action report.
I did the set up the same as last time except on normal difficulty.
I started in a decent location and built my first city. The first thing I did was focus all my research on getting libraries. My sovereign wandered around a bit, but as soon as I recruited my first champion they took over and my sovereign went home. I built two other towns and ran into the kraxis, or whatever they are called. I paid them for the longest time to stop them from declaring war on me as my three towns grew to be cities and I became the most learned civ in the world.
Then I missed a payment.
They attacked and took first one city, than the other. They killed my wife and my daughter. I fought back with an army of girls with great swords. No armor, just a big sword. An interesting glitch showed up. Even if I killed an enemy unit in one hit, they got to retaliate. It was a close battle but I took back my two cities. Slowly I pressed into their territory and took over all their cities, killing their sovereign, but not before he killed a son.
*Sigh*
After that I slowly expanded, while continuing to study new forms of war. When a nearby civ declared war I built 48 riders, led by my son and daughter in law to attack them. The riders were outfitted with the best of everything non-magical. Master-craft armor and shields, karazans. They rode horses.
The war lasted a very short time.
My enemy begged for peace and I decided to give it to him. He only had 3 towns left and I controlled his capital.
And that was pretty much the end of the game. I played around for a long while, built an army of 48 gold rides which had the best of everything except for legendary armor. But I was just putting off the inevitable.
Eventually I had to call the spell of mastery and win the game.
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Things I learned:
Cities are broken. Really. if you destroy a natural improvement that is within the walls you free up extra space to build. And after you have filled the space you can rebuild the improvement. Wash and repeat. I found this out after the last war, but it was how I researched my crystal gathering to 500% effectiveness so easily.
If you can survive early on, Research can make you a god.
The AI doesn't plan very well. At one piont I saw another civ that had 2 crystal deposits near their city, within their control, and they weren't harvesting them, and didn't seem to have the tech to harvest them. I try to play peaceful when they can so I blew some magic and built a city as close as I could using magic hammers (X4) and Fertility (x7) I think I had the city complete in 5 years or so. I easily put my influence around the city so that it couldn't expand and took the crystal depots for my own.
Well, now I'll have to try again on challenging.
