Mathieu. Consul Mathieu, Consul of the Greeks.

The rules weren't made to be broken...but they were meant to be bent out of shape. Such is my story. I concluded that you didn't have to have an army of 100+ soldiers to take over the world. So I proceeded to conquer the world with only 5 military soldiers at a time.

The Greeks started on a continent we called "Metaluna" (I have a thing for old movies) and built five cities before we ran into the English. Using an invention called "Writing" we managed to destroy the English Crown of 7 cities with one military piece outside of the cities (Only an idiot would leave his cities undefended, but they were permanently fortified). How? Diplomats. I stole their pieces and disbanded them, poisoned their water, and generally left them in a worse state then they started. The military piece was one phalanx.

After destroying the English, I forgot about exploration for a while and just worked on my current cities. However, it was leading up to the destruction of the opposing world. After I had finished Leonardo's, Sun Tzu's, and the Great Wall, I was ready for action. I built some explorers (not considered military by my count) and a plethora of diplomats (not considered military, either) and sent them out. The next pesky set of pseudo-barbarians I ran into were an uppity civilization called the Egyptians. They were harder to defeat (I needed my maximum of five military) but I succeeded mostly through poisoned water (god bless it!), sabotaged projects, revolts, and other controlled mayhem at my disposal. Strangely, they never thought to counter my actions through building their own diplomats. However, the unexpected happened. The Egyptians were allied with the French.

The French commanded a large land army, as well as the remaining half of the continent. Through my unorthodox war methods I managed to capture Babylon (they had conquered the Babylonians) and Orleans, as well as destroying some other small cities not worth mentioning. However, the French devastated my small "army" by destroying all but one Musketeer (I had advanced since starting the blasted war), who escaped by a line no bigger wide then a hair.

They also managed to capture back a formerly Egyptian city. I rethought my battle strategy. I steeled against the notion of "guns not pens" but did build some units stronger then Musketeers, this time a variety. At about the same time, the fruits of my scientific labor were grasped: I had discovered Espionage. I quickly switched to a Communist government, and replaced every diplomat with a spy. I got twice as much havoc, twice as fast, and the quality of selective theft of technology served well. The veteran spies quickly helped me fell the French Empire, as well as squash the two other, weaker civilizations, except for the lone American City of Philadelphia.

After 50 years of space ship work, I launched the spaceship and waited until the year of the landing to destroy Philadelphia, so that I could grab both the "Conquered the World" and "Landed Spaceship" bonuses at the same time. My unorthodox methods left me as "Comrade Mathieu the Magnificent." Let this be a lesson to those of you who think that nuking the rest of the world is the best method.

By Mathieu