What is the worst hammering you've ever had?

[Blaupanzer]

Mary-Ann, That has happened to all of us at Deity, I suspect. Either barbs or another civ finds us prior to sufficient defense and down we go. Note that one warrior is superior to all barbarian comers if you only have one city. This amazing trick can be very useful if you spot them wandering early. Those early guys can also indicate a nearby civ (that triggered the barbs out of a hut). The AI civ is not limited by the above rule. Their horsemen will eat your poor warrior.

[War4ever]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
Mary-Ann, That has happened to all of us at Deity, I suspect. Either barbs or another civ finds us prior to sufficient defense and down we go. Note that one warrior is superior to all barbarian comers if you only have one city. This amazing trick can be very useful if you spot them wandering early. Those early guys can also indicate a nearby civ (that triggered the barbs out of a hut). The AI civ is not limited by the above rule. Their horsemen will eat your poor warrior.

actually any unit in your only city will survive barbs..... just not necessarily the ai

[Father Beast]

I got plastered really good playing on deity+2 one time. I built my city and the Zulus showed up with a bunch of elephants in 2100 BC demanding my entire treasury for a cease fire. I told them to stuff it and down I went...

[East Street Trader]

The worst hammering is the any recent hammering so I'll tell the short tale of the English civ I founded last week on what turned out to be a small island with room for about four perfectionist cities.

London got founded, made a settler which marched across the island on the roads laid down by my second settler and founded York. At this point pirate archers landed next to London. I had 24 gold in the treasury so could not employ the run away, run away ploy. London fell.

My surviving city, York, now faced a succession of barb archers generated by London, its close neighbour on this small island.

It turned out that the rule about a defending unit in your only city being invulnerable to barb attacks holds in this situation so my NONE settlers came into York and saw of assaults until I could build warriors, foresting the city square to help less favoured defenders in the future.

In preparation for getting a second and third city down I built a barracks and then a plalanx. This noble unit then survived a millenia or three of barb archer attacks - sometimes three or four in a turn.

I was able to found two more cities in the hinterland behind York.

But the real trouble was that I was not being offered the option of building a replacement palace. So corruption was killing me. I had to set tax to 50% to avoid the barracks being sold which meant many turns went by without my generating a single beaker. Once I had slowly built up a dozen or so coins I could go in for a bout of research but it was sloooowwww work.

Turned out that building courthouses helped, but progress remained slow.

Had I appreciated just how slow it would be I'd have sold the baracks after building the phalanx.

But I reckoned that retaking London might restore my palace so I made my research goal horseback riding.

I celebrated the birth of Christ by building a mighty army of three horsemen and destroying the dozen or so archers who infested the island (those which had not immolated themselves at the gates of York) then rooting out and putting a summary end to those roystering in London.

Revenge is a dish said best to be eaten cold and true it is that much celebration took place in the land when the brave and victorious horsemen rode through London's liberated streets.

Now came the disappointment. Buckingham Palace had been destroyed and I was still not offered the option of building a new one.

Maybe there is a pre-requisite tech. (Masonry?)

Anyway I contemplated spending another millenia or two researching the sea going techs and doing all that would be needful to achieve the heady heights of Monarchy.

Maybe it would have been an achievement to get that far but, exhausted by the long barbarian wars, I did not have the energy and tamely gave up.

A tale of glorious (if slow) victory over the pirates, therefore. But, had I retired rather than quit on giving up I do not think my civ's achievements would have made much of an impact on the Hall of Fame. I never even met an A1 civ.

One small disappointment is that I have read of some comments which the advisers make in unusual circumstances and thought I might get some such in this game. But, no, just the usual stuff about torches of knowledge sputtering and talents going to waste.

In my current game I started on a huge specials and huts rich continent, confined the neighbour Babylonians to one city, and allowed myself to build both HG and the Collosus in my second city (I usually apply a self denying ordinance to this as it is too powerful). I have about thirty good cities down and am starting to work out the timing for a 50 - 100 AD Republic to be followed by some profitable ship chained foreign trade, a short bout of superironclad conquest and then a cash rich 1000 AD Democracy.

Quite a contrast.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by East Street Trader

Now came the disappointment. Buckingham Palace had been destroyed and I was still not offered the option of building a new one.

Maybe there is a pre-requisite tech. (Masonry?)

Yup... Masonry it is. I hate when that happens... the number of times I used to play Germany on the world map and have the Russians take Berlin...

I assume you were on Deity, EST? Good story. Kudos for being able to admit to it!

STYOM

[Darkknight]

We are gathered here to commemorate and honour our late discible the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

[East Street Trader]

I suppose an answer might have been: to stay at one city; make Masonry the research objective; then rebuild a Palace; only then bother with more cities.

Also I over-estimated the danger from the barb archers. My vet phalanx entrenched in forest terrain was not stretched to beat them off. He would have had a decent shout at surviving without the vet status confered by the barracks and, if he survived, would have become a vet in the course of time anyway.

With better play I could have got to equality with the wait for Jesus challenge (or probably better).

I have thought for some time that all the cheats which are built in to aid the A1 against a succesful human player are matched by corresponding cheats which hold the A1 back when the human player is floundering. Certainly the received wisdom is that the A1 research rate drops if the human player turns his own science rate down. So, next time, I'll try harder to recover.

Don't under-estimate the value of that free Palace before Masonry, though. It is a very valuable asset. Another game I gave up on was one where I got an advanced tribe from a hut before founding. You don't get a Palace then either (actually I think that was a glitch because I have seen only one other reported occasion when this happened).