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So, I commented that I blew an evening playing Civ V to a friend. His response was epic.
"I don't think I've bought any of those since III. That game is like a drinking binge. You wake up 3 days after you wonder what you were doing."
I think I'm about 10-15 more turns from conquering my continent, and I've done enough exploring to be confident that there are two main continents.
I started a standard chieftain game (because, as was pointed out above, Settler is pointlessly easy) as French. Past iterations of the game have made keeping a standing army such a nuisance that I'd settled into a defensive but pacifist, Win by Tech or Diplomatically (or, with IV, Cultural Victories) mindset. I chose French for the bonus culture production per city (and then promptly didn't read that the Policies get more expensive per city you own until about 5 turns ago. Whoops). Fortunately, my error was mitigated by my figuring out that between having 3 or 4 militaristic city states surrounding me, and the fact that I was able to churn out just enough gold to keep about 2 of them buddies with me (plus a culturally oriented city-state) to feed me free units, and producing a spare unit here and there, I was able to build up a bit of an army. I was sharing the continent with Ramses and al-Whoever the Arab, who were both talking dirty about each other behind their backs. When I finally figure out where both of them are, I realize that I'm stuck between them, so playing them off each other isn't gonna get me anywhere except attacked if I get suckered into anything but neutrality.
That realization, coupled with Ramses and conquering one of my city-state buddies, prompted me to go kick his *** a bit, just to keep him in line. His archers and spearmen weren't a match for my archers and swordsman (the consumability of strategic resources was a helluva surprise here!), so I whittled down Thebes' defenses and captured his capital since it was the most conveniently located city. Suck on that, Ramses! I kept it as a puppet for a little while, then ended up annexing it because it dawned on me that it was pretty well situated and was a good producer. Then, I noticed the Arabs creeping northward, encroaching on my manifest destiny. So I settled a couple towns in the south to stake out my territory and block his advancing borders. He snuck a few doomed towns in just to be an *******, but I let it slide, vowing my revenge later, because I noticed that Ramses had also gotten the erroneous notion that he was allowed to expand southward, too. So I teched up a couple military techs to make sure I kept the edge and could leverage my horse pastures into dominant units (knights), and I sent knights and crossbows up to take back my territory. This time around, I had a golden age fueling my military machine, and let me tell you -- I built a helluvan army right quick. He thought he was pretty special 'cause he dug up some horses to build chariots sometime in the past couple hundred years.. well, he discovered he wasn't really. I systematically marched through his lands, and left him his youngest city, a pathetic little thing on the coast sandwiched between Thebes's culturally expanded might and a city-state that didn't like me anyways (and was surrounded by mountains on all the other sides) because I learned about encroaching when I discovered them...
So I devoted a bunch of money and lost happiness trying to get the 3 cities I annexed on that conquest to be worth a damn. See, I had this really concerning lack of ports, since all the city-state buddies I had were strung up and down the east and west coasts. And the two ports he had weren't really optimally placed -- one was hard up on Thebes' ravenous appetite for land, and the other one was up in the middle of some barren northern wastes. So it took a lot of time, attention, and coin to nurture those cities into any level of productivity, but now I'm thinking that with a few of the improvements and buildings I've finally gotten in place there, they might actually be acceptable ports to build some naval power from. This is facilitated heavily by embarking land units, so I don't have to crank out transports. Thank goodness!
Now, I've captured Mecca and am working on purging the last two of his cities.
By the way, war is a fantastic way to capture workers!
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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
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