Pike Plays Civ: Finale!

This is the culmination of a Civilization IV Let’s Play I’ve been doing; here are Part One and Part Two.

Where were we? Ah yes! Caesar had just declared war on me! Again!

So Caesar sends his stack at Coventry, which I’d retaken several turns prior. I’d moved most of my reinforcements out of there, due to years of peace and assuming I’d be good. Famous last words, I know. It was very quickly down to Caesar’s stack vs. one single Redcoat. Who put up a good fight, by the way, due to my huge tech advantage, but eventually Caesar nabbed it back. What happened next can probably best be described as a game of Coventry Yo-Yo, as I took it back, and then he took it back, and then I took it back again. That poor city. It’s like it’s really Poland or something!

MEANWHILE IN ARRETIUM, it’s Caesar’s trebuchets vs. a big pile of my machine guns, which I’d just finished teching and which I was now hurrying like fist of the North Star. Yeah, that didn’t go so well for him. I guess you can give him points for being plucky, or something.

So about this time everyone voted for me to be in charge of making votes and stuff. So obviously, I asked everyone if they wanted to declare war on Caesar and help a guy out. I mean, wartimes are funtimes, right? Right? …Bueller?

Chickens.

Okay, I’m alone on this one then. Which is okay, because I’ve got a little stack full of Redcoats and Artillery and Caesar is still using, like, swordsmen and stuff.

Notice he's still making trebuchets.

I’ve also got a Great General named El Cid, who apparently was a famous historical leader at some point and only moonlighted as a Final Fantasy character. Kay, sounds good.

I went and mopped up the Roman empire. Rome fell, some other cities that I can’t remember fell, and finally even my formerly peacenik fellows got in on the action and soon everyone was just eating poor Caesar up. While this was happening, I was nonchalantly building the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program on the side. You know, just for fun.

Anyways, Caesar quickly got down to having about, oh, one city left. Which is when this happened:

And you know, I felt bad. I really did. So I made peace with him. A couple of turns later, Sitting Bull took his last city and his entire civilization was destroyed. We’ll always remember your salad, bro.

Now that the war was over, it was time to focus on more important things, like building a spaceship. Despite having the Apollo Program finished in 1928, I wasn’t quite teched up enough to start building spaceship parts yet, so in the meantime I built dozens of ICBMs, just in case. Hey, the best offense is a good defense, right?

And so the decades went on. I was still waiting for enough tech to start building my spaceship. I was starting to get antsy about it, too, knowing that with the Time Victory option enabled, my time was limited. And then this popped up onto my screen:

I looked at it. I thought about it. Caesar was gone and all of the other civs LOVED me. All I had to do was press that button and I had a Diplomatic Victory in the bag. Game over. I win.

And I thought about it… and my cursor hovered over the button…

…and I hit no.

DISREGARD DIPLOMATIC VICTORY, ACQUIRE ALPHA CENTAURI

And so the game continued, mostly uneventfully other than having to stave off other civilizations’ frequent trade offers of clams or rocks for my uranium. Finally, though, I was able to start building spaceship parts, and I started to do so, but it was just about that time that an ominous little countdown appeared in the top right-hand corner of the screen:

buy ivermectin online 100 TURNS LEFT.

And you know, for a game that was ending up remarkably peaceful now that Caesar was gone, this was possibly the most nerve-wracking part of the game yet. I had 100 turns to beat the clock, build a spaceship, launch it, and land safely on a faraway planet.

Bring

It

ON.

And so I built a spaceship, piece by piece. Times were good in the Glorious English Empire by this point; cities from other countries were seceding left and right so they could join up with me, I was exploding with culture to the point that I worried I might accidentally end up with a Culture Victory, we had tech, we had Wonders coming out our ears, we had so much money that I didn’t know what to do with it, we had a huge stockpile of nukes in case anyone decided to do something funny in the last second, we had Al Gore building the Internet for us in Warwick, and that Diplomatic Victory box kept popping up and I kept declining it.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, I launched that freaking spaceship.

There are a bunch of crazies aboard; I sure hope they don't split into different ideological factions and cause issues once we land.

And then, ten turns later…

Aww yeah, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Ahhh, what a great game. I had dominated in just about every fashion: scorewise, techwise, diplomacy-wise, culture-wise (I had two cities with Legendary Culture by the end, and four of the world’s top five cities were mine), and I got the spaceship. What sort of accolades would the score screen give me? Surely I had to be somewhere up toward the top with all those historical strategic greats…

...

…oooooor I can sit around at the bottom and be Warren G. Harding, I guess. Yup, looks like the game had the last laugh.

Now what about that spaceship, you may be asking? Did they reach Alpha Centauri safely? What happened to them? Well that, my friends, is a story for another day…

4 thoughts on “Pike Plays Civ: Finale!”

  1. This was a fun read. I don’t have Civ IV but I do have Civ V, but I think the last time I played it was…umm February? Looks like I’ll have to dust off Steam and play a game or two. I tend to go for the science victory too but every once in a while it’s gratifying to just crush your opponents in miltary might.

  2. @Fig – Civ IV is far better. I guarantee it wouldn’t have been sitting idle for months like V has been!

  3. I like how the real Churchill is sitting about a dozen places higher. Better luck next time? Maybe you should have taken that diplomatic victory :P

    Do this again please, you’re entertaining :D

  4. I did play a full game as the Iroqois the other day. (Disabled Time-based victory, game lasted about ~650 turns.) No one stepped on my toes except Rome. What is it about those Romans anyway huh? He decided to build a city right between my two major settlements on my main island effectively cutting the two off. (Not that big of a deal as I build all my cities coastally whenever possible. Yay for harbors!) But still, principles. At this point I had access to stealth bombers and a full navy while he had access to industrial-age infantry. (I had the Manhattan Project but zero access to Uranium) As my Stealth bombers operating from my capital of Onandaga were pounding Ceasar’s cities, I sent my mechanized infantry across the pond and captured his cities. By the time I had toppled the ‘mighty’ Romans, I had fallen behind on my usual technological victory goal and the other civs had started building rocket parts. So I used my gold to influence the city-states, build the UN and won through diplomacy. Nothing says diplomacy like mercilessly crushing a weaker civilization and bribing those who are neutral eh?

Comments are closed.