Preface: This will be my first game playing on Monarch. I've played a few games on Noble, and even won one of them convincingly, but I expect to get somewhat abused by the AIs here. Still, taking notes does seem to help me slow down and pay attention to important stuff in the game, and I'm sure it'll be an interesting game regardless.

I've also never played at Epic speed before. It'll be interesting to see how that affects the flow of the game.

[Note: I don't think I did quite enough warring, which seems the thing most likely to be enhanced by playing at Epic. I'll have to try to make up for it in the next Epic I try.]

On to business; I suppose I should open up the save and see what's what.

4000 BC: Apparently I have two warriors. I'm not sure whether that bodes good or ill. [or is it standard?] There's gold visible to the northwest, and cows to the southwest. There's also a plains hill two spaces west of the settler location, which would get both spots in the city radius. Downsides would be keeping the spices to the east outside the city radius and increased proximity to the jungle that appears to the west... but what the heck? Moving the warriors doesn't reveal much advantage to the start spot, and the increased defense and production should be helpful in my quest (besides--the gold appears to be part of the hand I was dealt :-) [much much later on, it turns out that the plains hill was a concealed Aluminum]

3970 BC: There appear to be quite a number of huts around Thebes. Happy cap is only five; must remember to keep an eye on that. Let's see. I think I'll go ahead and start with a worker so I can get my cows going and see where any horses are (for War Chariots, which presumably I'm not going to be able to use, given the declaration-of-war conditions). Also to that end I'll begin by researching Animal Husbandry, probably followed by Mining.

3940 BC: Village NE gives me a scout. Good luck! Silk and Elephants available to the northeast as well. The village to the west provides a map, revealing more gold, another hut, and marble.

3850 BC: There's also corn and cows to the northeast of me. Good specialist city spot to be had there, I reckon. [at this point, I wondered if the map was supposed to be Earthlike -- though there is a bit too much jungle for this to really be north Africa. This was a speculation that turned out to be false]

3760 BC: In the interturn, the SW warrior is attacked by panthers. Fortunately he's on a forested hill, and emerges unscratched. He pops a hut for 43 gold. The scout pops the SE hut for 36 more gold.

3730 BC: Mansa Musa is to the north of me. Oh dear. Rice to the southeast.
3670 BC: Caesar is to the west of me. Double oh dear.

3610 BC: The Romans have just popped the goody hut I was swinging my scout around to. Oh well. I guess I'll try to swing the scout around behind Caesar, while my warriors will stick to the woods.

3520 BC: Elizabeth is here too!
3490 BC: ... aaaaand Saladin. Oh well, maybe this means there won't be many barbarians, at least. [Ha ha. If only I'd known.]

3430 BC: Worker's done. I'll build a Warrior to give Thebes a little time to grow (and also because I'm paranoid). Tokugawa's apparently back behind Caesar... at this point I guess I have to assume that we're all here on this one happy little land mass, and I should've gone settler first. Oh well.

3400 BC: Animal Husbandry's researched. I'll go for Mining to get my gold hooked up. I'll need to worry about defense (i.e. Hunting -> Archery), but I think that can wait just a little longer ... apparently if I'd stayed on the original city location I would've had horses. Natch.

3190 BC: ... there's Roosevelt, way off to the west.

3160 BC: There's apparently a barbarian city already :-o [I don't know whether Raging Barbs was turned on or whether Monarch is just rougher barbarian-wise than I'm used to from Noble. I'd guess the latter, given that the barbs didn't do much of note.]

3100 BC: I've got Mining now, and I'm going to go for Hunting. Bronze Working will pay dividends, but I'd like to be around to collect them if it turns out there's no copper near me (this is probably excessive paranoia).
2890 BC: Hunting. Going on to Archery, as per the plan.

2830 BC: ...yup, here's Mao. He and Toku seem to be friendly, but he's apparently already annoyed Lizzie.

2710 BC: Hinduism is FIDL... finally. I guess I could've done well to start by founding a religion. [If I were to try things from the start again, I might go that route -- but OTOH I would probably have wound up with skimpier defenses because of it.]

2680 BC: Archery's done. Now I'll go for Bronze Working. Elizabeth is revealed to be Hindu.

2560 BC: Buddhism has been founded.
2530 BC: ...by Caesar. Gotta get on his good side, even if he is the points leader. Found Memphis, and yikes with the maintenance already.

2290 BC: Discover Bronze Working, convert to Slavery (heck, it's free). I'm thinking Pottery (for a granary and cottages) followed by Writing (so that I can do Open Borders and start improving relations with people).

1990 BC: Located the copper source I'd like to try for. In attempting to check the game details (to confirm the difficulty level) I note that the game name (?) is "DeepHurting" ... uh oh :-) [I did later recall that the information I was looking for is available in the F8 screen -- what exactly *does* the Game Details screen have in it?]

1720 BC: Discover Writing. Evidently Mansa Musa did too, because he asked me in the interturn for Open Borders. Begin researching Masonry with an eye to getting some marble hooked up around here. Get Open Borders with Caesar, bad idea as it may be.

1600 BC: Egads! There's a barbarian city just southeast of Thebes.

1540 BC: Found Heliopolis to grab bronze. I'll have to ship a worker down there to get the ball rolling; it's got some good stuff to be improved.

1510 BC: Judaism FIDL. Chop Granary into Memphis, and get going on a Library. ... and apparently there's YET ANOTHER barbarian city near Thebes. I need some war chariots down here stat!

1450 BC: Discover Masonry, begin researching Iron Working (both to see where the iron is and so I can clear jungle from around Thebes).

1300 BC: Capture Jute with War Chariots (barb city, held by Warriors). This does immediate bad stuff to my economy :-/

985 BC: I don't know who the barbs have been beating on, but they've got a moderately-serious stack headed for Memphis. This isn't good :-/

970 BC: Researching Iron Working brings me into the Classical Age. I start on Mathematics, but I'm going to have to do some rebuilding before I'm actually going to get much research done on it.

Here's the state of the empire at 955 BC:

[Upon reflection, I think my empire is a bit too spread out, at least given how many economic difficulties I was having. I'll be interested to see what others with Egypt did for cities, though.]

940 BC: In a fairly close battle that I probably shouldn't have risked, I grab Hittite from the barbs. My economy is almost certainly headed for crapville for a while now.

895 BC: Mansa Musa has axes. Eep!

670 BC: Mao looks like he's going to try to snake my iron out from under me. Oh well -- if he plants a city there, it's bound to culture-flip, and I've got backup iron in the north.

[In retrospect, the AI would have to have been seriously cheating in order to grab the iron, since Mao didn't know Iron Working at this point. The settler wound up founding something else; I don't recall what.]

655 BC: Finish researching Mathematics, move on to Alphabet so I can catch up in some of the other tech branches that I have heretofore been studiously ignoring.

460 BC: Mansa Musa discovers Code of Laws / Confucianism, and Roosevelt builds the Pyramids.

445 BC: A question for the experts: What the heck am I supposed to build here? [Some expansion on this question: I had not previously built a Barracks here because I was making a conscious effort not to just slap them down everywhere and being somewhat low-production I wasn't going to turn Jute into a military production center. But aside from an Aqueduct that I won't need for several centuries due to the happy cap, I wasn't sure what else to build, so Barracks it was. I suppose I could always have used another worker, although as it was there were a couple of periods where my work force ran out of useful stuff to do.]

400 BC: Discover Alphabet. Begin researching Currency. Trade Iron Working to Saladin for Mysticism and Fishing, which is almost certainly a mistake (but I was hoping to butter him up a little after refusing to stop trade with Elizabeth -- perhaps I should be trading with her instead, though). My military costs are getting to be crippling :-/ [In retrospect, I should have just made up my mind to stomp Saladin and befriend Elizabeth and not traded Iron Working to him. Arabian Swordsmen weren't too much of a factor in the war, but they could've been.]

370 BC: After some more tech trading, begin researching Priesthood, since apparently nobody wants to trade it to me and it's only 3 turns. Running scientists in Memphis bore fruit in the form of a Great Scientist a few turns ago, and I pondered lightbulbing something with him since none of my cities are terribly inspiring commercial centers just now. At the time, he was offering Metal Casting, and then I started trading for various religious and boating tech, and he's dropped his offer down to Compass, which is at present practically useless. I'm going to go ahead and shove him into Thebes and build an academy.

295 BC: Great Lighthouse built elsewhere.
280 BC: Oracle built elsewhere.

265 BC: Saladin doesn't want open borders with me any more. This probably does not bode well. He's switched to Elizabeth's religion, and so I probably can't get her to help me with him. Once I get my iron hooked up, I'm going to be sorely tempted to get a bunch of swords and run him over. Have to see who likes him, first, though, and I'm not sure my economy can really take a war right now.

250 BC: Gift Caesar Code of Laws. I'm hoping to butter him up.

85 BC: Najran culture-flips to me, and I raze it, since it's too clsoe to Heliopolis. Swap Currency to Mansa Musa for Monotheism and $200.

Here's a shot of Egypt at 5 AD; you can see the smoking ruins of Najran just to the south of Heliopolis down there.

170 AD: Saladin adopts Theocracy. I think I can guess where this is going.

200 AD: Thebes builds the Parthenon.
275 AD: Taoism FIDL. Rome, as it turns out.
305 AD: Mansa declares on Elizabeth.

320 AD: I'm not going to join Elizabeth in her war (much as I might like to, my front with Mansa's a little awkward just at the moment, and I have my eye on Saladin). I do give her Construction, though ... maybe cats will help her. Enter the Medieval era with the discovery of Music. I haven't got a truly *great* use for a culture bomb just at the moment, so I'll leave him around...

485 AD: I'm not sure I'm quite prepared enough, but I'm going to go ahead and go to war with Saladin. Basra and Damascus both count as low-hanging fruit, I feel, and I should be able to blunt Saladin's counterattack.

605 AD: Mansa Musa builds Chichen Itza.

620 AD: Catapult wins a 2.9% battle attacking Medina; the war is otherwise going according to plan. [It's not just the AI that occasionally does this :-]

680 AD: Elizabeth and Mansa Musa call the whole thing off. [I'm still not sure if any ground changed hands betwen them.]

950 AD: The war with Saladin is finally over. [Which is to say that I'd wiped Arabia off the map.] Now I have to get my economy out of the gutter. [A task that took most of the 1000+ gold I amassed by taking Arabian cities, spent on running research at a reasonable rate.]

Here's a look at the post-war empire:

[I spent the next several centuries improving my infrastructure and in general neglecting my military, falling into autopilot mode. Sure, I built a couple of longbows here and there, but in general I feel like I wasn't quite engaged enough. Inattention bore fruit eventually ...]

965 AD: ... both Mao and Roosevelt hit me up for tech -- Philosophy and Compass, respectively. I guess I look like a big softie. Looking at demographics for the first time in many turns, I note that I'm now seventh in GNP, which I assume means that I haven't been cottaging enough. I'm still first in just about everything else (except soldiers), though, so I'm optimistic that I'll be able to catch up.

995 AD: Somewhat ill-advisedly, I'm going to try for the Hanging Gardens. [Well, it seemed like it was too late to snag them at the time...]

1085 AD: Hadn't ever noticed that cities get fireworks when they celebrate WLK day. Somewhat odd considering I haven't yet discovered Gunpowder :-)

1124 AD: Discover Civil Service and switch to Bureaucracy.

1148 AD: Roosevelt builds the Colossus.

1166 AD: Apparently I'm still the "most advanced". Whatever that means.

1190 AD: Build the Sistine Chapel.

1196 AD: Whip in the Hanging Gardens. Economy is apparently now back in the toilet from the extra population :-/

1202 AD: Whip in my Forbidden Palace in Mecca, and finally I'm back in the green again. Granted, I'm still at 50% science :-/

1214 AD: Okay, tentatively I think I'm going to try for a cultural victory, using Thebes, Memphis, and Jute (!). Jute will need to get the Hermitage, since it's a little behind in the culture race.

1292 AD: Enter the Renaissance with the discovery of Education.

1304 AD: Oddly enough, I am the first to circumnavigate the globe. [Not that it did me much good.]

And here's the empire at 1310 AD:

1364 AD: First to Liberalism, and I'll take Astronomy for my trouble. I'd go straight for Nationalism, but I don't yet have a city ready to build the Taj Mahal, and I think I can afford to put it off (we'll see ...)... and heck yes I'll go straight from Paganism to Free Religion :-) I'll hold off on Free Speech for now until my capital's done building culture buildings. I'm going to need to go on a round of musket-building as soon as I get Gunpowder, also, that's for sure. [Note that I never had a state religion this game. That meant no Theocracy or Organized Religion, but on the other hand I never had to do the diplomatic dance between taking Buddhism to please Caesar or Judaism or Confucianism to please any of my nearer neighbors.]

1418 AD: Mansa Musa builds Angkor Wat.
1430 AD: Roosevelt builds Notre Dame.

1448 AD: Rush the Taj Mahal with an Engineer. Roosevelt, capitalizing off a trade to him of Education (from me), is the first to discover Economics.

1478 AD: Mao rushes the Hagia Sophia.

1583 AD: Enter the Industrial era with the discovery of Scientific Method.

1604 AD: Mansa Musa builds the Spiral Minaret.

1625 AD: Caesar is adopting Vassalage and Theocracy. That probably isn't good; I'd better kick my military building into high gear.

1667 AD: Change to Free Speech -- it's time to really get this culture show on the road.

And then I see this:

1685 AD: Caesar's power graph is absurd, and he just started a Golden Age. I hope this doesn't bode poorly. I *think* the best he can have is cavs, and I at least have a *few* riflemen. I suppose drafting isn't out of the question for me, either, since I have happy to spare in most cities. [I'd never used Nationalism before in any serious way, and three unhappiness always seemed like a ridiculous penalty for it ... but this game I did get some mileage out of it, and my cities still had enough resources and such to be happy after drafting a round of Rifles]

1697 AD: Well, okay. Caesar just declared on Mansa. Which means Mansa's probably going to come knocking asking for help next.

1703 AD: Wow. State Property is *amazingly* better for me than Free Market. Caesar takes Kumbi Saleh. He's not going to be pleased when all those formerly-Malinese border cities culture-flip to me, I'm betting :-/ [I didn't take a screenshot of it, unfortunately, but by the time of the first Roman-Malinese War, Gao and Kumbi Saleh were already under strong cultural pressure from Memphis. Caesar taking over Kumbi Saleh, of course, meant that he had zero culture there. I'm pretty sure that the city never managed to push its borders during Caesar's tenure there.]

1718 AD: Mansa asks for help, and I refuse. And then Caesar asks for help. I'm not sure I dare refuse him, so I declare on Mansa. This is probably going to get ugly.

1730 AD: Mao declares on me. [I assume that Mansa must have bribed him, although I *suppose* it could've just been opportunism on his part.] This is going to get ugly. First, I guess I'll bribe Elizabeth to declare on Mao... (a lot of good *that's* going to do me, I'm sure). Next, I'm going to sleep on this. [I'm not sure whether or not this actually helped prevent the onset of panic, but it was also getting late, and I needed to snap out of autopilot mode]

Next, I'm going to switch to Nationhood, briefly, so I can get some guys to defend myself from Mao. Next, turn down the science rate a bit so I can get some cash to rushbuy and upgrade stuff. Mao's "stacks" don't look so beefy just at the moment; he's got a bunch of rifles, cats, and ... hmm, okay, he does have grenadiers.

1738 AD: Mao seems to be concentrating his effort on Hittite. I'm doing a reasonable (not to say not costly) job of breaking up his stacks, and I think I'll be able to hold the city... hopefully.

Mansa's willing to agree to a cease-fire, since we're both basically staring over the border at each other anyhow. Doubt he's going to be much use without some gifts, but I guess we'll see how that works. [Mansa attempted to invade with some elephants towards the beginning of the war, but rifles made short work of them. After that, Caesar kept all of Mansa's discretionary forces at bay, or so I assume.]

Drafting + Globe Theater is kinda cheesy, but I guess Slavery would work equally well. [because sure, the unhappiness stacks, but it gets zeroed out anyhow]

1740 AD: Mansa immediately wants to swap luxury resources. Well, what the heck? Roosevelt also offers me Military Tradition and cash for Biology, a deal that I'm happy to take [which is not to say that I used cavalry for much of anything, but I might've wanted to...].

1742 AD: I manage to complete the Statue of Liberty. Booyah!

1744 AD: At the cost of a couple of Rifles and a bunch of suicide cats, manage to pry Mao's stack off of Hittite. I don't think he's completely done yet, but we'll see.

1746 AD: Sell Steel to Caesar for $2740, since that's what he was willing to pay for it (I guess in terms of beakers vs. coins, that's a good deal for him, but I need the loose cash). I *think* I can do adequately against Mao with the current-gen units, so I'll Research Radio now (and not Artillery).

1750 AD: Chengdu falls.

1756 AD: Mao is still refusing to talk. I'll probably have to go beat down Nanjing, but I'll wait until after Chengdu comes out of resistance.

1762 AD: Apparently Mao gots cavs. I guess I'll go ahead and settle for peace, since Nanjing is culturally hosed anyhow and I can leave my army on the border at Chengdu as discouragement.

1764 AD: I think I can see a Chinese Great Artist heading up to Nanjing to culture bomb it (but apparently it doesn't -- don't know what Mao did with it).

1774 AD: Enter the modern age with the discovery of Radio.

[To summarize ... from here on out, I'd already constructed almost all of the cathedrals etc. that I was going to use in my three culture cities, and the reason I got so far behind in military in the first place was because I'd spent all my time building all of the available infrastructure buildings into most of my cities ... so they now had nothing to build but military, and build military they did, for the rest of the game. Sure, there were some side trips, but I figured I didn't want Caesar somewhat irrationally (given "pleased" status) declaring on me and ruining what was otherwise a fairly sure win.]

1784 AD: Mao makes peace with Elizabeth. I guess I'd better keep on keeping on with the military-building.

1794 AD: Roosevelt builds Versailles.
1819 AD: Build the Eiffel Tower.

1820 AD: Kumbi Saleh, which is apparently the Confucian holy city (!!) revolts to me. I can't imagine Caesar's too happy about that -- Mansa Musa either. ... except that the way things work, Caesar's actually *more* happy with me, since our close borders no longer spark tensions :-D [This is very artificial, but I'm not really sure what one would do about it ... and it's more or less Caesar's fault for taking such a poorly-positioned city in the first place. Seems a fair trade for all those times the AI founds a city right up on the border of my empire and then whines about how our close borders spark tensions ...]

1834 AD: Medina pops silver.
1838 AD: Chengdu pops gold.
[The only two pops I saw all game]

1840 AD: York is now apparently entirely surrounded by my culture. This is somewhat odd; it wasn't all that many centuries ago that York was one of the leading cultural cities anywhere.

1856 AD: Apparently Thebes was founded on Aluminum. Having discovered Industrialism, I *think* I have enough tech to turn my research down to a low simmer.

[Mao and then Caesar both declare war on Mansa Musa around now. I help Mansa out with a bit of tech, but I'm not willing to intervene in his war, since both Caesar and Mao are rather friendly at this point. I'm not sure the Chinese get any worthwhile cities out of the deal, since although they take one of them, two others culture-flip to me and Elizabeth. At this point I'm more or less running straight for the win.]

1879 AD: Caesar finishes off Mansa.

1893 AD: A winner is me!

In retrospect, I'm not sure whether the various civs were "dealt" any hands in particular. I notice that Rome had Iron in the city radius of its capital, and of course I would have had Aluminum... perhaps Egypt was supposed to win a space race?

In any case, thanks to Sirian and Griselda for running the event, the first RB event in which I have participated. I'm looking forward to Epic 9, whatever that will be :-)