Civilization V – Forward for the French Empire

Civilization V is the new turn based strategy game from Jon Shafer, Sid Meier and the team at Firaxis, allowing players to take control of a nation as a mythical leader and lead them to glory in search of victory via domination, science, social policies or democratic world vote.

Napoleon is a funny little guy. Students of history might remember him as a great general who almost managed to conquer the continent of Europe leading the French but the people at Firaxis have decided that his nation is best remembered for the amount of culture that it created before the Industrial Revolution, translated into Civilization V as the ability to get 2 extra points towards Policy changes per city before Steam Power.

To me this sounded like the perfect nation to try and get a Utopia based victory, apparently the hardest to achieve in Civilization V, according to early reports from players.

My two previous full games indicated that until Steam arrived a player had enough time, as long as war could be avoided or limited in scope, to put together five or six high culture cities while also keeping up with the best technology wise, when playing on the Prince (Normal) difficulty.

I also resolved to try and pull of the win on the Marathon game speed with the biggest possible map and the most civilization present in the game world.

Unfortunately my dreams of Utopia were quickly slashed by the Greeks lead by Alexander who quickly got access to the Classical age and then moved to flood my cities with Hoplites, which proved too much for my Iron lacking empire.

I've learned that Marathon games really take a long time and that it's probably better to stick to Epic if looking for more room for strategy than Standard offers, which I will do for my next try at building the French Empire.

I've also learned that it's best to have a few cities before moving to the technology which uncovers Iron, mainly to give yourself more chances of having the resource pop up in territory the city controls or can quickly expand to (money is a huge boost here).