About a game

    I'll try to be brief. The game is nine years old and I doubt anybody much is playing it anymore. Also one of my three loyal readers heard about half of this yesterday. So close one eye, dude!
    Yes it's about Civilization IV. Yes my I.V. joke proved to be prescient. But if the addiction isn't fading, the first blush of the love affair is at least a bit lighter. One comment at least applies to every Civilization/ Sid Meier game I've played so far. So much relies on chance. It depends where your first city lands and where the other players' first cities land. If you're lucky, you're very very very lucky. So I played a game as Gandhi and just absolutely rolled. Keep in mind that even when I don't play as Gandhi, I play as Gandhi. I am a committed Civilization pacifist. I do trounce barbarians because they're barbarians; they're perpetually at war with you. But otherwise I'm totally non-militaristic. And this game just went perfectly. This is great until I do all the exact same things and wind up taking 200 years longer to win, ending with a terrible score.
    One reason the latter happened (you can close the other eye, Paul) is that I didn't figure out that the key to a diplomatic victory is bribery. The way you win a diplomatic victory is to build the United Nations, get elected secretary-general, and then pass a resolution making you world leader. Gandhi did this no problem. But nobody else I've played as has. It took me centuries in game time and hours in real time to figure out something. When you have the UN elections, there's a turn before you get the result. What you're supposed to do is give everybody something, money, a technological advance or whatever. Once I did that, elections started going my way. I actually went back a couple of centuries to replay one of the more frustrating endings. I didn't wind up with a Gandhi-like score, but it did improve. Somewhere Genghis Khan is much relieved.

Edit: OK, I'll have mercy and not add another CivIV post but just edit this one instead. As it turns out, bribery doesn't always work. I suspect that the problem is another odd one: in earlier eras, it seems like it takes two turns rather than one before your UN election happens. I suspect that if I skip a turn before trying my bribery, it will then work. But at the moment, I've just let that game hang and started another. Should some Civilization IV fan some day surf in, surf back in again later; no doubt there will be another edit.

Editedit: Nope. It was just my imagination that there were 2 turns. CivIV just hates Russians.:)

Edit3: Fortunately, I had a previous save just 50 years earlier, so I went back and bribed like a madman and when I built the UN, I squeaked by with a diplomatic victory. I still wound up with what seemed like a lackluster score, but as it was my 2d best ever, I guess that's my imagination. Lesson: don't make a defense treaty with somebody who is very unpopular unless you want to have to bribe the world to get a couple more defense treaties. Once you're allied with half of your rivals, you're probably going to win. If you're not, you won't. I want to go back and see what in heck I did as Gandhi, but I suspect that I was just lucky.