First Try

After going through the tutorial, I started playing a scenario where I was the leader of Japan. My empire began by building 3 cities on Japans mainland. I began probably like most people by building a food surplus like Diamonds Guns, Germs and Steel tells us to. Because these 3 cities are on an island, they advanced very quickly, because they were my only cities, and because I could research all of the agricultural advances I wanted to. I could do this because of my isolation from barbarians and other empires, who could not attack me without large advances in technology with ships. Once I was able to start producing these ships and stronger military units, I made a stupid change in my philosophy, although at the time, I didnt realize that I was doing it. I started creating mass amounts of military units but I played passively through the entire time frame. I never entered into a war or even battle with anyone besides Barbarians. But once I began expanding, I quickly saw the importance and efficiency of railroads between cities and resources. In these expanded cities and surrounding areas, I should have used more workers and produced them sooner than I did. I waited a while and it took a long time for the cities reap the rewards of the resources around it. Natural resources and how you use them to your advantage was another big part of Diamonds book. He argues that a civilization can only grow as large as the resources around them can support. In my empire, I was able to farm a lot of rice. So, I build granaries and created a large food surplus. Even though this was great, many areas were not able to be mined. In those areas, very few technological advances were made. They ended be populous cities but very primitive in a lot of their unit production. The one major resource I could mine, besides iron for railroads, was uranium. Not really Japans mainland but my surrounding areas were able to produce a lot of uranium. With the Manhattan Project, I could have produced nuclear weapons but ran out of time and turns. Another resource that was unavailable to me was oil. Even though I was one of the more advanced empires, at least my mainland cities were anyway, I could not produced anything that required oil, such as planes and fighter jets. Neighboring China, even though their cities were protected by bowman late in the 20th century, had fighter jets circling nearly every one of their cities because of their production of a lot of oil. I ended up winning a time victory during this scenario but made some large and stupid mistakes, so I think that if I play smarter I could do it again.