Civ5 game log: The Indian one-city challenge

Having won the technological victory, the time victory and the diplomatic victory while mostly pursuing the cultural victory I chose to play my next game as the Indians. I set the difficulty level ridiculously low, to Chieftain, but compensated it by turning on the one-city challenge option. In other words, I was only ever allowed to have one city in my empire. This way, I thought, I would really have to focus on only producing culture. The game speed I set to quick because the previous game I played was played with the epic length. The map type I set to Pangaea because I figured that would be fairest for the AI players who clearly aren't that good on, say, archipelago maps.

The game started out quite nicely with me first finishing the Stonehenge, which I believe is an essential part of gaining the cultural victory, and then the Great Library. I also met the other leaders: Elizabeth, Ramkhamhaeng and Suleiman. They were all friendly towards me.

My war elephant kicked some Barbarian butt.

The Barbarians killed a scout and a warrior from me but I got them under control after building a war elephant. I also built some extra units just in case because in my previous game I didn't and got a few of my cities taken by other civs. I also made friends with a couple of militaristic city-states so they donated me new units every now and then. Before I really even realized, I actually had a nice army of units.

My riflemen attacking London.

Elizabeth then approached me and warned me about getting too close with the Ottomans. She also had only one city, probably because the Barbarians had taken two civilian units from her, at least one of which was a settler. I set that one free once, but it got captured again, and the next time I captured it I took it as a worker for myself. The other civilian I just took without donating it back to Elizabeth. Elizabeth clearly couldn't take care of herself so when Suleiman asked whether I'd join his war against her I agreed to do that after 10 turns during which time I moved my riflemen around Elizabeth's borders. Interestingly, when I captured London, it was completely destroyed with just the city ruins left because of the one-city challenge, even though in regular games the capital cities cannot be razed.

What? Why??

Some 50 turns later Ramkhamhaeng declared war on Suleiman and quickly mobilized six units to take one of Suleiman's cities. Being both peaceful and Suleiman's friend myself I couldn't just watch the Siamese aggression and intervened with my infantry, anti-tank and artillery units. I even publicly denounced Ramkhamhaeng beforehand to convince Suleiman that he could ask for my help, which he didn't. Instead, when I had slain the Siamese troops for him and prevented one of his cities from being taken, he publicly denounced me!

At this point only three Ottoman cities remained.

Needless to say, I won't take such ungratefulness and almost as soon as I had made peace with Siam I declared a war on the Ottomans. I don't know if all of their units were destroyed in the brief war with Siam but I didn't come across much resistance and destroyed the ten or so Ottoman cities easily one by one, pillaging the farms and other improvements on my way.

At this point I knew I had passed the point of no return and even though I could've continued pursuing the cultural victory I chose to destroy the Siamese empire as well, as I didn't have a domination victory under my belt either. One thing that slightly bothered me was that the uranium that was nearest to Delhi was five tiles away and the cultural borders were already at their maximum, four tiles away. Not that it would have made any difference, but it would've been nice to drop a nuke on some enemies. By the way, the domination victory was quite perfect: I destroyed every city of every other civilization (excluding city-states, I only destroyed one of them) and not just the capital cities. I still ended up with a rather low score of 1034 even though the game ended on turn 259, or 1978 AD. Well, it was fun anyway. :)