Conquering

This time in playing CIV I learned the positives and negatives of conquering land. I started out the game with a small number of cities and expanding with a settler every so often. The advantage of doing this is your are able to easily control and defend all your land. It isn't too time consuming to control what each worker does, and it's easy to examine each city. The disadvantages to this is that you limit population growth, gold potential, and your resources. Then later in the game I started conquering by force, and my number of cities increased drastically. The big disadvantage is that you have to turn each worker to automatic, which doesn't allow you to monitor what they are doing and you can't really keep track of all your cities. The other thing is it is much harder to defend all your territory because you have to spread your military out. Also if you want to move troops from one side of the country to the other, it takes a very long time. There are a lot more benefits though. First, you open yourself to a lot more resources with the more land and different types of land that you have. Another advantage is that you have many more cities to build at once. This allows you to build helpful buildings, military, and even leave room to let you build things like the pyramids and Hollywood. Also with so many cities you can build a lot more military units in a small amount of time, so in case you find yourself in an emergency situation you can revamp your military quickly. Overall I think there are great advantages to conquering lots of land, but staying small is not the worst thing you can do.

Be Careful of War

On my next try at Civ I realized that I needed a balance between expansion, argriculture, and military. I had this balance working extremely well for a long time and also I helped myself in keeping allies with the other dominant civilizations in the game and the most of the civilizations around me. These allies reall helped me, in that I knew where to keep most of my military troops, which are not the easiest to move around in the game. These allies also opened me up to m first chance to expand by force and establish a dominance in the game. Ceasar had attacked one of my biggest allies in Egypt, so I decided with my upgraded military I would wipe them out which I started to do very easily, since I had tanks and gunships and they had longbowmen. Then while I was attacking Ceasar, Mongolia declared war on me. Luckily I had left some troops in the city closest to Mongolia which I was able to start an attack, so I wasn't fighting on my own land, and protect my cities at the same time. At this point, I realized I had overlooked an essential part of the game that was hurting me. I realized that after declareing war I had been losing over 100 gold every turn. Luckily I had built up a huge supply of gold, but if this were not the case this overlooking could have been a huge mistake. This really translates into real life, because wars do cost a lot of money, and if a nation is defending itself they could lose a great deal of money, and also start to lose their land because they can't suport theri troops. This just shows that before you go to war make sure you have all the angles worked out.