So the last few nights, Dan and I have been playing Civ IV with Plasma (in a five player game with two AIs). Plasma's new to the game, so we let him play on Chieftain difficulty while the two of us (and the two AIs) played on the default Noble setting.

And so the game progressed. I was struggling rather (I prefer to play on Warlord difficulty, really), made worse by two main things: firstly, Plasma was building wonders faster than me because of Chieftain-ness and secondly, Stalin (one of the AIs) declared war on me while I was trying to expand out with some settlers. So my settlers got killed and Mansa Musa (the other AI) and Plasma pinched the land that I was going to settle.

Eventually, Plasma and I defeated Stalin, and Dan and Plasma defeated Mansa Musa. So it was just us three left. Plasma was winning on score, was ahead on the tech tree, ahead culturally and had also started work on a spaceship. Meanwhile, I was falling rapidly behind because all of Plasma's wonders were squashing the borders of my cities with their cultural pressure. I had seven cities. One got Cultured by Plasma, three were getting pressed on, two were up near the ice cap and the other one - the only functioning one - was my capital, Metropolis (I like naming my cities after Sonic zones :P). Sup was just about hanging in there, but it seemed we had no chance. About the only card we had was that, thanks to my battles with Stalin and that Metropolis was churning out one unit per turn, I had a lot of units hanging around.

So, Dan and I decided to form a defensive pact against Plasma, and then war broke out. Technologically my units were vasly inferior (initially it was riflemen, cavalry and cannons vs. helicopter gunships), and my first assaults faulted. In the west, Dan was making slow progress, taking the odd city.

Then Dan and I decided to specialise. He'd do all the research, I'd earn all the money and we'd meet up every so often to exchange techs and cash. Dan and I slowly started to get better units: infantry, artillery, then tanks. Parades of tanks began to assault Plasma's cities.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/5145/civ4paradeco5.th.jpg (http://img267.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4paradeco5.jpg)

Plasma countered with modern armour, but the collateral damage that my artils inflicted were slowly wearing him down. I razed one of his big cultural cities, the one that also contained the United Nations HQ. That took Cultural and Diplomatic Victory out of the picture for him.

But it seemed we couldn't stop the space race. Our effort was a valiant one, but a doomed one. Morale was low. But then, a miracle occurred:

http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/5250/civ4plasma1cv5.th.jpg (http://img187.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4plasma1cv5.jpg)

Somehow - maybe through sheer chance, maybe because we'd captured the city with the Apollo Programme in it, I don't know - Plasma's Alpha Centauri mission had failed. As you can see, this rather gave us the will to carry on:

http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/5420/civ4plasma2ax9.th.jpg (http://img185.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4plasma2ax9.jpg)

Best moment in a Civ game. EVER. Especially considering how much Plasma gloated about how we couldn't stop him, no matter how many cities we took.

We pushed onwards, large forces attacking the large cities, smaller forces sniping out the smaller cities when Plasma moved his forces to the larger ones in response to our attacks. I got a massive pile of Mech Inf. and Artillery together and started storming the eastern strongholds while Dan continued through the south and west. I also sent out a team of marines to take out Atlantis, a city on a one-square island that Plasma had set up. Turns out it was undefended.

I pushed on with my Mech Inf stack, adding Modern Armor to it as it became available, and taking the former Russian cities, the city that Plasma had cultured from me and his capital. Plasma had one city left, which Dan took.

Now, Plasma had earlier tried to psyche me out by suggesting that Dan would come gunning for me after we'd finished taking him down. Hence my "totally worth it" line in the above picture: he'd private messaged his line to me, I forgot to PM my line to him. And, well, possibly. I decided to avoid all the messiness of that though by offering to become Dan's vassal state, giving him a Conquest Victory without having to destroy my civ. It was the icing on the cake.

http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/5944/civ4plasma3yd9.th.jpg (http://img184.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4plasma3yd9.jpg)

Finally, the scores of our various civs over time:

http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/4082/civ4plasma4pz2.th.jpg (http://img210.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4plasma4pz2.jpg)

It's for moments like this that I play Civ. Given Plasma pretty much spent the whole game gloating, piggybacking off our wars and just being annoying, and our war was going fairly badly at first since he vastly out-teched us (he had Modern Armor when we only had Tanks) and still took two of my cities, one of which he razed. I pretty much had to use masses of suicidal artillery and tanks to get to him.

But on the last turn, the supposed last turn for his spaceship to make it to Alpha Centauri for him to win, the message MISSION FAILED came up on the screen, and everyone just went silent for a while. It was just... *sniff* so beautiful. We don't know if his ship just blew up on impact or if Oddly Named (the city I took on that turn) had his Apollo Program, but it was just so majestic.

And Plasma kept his defenses spread pretty thin (he kept moving his forces to whichever city was being attacked, leaving the rest poorly defended) so a mix of hit 'n' run and aggressive research got the best of him. Although if we failed, I was ready to blame Paul for keeping me from Diplomatic Victory and pulling us into this war. :p

Let it be known that it's never over until it's over. And beating Plasma is the most awesome feeling on Earth.

So the last few nights, Dan and I have been playing Civ IV with Plasma (in a five player game with two AIs).

gross

nice story though

We don't know if his ship just blew up on impact or if Oddly Named (the city I took on that turn) had his Apollo Program
No.
His scientists completely miscalculated the destination and, instead of Alpha Centauri, sent the spaceship to the center of the Milky Way where it got eaten by the Grox.

Civ IV sounds like a blast and I should see if I can get any of that sweet milk. That story was fantastic

Yeah CIV IV is great fun. Well at first it is. The first first hour things go rather rapidly and you have lots to do, but not fast enough as you will agonize over certain players inability to end their turn.

But eventually several hours have passed without you really noticing it. But when you do look at the clock and see it's been five hours, you will also notice that almost nothing has happened except your nation has grown a bit bigger bigger and there are no more barbarians that are causing you trouble.

By then you will also realize that any fun stuff happening has actually happened on a separate continent and it will be a major hassle to get there. Then you either lose or everybody quits due to collective boredom because it's 6 in the morning and people are falling asleep.

Civ IV sounds like a blast and I should see if I can get any of that sweet milk. That story was fantastic
the "complete pack", which includes civ iv and both its expansion packs, is on sale on steam right now for 25 bucks. there's really no reason not to get it