Because for some reason I tagged the Civ 5 blog post as a part 1 so here is part 2, the screenshots are from this computer, while that blog was written with the laptop I retired in 2020.
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I played a lot of the Earth-style continent script maps for a while in 2021. Here I am playing the Iroquois in Europe, part of the World Map script.
Me winning as the Austrians on a gigantic map.
The Scramble for Africa scenario. I bagged a few of the easier achievements and one awkward one - having the English explorer and the Belgian explorer within a few tiles of each other.
I can’t beat the Mongol scenario (yet) despite following some guides to achieve it. There are a pile of achievements that are tied to beating it by certain difficulties but you can get all of them if you beat it on Deity. Deity isn’t as difficult in Civ 5 as it is in 2 or 4 mainly because you as an intelligent unpredictable human can generally outsmart the AI who struggle to manoeuvre their units properly. There is nothing more satisfying in this game than holding back a tide of enemy units with a small number of elite troops with ranged attacks.
I played England a lot for a while because there was an achievement for killing 357 ships as the English. I had plenty of experience and enjoyment sinking barbarian (and other players’) navies all game so was not too fazed by the need to sink so many as the English. Being able to effectively bombard enemy cities and units with the likes of Galleons (ship’s wheel icon above) and then seize them with melee ships like the privateer (skull and crossbones icon) could win games easily.
Rome in the north-eastern USA featuring Claude Debussy.
2008 AD so only <50 turns to go and just absurd military to keep the world cowed.
I played a lot of gigantic maps to test the computer graphics card but often there were vast tracts of the world I never saw.
I have over a hundred units in my empire here. There is an achievement for having over 100 units, 100 great generals and winning the game 100 times. Of those three conditions it would be the 100 great generals that took the longest to pop, believe it or not.
Into the Renaissance is really good too. Here I am playing as the Byzantines. This is probably my first attempt at just winning it but was difficult to hold off the endless Arab assault
Fall of Rome was entertaining - playing as the Vandals and starting in Morocco and proceeding to conquer Rome and Byzantium for the Double KO achievement. Bonus points for taking Rome with a boat. Diary entry: “Nov 13th 2022 - Played loads of Civ 5. Did a few of the Into the Renaissance and Fall of Rome achievements, notably winning, taking Rome with a boat and Constaninople in a double KO with the Vandals.”
Viking Destiny 1066 was entertaining as well. I played it from every angle and beat it on various difficulties to acquire all the achievements. I mainly sleep-walked through on Settler with various civilizations so beating it on Deity was a satisfying challenge.
Diary entry from 14th Nov 2022: “Monday - chill, loads of Civ 5. Managed to get every 1066 Viking Destiny achievement, as every Norse civ then even did the Deity one as the Normans. Managed to hold on and rely on the AI not being able to manage traffic properly. Did Immortal as well afterward. 100 Generals achievement popped while I was warring in Scotland.”
November 15th 2022 - Tuesday - “finished off the Norman scenario with Emperor difficulty.” So the ‘win as…’ achievements were any difficulty, but there were specific difficult ones as well e.g. win on Immortal, win on Deity etc.
I briefly tried to beat the Fall of Rome on Deity without losing any cities and it all went to shit.
Returning to the Korea scenario to get the Immortal and Emperor achievements. You can pick any Civ for it and I had already beaten it before in Part 1 as the Chinese so I did it again twice in October 2023. Something about this map I really like, feels more like a board game rather than a computer game. That and just pushing the samurai out of Korea is always satisfying.
Immortal - OneDrive screenshot takes in the achievement popping as opposed to my usual screenshots via Steam.
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What isn’t captured is how I started playing Civ 5 for the first time in September 2019 and have been playing it fairly extensively in various bursts over the last 4+ years. While I largely played as the Shoshone and a few scenarios in the first phase from 2019-2020 I spent a lot of 2021-2022 playing each of the different civilizations to victory (there is an achievement for that). A lot of those were just Future start beatdowns of Venice but still, they count!
These are all of the achievements I have left to do to correct as of 28th October 2023. 18 left out of what, ?
1000 temples unlocking. Chopping 1000 forests, building 1000 roads all were grand and came with time but this one was ridiculous. I checked the XML files and it said I had 950+ built so I loaded up this file I had where I had set it up so I had sold my 10-12 temples and saved right before they were rebuilt so I could just reload it over and over to get it to pop. So even after 4 years and 500+ hours of fairly intense play and maybe building an average of 10 temples per game I was at around 700-800 built and then I used this file to get to 950 or so. Once I realised that in September 2023 I did it a handful of more times and got the trophy. Tedium.
Scramble for Africa - Rhodes Colossus means building a continuous line of railroad from Cairo to Cape Town. Doable apparently but finicky. Winning as the Boers and Turkey both on Deity is apparently very difficult.
Korea - all I have left to do is win as the Manchu which can be done on any difficulty so Settler is the way to go but is a difficult task taking Beijing and Seoul simultaneously. I’ve definitely tried it before and only being able to move 1 square inside Chinese borders due to the Great Wall is tough.
Into the Renaissance - loads of them to get here. I did manage to get England to take Jerusalem by abusing the random script map version of this scenario.
Wonders of the Ancient World - this is one I haven’t played much other than taking a few handy achievements. Winning on Deity unlocks all achievements to do with difficulty so will attempt that eventually.
Mongols - I mentioned this already and same as above, winning on Deity unlocks all achievements.
Fall of Rome - I also mentioned this - you need to retain all cities on Deity as either of the Romes. Difficult.
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Civ 5 is still great, not as good as 4 but has displaced 2 in my hierarchy of Civ games. I fairly played it to death over the last couple of years so with less than 20 of the 286 achievements to go I can say once again maybe soon I will boot up Civilization 6 and give that a go.
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