That One Game

Civ 5 is scheduled to come out in the Fall, and any self-respecting strategy gamer has already written off any productivity they may have had.  The release of new screenshots for the game has done nothing to alleviate that.

Any of us who have spent too much time playing for "just one more turn", no matter if it was Civ, MOO, SimCity, whatever, have That One Game.  That One Game is the one where everything that happened led to an amazing climax... maybe it was a tense struggle against overwhelming odds, or an incredible occurrence.  Maybe it was just a well-played blowout, who knows?  But oh, it was memorable... it became That One Game.

Mine was in Civ 3, a huge map and continents.  I was playing the English, started on what I wound up calling Australia: big island, green at the coasts but arid desert in the center... and practically no resources to speak of.  After a while I learned sailing and found, just off to the west, a very big continent filled with all the luxuries and resources a civ could need.  I also found the remains of another civ... three razed cities in the worst starting locations I've ever seen (after the game ended, I discovered it was the French.  Ces't la Guerre.).  Other than the home of the French, though, what I saw looked ripe for the picking... until I found what killed Napoleon.  The Zulus... and they weren't happy I was there, declaring war on me and quickly overwhelming the exploring archer I had sent over.  I put them out of my mind, as I had a tech lead on them, and vowed to revisit Africa soon.

Some long while later, I packed up two musketmen, a settler and a worker and sent them off to found a home base on Africa.  Once I got there, though, I found that the Zulus had expanded, taking most of the good territory.  So instead of colonization, I decided to make life hell for Shaka.  I dumped the musketmen and worker off on what appeared to be the only road between northern and southern Africa, fortified one of them, and had the worker build a fortress.  The other musketman began tearing up the any roads I could find around the fortress.  Within a few turns, Shaka had had enough... and the Impi began to move.  I brought the raider back to the fortress and waited.  And waited.  Eventually, I got a cannon over to the fortress as well.

Just in time, as it turned out.  Not one, but two Stacks of Doom converged on my little fortress, one from the north, one from the west... each of them composed of nothing but Impi.  Wincing, I immediately gave the fortress the name "Rorke's Drift" and crossed my fingers.  By the end of the first SOD's defeat, one of my musketmen had been promoted from "regular" to "veteran," and the other was about to.  Both were damaged, however, and the second stack was even larger than the first.

They held the line.  One of them died, and the other had one hit point left, but they held the line.  From there, the conquest of Africa was easy... almost everything Shaka had, he had thrown at Rorke's Drift, and most of them had died (some retreated). 

I left that one musketman and the cannon stationed at Rorke's Drift for the rest of the game, even after I could have promoted them to other, better things.  They remained untouched, even through the later nuclear war against the Germans.  At the end of the little fracas that they started, the three cities closest to Rorke's Drift had been turned to radioactive rubbish, along with a few others on my side, but any German city over the size of 5 took an missile. But there they stayed.

And when the spaceship to Alpha Centauri finally arrived at its destination, I knew I had just finished playing That One Game.  From then on, I have never neglected building fortifications, and I have always had a lone outpost somewhere far away from the main action... in honor of the musketmen of Rorke's Drift.

So, what's YOUR "That One Game"?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 04:46 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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