Fog of War: Procrastania

Our good friend Mustard, well-known author and godless communist, was too good for us again this week, so I am humbly filling in.

Our discussion of pretend war this week harkens back to a webgame called Nationstates, popular among the TWG regulars about a year and a half ago, and still ongoing. It’s a fun little game with a simple purpose: every day you are given a decision, with some multiple choice answers, and the choices you make determine how your little nation grows and changes. The game includes a small amount of international stuff, but it’s poorly executed and not nearly as fun—you can decide that you nation belongs to a certain larger group, or to an overarching UN, but neither seems to have a huge effect other than forcing you to outlaw slavery and whatnot. Just because something is meaningless, however, does not stop Internet denizens from doing it, so all of us little TWGers banded together to form the High Kingdom of Procrastania. I don’t remember what anybody's nation was called, but I remember that I set out to makemine a highly liberal Theocracy, just to see if I could.

All of this is essentially a long-winded way of setting up the fact that now, two years later, I think about Procrastania every time I play Civilization 4. And by “think about,” what I really mean to say is “name my cities after TWG regulars.” Last evening’s game was a great example.

I decided to try a “Great Plains” map, meaning that the board is laid out more or less like the great plains of North America—plenty of cows and corn, a few forests, and the occasional hill and river. I was in the mood for something aggressive, so I chose the Greeks for their special unit—the Phalanx, a specialized spearman. This is good because it shows up very early in the game, where I can use it to rush a nearby city and try to wipe it out before it gets off its feet. Ideally you want to start with a nation that has an early horse unit, such as the Mongols, Persians, or Egyptians, but this is risky because you don’t know where you’re going to be on the map, and what resources will be in easy reach. All you need for a spearman (or a Phalanx) is copper, and that’s fairly easy to come by. As it happened, I started on the far west edge of the map, butted up against the equivalent of the Rocky Mountains, so copper was plentiful. My plan was coming together!

I planted my capital city next to a river—always a good idea, because it lets you share resources with all of your other cities along the same river without having to spend your early turns building roads. I named Procrastania’s glorious capital Fellfrosch City, because I am vain. You can’t actually name the rivers, but I dubbed this one the Sprigganwater, because I am hilarious.

While Fellfrosch City worked busily building a settler, I sent my scout poking around to see what he could see. I soon found that my nearest neighbors were the French. Excellent…. I also ran into some Americans and Persians, and much later some Romans, but no matter now—my Settler was done so I trucked him back into the mountains, at the head of the Sprigganwater (he he!), and formed the proud industrial city of Tageville. Tageville had a slight food shortage, which meant that I would never be able to make it very big, but it had cows, copper, and great natural defenses that would help keep it safe, not to mention a couple of really good mines that made it into a great production center. I set it to work building a barracks, preparing to pump out Phalanxes, and continued to explore.

My scout made an important discovery: there were horses just outside of France! If you want to play Civ 4 aggressively, you need to get horses and control them—they’re a huge boost that you simply can’t ignore. These horses were away from the Sprigganwater (and who can blame them?), meaning I would have to build a road, but they were right next to some corn and cows that would help keep my new little city fed. I whipped up another settler and prepared him for his mission—he would have to sit right on the border of Paris, a precarious position since the larger city had a huge cultural head start, and might manage to incite a revolution and absorb the smaller one. If all went according to plan that wouldn’t happen, because I’d be attacking Paris and conquering it in a few turns anyway, but it was still a risk. Knowing that this city would be my military headquarters in the glorious invasion of France, I named it Skarton and plopped it down.

Almost at the same time, Fellfrosch City started work on Stonehenge—a World Wonder that has the impressive effect of putting an Obelisk in every city I control. Since an Obelisk produces culture, this would be an ideal way of boosting up Skarton and avoiding a civil revolt. Also at about the same time, Tageville came up with some interesting theological ideas collectively known as Hinduism, which I quickly adopted as my official state religion. A few turns later, those crazy Tagevillians also came up with Judaism—let it not be said that Tage is not a spiritual guy. With Tageville now the world center of two world religions, it started to produce a lot of culture and began to grow quite quickly—the population stayed low, but the borders covered a huge area.

Once I had about four Phalanxes and an Axeman, as well as a steady supply of reinforcements from the barracks in Skarton, I sent a message to King Louis telling him that his head would look good on a pole, and I charged in to Paris. It was early in the game, and he didn’t have much of a defense built yet, so I walked over him easily and stole the city. When you steal a city you don’t get to rename it, unless you just burn it down and start over, but providence had smiled on me because, against all odds, we actually have a forum member named Paris. Paris was conveniently located on the scenic banks of the Sprigganwater, so it began trading and sharing with the rest of the nation immediately.

That tricky King Louis had already built another city, however, so he wasn’t out yet; fortunately for me, it was in a location I had already scouted and wanted for myself, so I thanked him for getting it all ready and then marched in with my army and took it. We don’t have any forum members named Orleans, at least as far as I know, but I left it anyway because it was in a great spot—it was on the edge of a huge lake, brimming with fish and crab, and the city itself was snuggled in between an iron mine and a stone quarry. Orleans eventually invented Confucianism, and Skarton Christianity, but amusingly Paris resisted all of my early attempts to spread any of my four religions. They eventually accepted Hinduism, thank goodness, because that gave me a nice boost—every city with my state religion builds buildings 25% faster.

Hinduism was proving so popular, in fact, that America had adopted it as their state religion as well. This was a very good thing, because a nation that shares your state religion is much more inclined to be nice to you. I immediately called them up and offered several treaties to cement the deal, including open borders between us. We got along famously, and I turned my attention to the next biggest threat: Persia.

Persia wasn’t really a “threat,” per se, they were just “very close to me.” Once Paris and Orleans were stable and protected, I assembled my growing army of Phalanxes, axemen, and horse archers (which, despite what you may think, is actually just an archer mounted on a horse. There are no teenage mutant archer horses in this game). I assembled them, of course, right on the borders of the Persian town of Susa, which should have clued him in, but he stayed blissfully (or willfully) ignorant of the coming invasion. When everyone was ready to go I declared war and charged in, taking it out in just a couple of turns. Susa was in a pretty bad spot, however, so I didn’t bother keeping it and just pillaged and burned it to the ground; I needed the money anyway. The next city proved to be much more resilient, as the wily Persians had had the foresight to build it on top of a hill and thus grant it substantial natural defenses. Add in the several extra turns they’d had to reinforce it, and I knew that Pasargadae was going to be trouble. I surrounded it, trashed their mines and farms, and broke the road that connected it to their capital city. It would be several turns before I could research catapults, build them, and get them in place, so my army settled down for a long siege.

In the interim, my plucky little scout went up north and found an interesting thing—a wooded valley stuffed full of gold. I was hurting for money, so I decided to set up a mining town and get as much of that gold as I could. My Horse Archers had to take down quite a few barbarians in order to claim the valley, but once it was safe I sent up a settler and formed the quaint little hamlet of San Ehlercisco. This town didn’t have to be big, which was good because it couldn’t be—there was just enough food to build a farm on the banks of a river (a tributary of the Sprigganwater), which produced enough food to support two gold mines. Persia was getting desperate now, and started sending horsemen after my little gold town to distract me from my siege, but Tageville was building Phalanxes a mile a minute and I was able to set up a nice defense.

Eventually the catapults arrived and started pounding away at Pasargadae, and when it was weak enough I sent in the troops. Civ 4 allows your units to earn experience for each fight, so if you have a unit that’s seen a lot of battle it gets pretty powerful. Several of my Phalanxes had been around since the early sacking of Paris, which made this their fourth city, and they were very good at what they did—with the walls out of the way, they marched in and razed that sucker to the ground. I didn’t really want it so I pillaged and burned again, but annoying America came up and built a city right on the same spot. We were bestest buddies, though, so that was fine with me.

At the same time that I was founding San Ehlercisco, I had set up another open border treaty with Rome—not because I need to go through their territory, or because I wanted to be friendly, but because I wanted open access for my vast force of Hindi missionaries. Orleans had become my Missionary Training Center, and I started flooding both America and Rome with the good word of Hinduism. Why? Because it allowed me to spy on them. If you control the home site of your own state religion, you have full vision for every city in the world that shares that religion. Most of Rome was Buddhist, but they took to Hinduism well enough and I was able to use my religious ties to keep careful tabs on what Rome was doing. After Persia went down, Rome would be mine.

Also on a religious note: the San Ehlerciscans, inspired by the contemplative beauty of their mountain home, invented Taoism. On an amusing note, those stubbornly areligious Parisians finally saw the light, thanks to Mohammed, and founded Islam.

There was only one Persian city left, and it was crammed full of defenders. Thankfully, by now I had some armored knights to help with the attack, and to help with the smashing of various mines and pastures and whatnot—I intended to keep this city when I was done, but it would be easy enough to rebuild the amenities later, and right now it was more important to deny Persia the power to use them. The siege was long and hard, and they were pretty well-entrenched, but I discovered gunpowder and trained a few musketeers just in time to tip the battle in my favor. In the year 1275 the Persian nation was wiped out and scattered, and their capital (I forget the name) fell under my control.

I still have at least one nation to destroy—probably two, because I can only take so much of this American crap before I wipe that silly grin off their faces and bring the entire world under Procrastanian control. Not only that, but I still have plenty of TWG forum members who need cities and/or landmarks named after them. And not only that, but I will probably have to write Mustard’s column again in two weeks, so I need to save something for later. Tune in next time to see if history is kind to the humble people of Procrastania.

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Written by Fellfrosch on February 07th, 2006