I won my first game (which was my second random map game) of Old World. Babylonians. It was a desert map and it spawned me on the eastern seaboard in (presumably DUE to me being Babylonian) a forest river valley/oases like area. I had to deal with Egypt forward-settling me real early, so I waged a very early war and managed to kill them. It turned out Egypt was completely fucked over by RNGesus, they were locked away in their own coastal plain, had to reinforce across a desert, were just screwed. I stalemated trying to finish them off, so I called it even (having taken their two colonies that were within my convenient reach) and they became my little buddy because they had invented Manichaeism and, taking their holy city, I became the lord of their own religion.
The rest of the game was rather boring besides the early pressure of having to deal with the shittiest terrain in the world. Greeks managed to storm down my other river valley, and the map is laid out in such a way that you basically have only two adjacencies with rivals. Greeks were a close second and I lost a war badly against them, only cut short by me killing their leader in a duel. But I won on wonders. Had a shit-ton of stone from the nasty sand hill areas the AI was too retarded to make use of.
It's super gay this game, set in Classical Antiquity, has no republics (Carthage, Greece, Rome... 3/7 of them...)
I really do think (I've rambled about this before here) they should make a sequel called New World. Factions by default: British, French, Spaniards, Dutch, Portuguese, Iroquois, Aztecs and Inca. That's only eight compared to seven stock in Old World. Colony as leader/families (Cavaliers, New English, Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, etc.). Stateless societies as playable factions as DLC.
Edit: I really dig the premise of specialists. At first I didn't like that population wasn't directly tied to making land usable. But the specialists basically are that. I like the idea that Civics are used to "buy" a skilled workforce and it can refine more and more, role-playing a city coming to develop a reputation for excellent guilds or schools of philosophies or warriors or whatever, even if it's mostly in the background.
