Oops, I made the mistake of picking this up recently. There goes all of my free time. It's a turn-based strategy game (akin to MOO/MOO2) where you need to beat all of the other civilizations to one of 6 victory conditions. There's a nice tutorial which walks you through the first hour or so of play on an easy setting.

The tutorial game wasn't bad, but it lulls you with a false sense of security. After beating it handily in about 2-3 hours, I felt I was ready for a bigger challenge. The first issue was the wave after wave of barbarians that suddenly started showing up at my doorstep. Since that didn't happen in the tutorial, I wasn't aware of just how aggressive I'd need to be at keeping my land guarded.

My latest game is on the 3rd difficulty level and I've switched to only playing custom games (Single Player -> Custom Game). It's a "Terran" map that is "Huge" with 3 other AI civilizations (the rest of the slots are flipped to "closed"). The only victory condition that I have turned on is "Conquest", which means I have to eliminate all of my enemies in order to win. This results in very long games with no arbitrary end at 2050AD. Similar to playing MOO2 to the bitter end (rather then jumping to Orion and taking the Orion homeworld).

This game is also the first time that I've started using the "city screen" rather then just letting it run on auto-pilot. I've made a bunch of mistakes, so I'm down in 3rd place on the score window (China: 1220, Mongolia: 1143, Japan(me): 1077, Inca: 1003). However, if I look at the Info Screen (F9), the demographics tab shows that:

- First place for Production (131 vs 99 avg), Food (214 vs 186 avg), Soldiers (553k vs 364k avg), Land Area (302k sq km vs 221k sq km avg), Import/Export (92/74 vs 69/69).

- Second place for health (Life Expectancy), but it's essentially a tie at 61 v 61. Approval rating is also basically a tie at 63% vs 62%.

- I'm lagging in GNP (93 vs 103 avg) and population (4200k vs 5236k).

Not bad for my first time really digging into the city screen and trying to tweak by hand.