Five_X

Well, just recently I reached a level 25 Home City as Russia.

I fought two interesting skirmishes to get there; the first was on the Northwest Territories map, which is an interesting place with a bit of a naval focus, which I don't usually do as Russia - in fact, I have exactly zero cards from the Harbour. :|

It ended up with me, in the Imperial Age, helping my relatively worthless allies fight against two other Imperial Age civs (Spanish and Dutch) and their own worthless ally. After a lot of tries attacking their base I managed to destroy them with Queen Isabella giving me this little chat gem:

"Why am I always the one that is getting double-teamed?"

Yeah, she's... she's like that, a lot, and she's definitely one of the more amusing AI personalities.

Anyhow, I basically saved most of my cards from that, and got to level 23. Next battle took place on none other than Honshu, the map that covers Japan. It's a narrow strip of land surrounded by islands; at this difficulty the AI is unfortunately too dumb to go for the islands and sea treasures, so I got them all to myself! I did more naval combat than expected, and in the end boomed to Imperial and wasted my foes. I think my next game will be on Hard Mode as the Russians, really.

That fun game got me two HC levels, bringing me to 25, finally!

I got the Medicine card, which makes villagers recruit faster, the Strelet Horde card which increases Strelet HP and gives me a bunch of Strelets from all of my Blockhouses, I got the Boyars card which increases the attack and HP of Oprichniks (raiding cavalry), Strelets and Cossacks, and finally I now also have that one card that allows me to get another Factory, which will be very useful.

The only card I didn't end up getting is the TEAM Dueling School card, which I'm kind of kicking myself over because it's an awesome Team card and it would stack with my Fencing School card to make my infantry literally train in seconds. It'd basically make me invincible once my economy gets going, since if I'm under attack I could throw hordes of Strelets at whatever ails me.

Next I'll be playing Indians again because they're fun, but eventually I'll be back to good old Mother Russia!