After that point, our game is fairly well documented. Before, however, lies nothing but vast stretches of prehistory, a long dark age illuminated by nothing but the faint and flickering spotlights of our unreliable memories. It's easy for beginnings to get lost in the mists of time. The Celtic and Carthaginian empires, 1860 AD. We started our game on either side of a vast lake set in a subcontinent, the south-eastern-most part of a Pangean super-continent. My early empire, Carthage under Dido, occupied the parts between the western shores of the lake and the ocean farther west. My friend's and ally's Celtic empire, led by Boudicca, lay to the east of the lake. We know for certain that soon after our early expansion, we ran afoul of another confederacy, consisting of Rome to the north and Greece to the west, for reasons largely lost to time (possibly, it was the Celtic annexation of the city state of Zürich which exacerbated tensions). Rome declared war against the Celts, dragging Carthage as well as Greece into the conflict. The Celtic city of Truro bore the brunt of Caesar's aggression. Over the course of several thousand years, Truro was taken and eventually retaken again and again, its population decimated in the process. Truro and Singapore under siege by the Romans, 2002 AD. In a desperate attempt to bolster our position against Rome, we decided to annex the neutral city states of Singapore, which had the bad luck of being situated at a strategically valuable spot. The international community, however, didn't at all take kindly to what they saw as continued Celto-Carthaginian 'war mongering', and relations never recovered. We were effectively cut off from trade or outside help, and it didn't help that Alexander the 'Great' (damn his smug face) routinely used his political influence to outlaw the use of luxury articles our realms depended on, or put us under embargoes. The decline and fall of the Roman empire, 2024 AD. Sometime in the 19th century, things finally started to turn around.

El 3 civilization v backgrounds