TheStart of my Civilization

After playing the game a few times I am starting to do a better job at creating a productive and satisfying civilization. During the first few times that I played i struggled with making important decisions because I wasn't sure which direction i wanted my civilization to go. One of my main mistakes was that I was very aggressive with attempting to protect my cities and got into many wars with the surrounding emperors. I didn't have sufficient armies to protect my cities which cut off the amount of resources within the cities and I wasn't as effective in the wars. Besides the fact that I didn't have enough armies to protect my cities I did a decent job with building roads, building farms, and increasing the population. I wanted to become a very populated civilization to increase my economy and have more resources. Building the roads themselves were a great factor in creating better resources. Like Diamond mentions in his book one of the keys to building a great civilization is having productive resources. I was also very interested in making trades with other emperors but I had a very hard time. So basically what I learned from playing this game a few times is that starting your own civilization includes making many big time decisions that can cause your civilization to go up or down.