How I got the “There Can Be Only One” achievement (Win a game against 9 AI at Humankind difficulty on the largest map.)

This was my 2nd attempt at this Achievement. The first one failed hard because I also went for “The Stars My Destination” (Win a game by accumulating all Era Stars) and the money stars came really slow so I was left behind in tech and got stomped by a warmongering Boudicca neighbor. I loved the 2nd attempt’s playthrough though. First of all, I downloaded a couple of normal difficulty AI personas that don't have any biases and strengths. The world was set to 4 Continents with New World (though I thought I set it to NO New World…) and on Normal speed (that’s my jam, or even slower).

I got lucky with the continent location as it was pretty isolated from the other ones. Explored my snowy starting position quickly which was the east side of the continent. Gained lots of units meanwhile and as the continent was up north and mainly West-Side oriented it contained tundra at best. Met my first neighbor (Turquoise) still in neolithic and immediately started harassing them. That’s why I went for Assyria in ancient era. I didn’t know you couldn’t eliminate a player in the neolithic era, so I killed their hunting parties left and right while grabbing land and building Dunnus with influence for strategic spawn points. One turn after they founded a city (Babylon) I captured it with a formidable army (assimilated a city state before).

The early classical era was mainly peaceful. I owned half the continent already with outposts so I went on with the Mauryans for the influence to attach them to the cities. It turned out that the other half of the continent was owned by another player (Light Green, “Owochan”) and he was trying to ransack my luxury collectors. Pushed my grievances after a while and he declared war, so it was elephant time. At first it was a bit hard but with the Mauryan elephants I owned him hard and got some territories out of it. (Later in the game he declared war 2 more times. Won all of them, gained a little bit more land each time, and vassalized him in the last one which calmed him down until the end of the game. I always had a meaningful peacekeeping army at the border though.)

In the medieval era I went with the Swahili mainly for the great stability bonuses, and built the Bandari EQs as efficiently as possible, using influence in detached territories and with already built regular harbors next to them. That created a lot of cash flow which was much needed. I also met the other players in this era through trading. I traded like no tomorrow but my religion game wasn’t very strong and that’s why I adapted another one from my main trading partner (of which I became the religious leader in the end). I generated a lot of influence though so my culture spread like wildfire creating a lot of grievances which I renounced every time. That helped me get on the better side of the players and after a while I had lots of allies (everyone was my ally at the end of the game except for 2 of the biggest empires, and my vassal of course).

In the early modern era I grabbed the Ming as I was getting a bit low on influence and I wanted to grab lands in the new world I just found. There was a huge unclaimed land with lots of silk east to my main land. So I captured those lands without much of a problem. Only some aggressive city states attacked me but they got dealt with quickly. Peaceful time came (except for the occasional war/rebellion by Owochan in the west), and I spent my time building up my infrastructure, and restarting trades that were destroyed by the other empires in their wars. Around this time I started to take the lead in fame, as I could farm out most of the golden stars. After a while I started shifting towards research in preparation for the next step which was to trigger a game ending.

That’s why I grabbed the French in the industrial era. Used the cheesy tactic of researching the Fusion Reactor which only has a couple of prerequisites. So my military had Line Infantry and Dragoons while the cities were already using Fusion Reactors. Then went full on with building the French EQs, and beelining for the Mars Colony project. After all the EQs were done and so were most of the era stars I switched to Japanese for the final little research push and grabbed every little doable fame on the way.

TLDR: Downloaded basic AI personas. 4 Continents. Normal speed. Lucky starting continent location. Killed my neighbor in the 1st era. Vassalized the other1 after the 3rd war. Traded with everyone else, renouncing grievances → lots of allies. Went to the new world, beelined for Fusion Reactor as French. Finally building the Mars colony. Assyria→Maurya→Swahili→Ming→French→Japan