And it's been almost 15 years since then. When Sirian started up the Epics at Realms Beyond, I was happy to leave and had no reason to go back. I tried that once and had no desire ever to do it again. ( There are old writeups of both games here on my website.) However, I became dissatisfied with the competition over time, as the lax GOTM administration for Civ3 had no problem with blatant exploitation of the AI civs and embraced the tedious 'score milking' process that became necessary to produce a good result.
GOTM 05 was my first-ever Monarch difficulty victory, while GOTM 07 was my first-ever Deity difficulty win. I was a participant in GOTM 05, GOTM 06, GOTM 07, and GOTM 08 during the early months of 2002, and I produced some pretty strong results, posting a fourth place and seventh place finish in fields that routinely included more than a hundred submissions. Longtime readers of the website may know that the first competitive games of Civilization that I played online were not with the Realms Beyond community, but with the CivFanatics Game of the Month (GOTM) tournament for Civ3. Well here's a place I never thought that I'd be again.
