how to build and destroy a city in two hours.

I've been lucky enough to have already finished (by finished I mean I was killed off the planet, so I had no possible way of continuing) one game of Civ. While some of my classmates have entered the modern age, I managed to have my city raped and pillaged by barbarians.

My game started in India. The people were very productive and usually remained happy, but I think this is because I took every one of their suggestions; which means I wasn't a very good leader but it kept the people from staging a coup. My city was able to 'give birth to' two important people, but because I followed the game's suggestions one of them died off. I think this is a bad thing, because it pissed some of my people off.

I followed the 'big picture' map and my people learned every type of craft before advancing too far in any given area. I built a library and Stonehenge - this threw me off a little bit, because Stonehenge is not located in India. And neither Taoism nor Judaism were founded there either. So the fact that we were not playing on an alternate Earth universe took some getting used to.

Ultimately, my problem was that I focused too much on advancing my civilization and not protecting it. I forgot to send out warriors with my settlers. I ended up creating a city without an army to protect it, so the barbarians were easily able to destroy my settlement.

According to wikipedia.com the only country to recently have no army, no police force, and no agreements with other nations who would provide military support was the Solomon Islands. However, in 2006, Australia and other Pacific Rim nations had to step in to try and resolve an 8 year civil war. This is brought about the re-establishment of police force.

No civilization can survive without the protection of a military system. However, this brings up another question. Will there ever be such thing as world peace? So long as every country maintains an army, there will be the threat of war; and so long as there is the threat of war, every country will maintain an army. Historically, no civilization has succeeded without the protection of 'warriors' which essentially shows that there is historic evidence that world peace is nothing more than the dream of every Miss America.