No military action? Lots of farmland and rocks and only 60 prosperity required? I'll finish this one before dinner.
Well, 15 years later I had to change my mind. This is a fairly challenging "peaceful" scenario on a gorgeous, realistic-looking map of Crete with trees and rockpiles artistically and annoyingly placed. Because the island is narrow north-to south, it's hard to fit in your favorite housing blocks.
Remember Miletus? You can only sell weapons, oil, and fish, and not very many. That's the Empire city, and it means that you have to watch the cash for many years. Furthermore, you need to import clay. I didn't find anywhere to build my usual two or three adjacent docks, and so clay kept showing up in the wrong port. Making your warehouses specialize is very important.
There's only one type of wine, which you must import. That means a villa block instead of a palace block. Getting a third food by importing wheat really doesn't work, so large villa is the practical limit. These villas bring in taxes that will finally make your city reliably solvent. It may be possible to win without villas, but I left a lot of small casas to avoid the problems of distributing pottery all over the island.
Far west are natives and a well-advertised earthquake. I stayed away from both. When I replay this to get down to 10 years, I'm going to trade with the natives. It just took me too long to realize that my two industries weren't quite enough for comfort.
Usually when you ignore Mars you get the "bitter anger" message. Not so on Crete. Three times, at least once when Mars had only one temple fewer than the other gods, locals aired their grievances. With hastily-built prefectures and gladiator schools I survived, but just barely.
The one thing that's easy on this map is fishing, and you'll need to do lots of it.
Overall, this is the best user-designed peaceful scenario that I have played. I'd rate it above any of the peaceful levels of the original career except Lugdunum and perhaps Massilia.
