With my days of conquest finished for good (unless another resource should disappear), I settled down to enjoy the peaceful fruits of technological research. The remainder of the game was quite uneventful, and I won't provide more than a basic sketch of the (few) events that took place. Here was my more or less permanent borders for the rest of the game in 1290AD:
Take note of this picture, as it shows my territory before the railroad-building frenzy that began as soon as peace was achieved. My workers are clearly bunched together in big stacks, and I have a lot of them; New Veii has been producing one every turn for some time now and continued to do so for a while yet to come. Don't be fooled by the fact that it says 2 turns to build a worker there, as when the city grows next turn it will pull in additional shields and complete the worker - dropping it back down to size 6 to begin again. Thermo had just finished Universal Suffrage in 1280AD and was now working on Hoover with a Theory of Evolution prebuild - Athens would actually construct TOE after finishing its hospital.
When I discovered Replaceable Parts in 1310AD I found that my resource luck was considerably better when it came to rubber - I controlled 5 of the 7 sources in the world! Now it's too bad that I don't need to fight anyone... Wonder production in my two strongest cities (Athens and Thermopylae) was greatly speeded up by railing all the tiles that surrounded them and merging workers into the cities to get them to size 20. As a result, TOE was finished in Athens in 1340AD only 8 turns after it was started; Hoover's was completed in 1350AD in Thermo. Since I had possessed no coal for a long time and reaquired it at the same time as I picked up Sanitation, I had not had time to build coal plants anywhere except Athens and Thermo. As a result, Hoover's gave me an enormous boost in production and saved me thousands of shields. Normally I have lots of power plants by the time it is built, but conditions in this game made it unusually effective.
People who are used to automating their workers are often surprised by just how much can be done with manually controlled ones in a short period of time. The pictures I took in this game from 1290AD and 1400AD (a span of 22 turns) are a great illustration of what can be done with good worker management over a relatively short span of time. Take a look at my civ at this date, and compare with the picture above:
My civ has gone from an early-industrial age situation with a few rails branching between cities to a massive, modern age, rails everywhere, "every tile around every city improved" environment. I especially like all the workers out in my western colonies; the team color disk makes for some nice screenshots. Needless to say, this was the 100-year span where my power on the histograph balloons and crushes that of everyone else. None of the other civs even have rails or hospitals built yet! I'm researching Flight at this point and getting all of my techs at a 4-turn rate. Bismarck is sitting about 5 techs behind funding my research, and the others are barely in the Industrial Age. This is really where the power of the human kicks in, as has been so often said before. I ran behind the other civs in the Ancient Age, a bit ahead of them in the Middle Ages, and then BAM! it's just game over in the Industrial Age once I get to railroads and factories. There's no way that the other civs could even begin to hurt me at this point. That's why I enjoy playing Deity games now, because there the outcome is still in doubt in the Industrial Age. Here, it surely was not.
I entered the Modern Age in 1460AD (Rocketry was the free tech). The only tech that required 5 turns of research was Computers, as it often does to get research labs. I had a SETI prebuild well under way in Thermo, which was running over 100 shields/turn; it landed SETI in 1495AD. And I completed the Iron Works the same turn, in Nuremburg!
Rather ironic, in that I only have one source of iron and one of coal, but they are both inside the city radius of one city! The game was very much at a lazy pace by this point; in 1510AD I realized (some 5 or 6 turns after getting Computers) that I should upgrade my Infantry to mechs. When I couldn't do so, I realized that I had no oil; in fact, there was only one source in the entire world and it was in Aztec territory! I wonder if that had some interesting effects in other games(?) Probably, but it meant nothing in this one.
The final turns read like a laundry list of things produced out of Thermopylae. Apollo Program built in Thermo in 1535AD. Manhattan Project built there in 1570AD. UN built there for laughs in 1625AD, a turn before Shakespeare's Theatre (neglected by the AI) was finished in Corinth (1630AD). After building a nuclear plant in Thermo, it was pumping out more than 130 shields a turn! So to have some fun, I mobilized for war on the final turn of the game and snapped this picture of my Forbidden Palace city working on an ICBM:
Now that's an impressive city! If one of my goals had been to conquer instead of launch the spaceship, everyone else would have been in for some trouble... In a result that surprises no one, I blasted off for Alpha Centauri in 1645AD:
A 1645AD launch is pretty decent on Emperor, and I would have done it much faster had I not been sidetracked twice by wars. Early on it was the fighting against Rome that I didn't expect which slowed down the tech pace, and later it was my amazing disappearing resources that had forced another war that slowed things down a little bit. But I doubt I could have launched before say, 1550AD unless I had played the game in a fundamentally different style. Hats off to anyone who can launch earlier; this was a pretty good rate.
The game was unremarkable for the most part, a fairly peaceful builder's game. Things were certainly a bit dicey in the ancient age, but once I survived that first sneak attack I had no doubts about winning. The complete collapse of the other civs in the Industrial Age was expected, but still always a bit surprising to see after playing on Deity for a while. There it gets masked by the huge bonuses that they get. Fun game overall. Now I would have to try and get a diplomatic victory in the "B" game, which shouldn't be too hard on an archipelago, right? Read on to find out...
