Rome's removal from the game returned some much-needed peace to my weary civ. After all of the spoils of the Roman Empire were divided between myself and the Germans, here was how things stood in 500AD:
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The Iroquois units in my territory are there because the Germans signed them to a military alliance against Rome. Looks like you were a little late there Hiawatha. Thermopylae is nearly complete a Forbidden Palace in a highly desirable spot and the rest of my cities were working on infrastructure projects of some kind. One city whose position I did not like was Veii; the city overlapped quite a bit with Neapolis while leaving a number of tiles unused between itself and Sparta. So I starved the city to size 2 and rushed a settler out of it, refounding the city as New Veii one tile to the south. With all those cattle next to it, I began preparing the city for a T-Hawk worker factory, able to produce one every turn once railroads were discovered.
To remedy my iron situation, Rhodes was founded in 550AD as a much-overlapped city on the river to the west of Antium in order to grab the iron to the north of Nuremburg. This was another aggressive settlement, but I decided I would rather irritate the Germans (far away and with colonies that I could capture) than the Iroquois when it came to an iron source. I also find it amusing that with more territory than any other civ there is no iron except at the very fringes of my land.
The Forbidden Palace completed as expected in Thermopylae in 600AD, greatly increasing income and productivity in the territory conquered from Rome. I kind of planned putting the Forbidden Palace there as soon as I founded it in the very, very early game. In 640AD the wonder cascade ended at Copernicus, and I planned to get all of the rest of them from that point on. On a side note, the Zulus secured both the Pyramids and Sun Tzu's in this game but failed to dominate as I predict that AI civs who get both should do. The fact that they were limited to fewer than 10 cities probably limited the effectiveness of those wonders. After this my notes read "Nothing happened for a long time"; no events of importance happened between 640AD and 950AD!
In said year (950AD), Berlin completed Bach's Cathedral. I traded for Economics on that turn so I could switch Athens over to Smith's and grab that wonder as well. None of the other civs had Economics, so the shields they had built up on Bach's were all lost. I entered the Industrial Age two turns later in 970AD and not surprisingly pulled Nationalism as my free tech. I should mention that I had turned on research starting with Physics and had quickly jumped ahead of everyone else. Germany was sold techs constantly to bankroll my research at 100% rate and thus Bismarck managed to stay relatively close behind me, but all of the other civs were simply left in the dust. The 1000AD picture shows some of the massive changes that had taken place in my civ over the last 5 centuries:
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By this point, Greece had massively increased in commercial power - although it would be a stretch to say I was militarily any stronger than I had been previously. Even on Deity with much less territory than the AI civs it's possible to keep pace with the other civs through superior city and civ-wide development; here on Emperor with much more land than any other civ, the results were almost laughable. Whereas Germany, Azteca, and the others were wasting their time in pointless wars and managing their cities foolishly, I was zooming ahead of them in research ability and production power. Things would only accelerate downhill from this point forward with the introduction of railroads and factories. Rather than post a bunch of wonder pictures, I'll say that I built all of the ones you see here: Smith's (1090AD), Newton's (1180AD), Magellan's (1200AD) and Wall Street (1140AD).
Bismarck demanded Theory of Gravity in 1010AD; seeing as how I was the only one who possessed this tech and Germany was no threat to me, I declined his offer. Somewhat surprisingly, Bis did not declare war on me. As you could see in the picture, I researched Steam Power first at max rate and got it in 1020AD. My only source of coal turned out to be outside of Delphi - no wonder the Romans kept attacking that city. I set up a worker factory at New Veii and began connecting my cities with a rail net. After finishing Newton's in Thermo, I rushed a factory and coal plant there in successive turns and began working on Universal Suffrage. Everything was going very nicely.
Then I suffered a serious setback in 1150AD when my coal up and MOVED out of my territory. What gives? I lose both my iron and my coal in the same game? This was flat-out ridiculous: I have all this territory, and can't even secure a supply of the resources needed to build railroads. So where can I get coal? I'm not going to gift a civ all of the techs up to Steam Power and trade them money for coal, not when I have such a big tech lead. The closest and by far most accessible source was in the jungle next to Nuremburg, a city on my border. It appeared as though a war with Germany was in the works, one that I could also use to grab the former Roman cities that were now owned by Bismarck. Don't blame it on me, blame it on the amazing disappearing resources trick that the game was pulling.
Naturally I needed a few turns to build up some cavs to attack. I took 11 turns to do that, and in 1255AD gave Bismarck a war declaration (again in honorable fashion). Nuremburg (coal!) and Pisae (furs!) both fell on the first turn of war, as they were defended only by spears. Looks like Bis was smoking some weed when it came to defense of his resource and luxury colonies there. But the old guy wasn't completely stupid - or rather, one of the other AI leaders was:
Silly, silly Hiawatha. I had been expecting a sneak-attack from him for some time, and had given the Iroquois a freebie luxury in the hopes of warding it off. Now the hopelessly backwards Iroquois were asking to be destroyed. At this point I made the conscious decision to go for a spaceship victory and ruled out a diplomatic one; the disappearing coal essentially forced my hand on this one. Now that 2 of the remaining 4 AI civs hated me, the spaceship was the way to go. That also meant getting out of war as soon as possible once I achieved my objectives; the Iroquois were going to pay a price for attacking me, but wiping them out would take too long and with too few rewards. If domination had been one of my victory conditions, it would have been a different story...
The Zulus declared war on the Germans in 1270AD with no urging from me. This looked like a suicidal move all the way; it would help me though by pulling the "puppet strings" of the German units that were fighting me. Not that I needed it. Hispalis was captured in 1275AD (with some leftover swords against a conscript rifle, ha!) thus completing my war aims. I signed peace with Germany for some small gpt amount. And as for the actual coal itself, here's a picture of the black gold that inspired so much bloodshed:
Of course there still remained the little matter of the Iroquois to deal with. I moved my now-freed up stack of cavs across from the German front to the area around Ravenna, which was swamped by a large but ragtag army of ancient age Iroquois units. It took two turns for the cavs to kill them all, and then in 1290AD I went over to the offensive. The city of Allegheny was attacked and razed to the ground on that date in retribution for the military alliance that Hiawatha signed, with its people carted off as slaves. (Side note to those familiar with the University of Maryland: this was rather humorous for me, as the building next door to the one I live in is named Alleghany Hall.) I then signed peace with the Iroquois and normality resumed, although any chance of winning a diplo victory was now shot. Thus ended a small and violent interlude in this game, which was not indicative of the overall peaceful building nature. For want of coal indeed.
