This was the map from 730BC. I think it shows that I had done a good job of claiming the available land on the island:
The Russians would get no more cities on the island. All of the unclaimed land at the moment was claimed by me over the next few centuries, while succesfully dancing with their settler. Karachi had a nice location, except that it narrowly misses a cattle. D'oh! Well, that was the price I had to pay for getting it on the coast, which was important. The Lighthouse was about to finish, so I was building galleys as "scouts" of the seas. I felt like an expansionist civ here, out scouting throughout the world. The next four turns passed without interest, leading to this message:
A very nice +3 scenario points for something I would have built anyway! And with that, my galley scouts were off into the world, scouting for the other Asian/African civs. I quickly saw what the Russian homeland looked like; lots of jungle and grasslands that was high on food but low on shields. They also didn't have much land at all. More importantly, there was irrigation near Moscow! I would get a chance to have irrigation near my cities before Electricity, which was a huge plus. In any case, after only 3 turns of exploring, in 630AD I ran into the Japanese. I was the first one to contact them:
You can see I have contact with the Russians, but the Japanese had contact with no one else. This meant another 2 scenario points for me (not bad!). They were the first new civ I met, and they were considerably higher on the histograph than me. As it turns out, the Japanese were all alone on a relatively large island, and they expanded to fill the whole thing very quickly thanks to a truly excellent starting location. At this time, I was behind in tech, but I used my world maps and contact with Russia to catch up almost immediately. Tokugawa and I were to have an... interesting relationship for the rest of the game, but more on that later.
I met the Zulus a few turns later, to the east of the Japanese, in 550BC. Since they already had contact with another civ (the Babylonians) I didn't take a picture and didn't score any scenario points. At this point, I decided to take a screenshot detailing the new lands that I had run into; this is from 490BC:
The minimap shows the other islands pretty well; the Zulus are black and the Babylonians red on the unpictured island. The Babylonians had the misfortune to start in the jungle, and did little throughout the game. The Russians only had 5 cities in their core; pretty sad to be honest. It looks like I had indeed crippled them pretty badly by purchasing those workers. I wonder how far the Russians expanded in other people's games? It will be interesting to see.
I kept pushing back the fog of war, and in time found more civilizations. In 370BC I found the Persians, who were sharing an island with the Chinese. For that reason, I took no picture and received no scenario points. Their island had terrible land, mostly tundra, but from the end game replay, I found that they had been fighting over it almost non-stop. This was not all that interesting to me.. However, also in 370BC I ran into the Egyptians, who were located on their own island far away from anyone else:
Egypt had contact with no one else, thus I received 2 scenario points for this as well. Now the entire world was known to me, except for a few tundra islands which I mapped out over the next few turns. With the contacting of Egypt, the great era of exploration came to a close. This was one of my favorite periods of the game, and I was sad to see it go.
