Here was my map in 10BC, with what was essentially my final borders for most of the game:
And some notes on the final cities I founded. Most of them were founded to claim any remaining space, but some were for other purposes. Iron Fishing Town put the iron resource in the northwest under my control and not the Aztecs', as well as serving as a, well, fishing town. RBD17 "Nara" was another fishing village that paid hommage to my first-ever experience with a fishing town, in the RBD17b succession game. Kultureflip grabbed a few additional tiles and had the hopes of flipping Tientsin (not likely with my pitiful culture!) Hoping for Oil and Southwest Reach filled space in the desert in the hopes of oil appearing there. Would you believe that there actually WAS an oil resource next to Hoping for Oil?! Amazing.
Overall though, I had a pretty good stretch of land. It was roughly the same amount as most of the other civs, or perhaps a little smaller. In any case, it would have to be enough for my purposes. I was very satisfied with the results though, as I secured all of the resources and luxuries near my start and grabbed a decent amount of land as well.
Now it was time to start the part of the game that is (to me) the most nerve-wracking: trying to catch up in tech. The only ways to do that on Deity are to fight a war and get techs for peace (no way on earth THAT was going to happen; look at my cities on the map!) or to trade away everything you have for techs. I had already played the trading game successfully in GOTM7, but in that game I had gotten all the ancient age techs for free by brokering contact and also had several helpful resources pop into my territory. This was going to be a bit tougher.
First of all I had to get contact with everyone. It would be pointless to trade for techs until I had contact with all other civs, which would devalue the techs and make them cheaper. I don't know the exact date that the two continents met, but it was sometime around 200-100BC. I traded my excess silks and dyes for contact with two of the other civs out there. One of those civs I met was the Iroquois, whom I discovered were lacking in iron. Very helpful indeed. I hooked up an iron resource in 150AD and traded it to them for contact with everyone else, their world map, and all of the techs available on the diplo screen. Hiawatha really wanted that iron! This was the first time I saw the entire world map.
The Chinese and the Iroquois emerged as my best customers. The Chinese were a good customer because they were the weakest of the other civs; the stronger a civ is, the more they charge you for the same thing. Since Mao was almost as weak as me, he was the one I consistently bought from. Hiawatha needed iron, silks, dyes - you name it, he would buy it. I was able to get a ton of stuff from him as well. The AI civs entered the Industrial Age in 70AD, when I was still in the Ancient Age. This worried me, but I was able to fly through the ancient and medieval techs through trades because they had been so devalued from everyone owning them.
Out there in the rest of the world, Montezuma was stirring up a heap of trouble. In 150AD, they had gotten into a war with the Zulus, and by 320AD they were at war with everyone on my continent and several on the other one as well. I took a picture of this, as it amused me:
Everyone but me was at war with Monty. Actually, this picture is probably from a later date, since I'm in the Industrial Age, but you get the idea. For that matter, I was in the Ancient Age in 70AD, spent the 5 turns from 150AD - 250AD in anarchy while changing to Republic, and still ended up reaching the Industrial Age in the year 400AD. It was all due to trading away my excess luxuries. I also got a lot of tech from the Aztecs by trading them iron, since they couldn't trade for it with anyone else.
For some reason, every time I play as the Romans, I end up having a terribly low amount of culture. I don't know why, but it keeps happening again and again. In this game though, I had no choice but to neglect culture in the early going just to survive. I knew it would hurt me both in trades (which determines price based partly on relative culture) and open up the possibility of culture flips. What I had been expecting for a while happened in 640AD:
Spaceflip was one of my least useful cities, but I was still sorry to see it go. It did have a temple, but since my OVERALL culture was only 1295 at that point, I had no right to complain over flips.
The next big thing to happen was an event that could prove to be a major rules controversy. I'm devoting a separate page to it, in fact, before I continue my narrative.
