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This is a quick writeup for my Winner's Circle: Immortal Elizabeth game that took place on Livestream in the Fall of 2024. It had become a recurring tradition by this point to run a Civ4 game with the victor of the most recent season of AI Survivor, setting the difficulty level to Immortal where I would be challenged as a player without completely skewing the gameplay by going up to Deity level. The winner of Season Eight turned out to be Elizabeth of England, an improbable champion according to our alternate histories but a leader that I was quite pleased to have at my disposal. Elizabeth is a very slow-starting leader in Civ4 with no early advantages to speak of, however her Financial and Philosophical traits give her excellent research capabilities and the English civilization has two strong, if late-arriving, unique features in the Redcoat and the Stock Exchange. One of the very first Civ4 games that I played on Livestream had been with Elizabeth on a Highlands map and it would be fun to take her out for a spin again.
I also try to pick some unusual map scripts for these games since Civ4 has literally dozens of them and far too many games are run on either Pangaea or Inland Sea. This time I ended up choosing the Tectonics map script which is another one that tends to produce "natural" looking terrain, albeit not to as crazy of an extent as the Totestra map that I used with Louis the previous year. The first map that I rolled produced the starting position pictured above, which looked nicely playable thanks to having a (dry) corn and grassland cow in range, along with half a dozen river tiles and coastal access to the sea. Financial leaders always love having rivers to unlock immediate 3 commerce cottages and there was the potential for a possible Colossus or Great Lighthouse here down the road. I founded Loot Fiesta on the starting tile, a reference to the Teamfight Tactics games that had preceded Civ4 on the Livestream, and opened with Agriculture into Animal Husbandry research while training a worker. The game was afoot.
Unfortunately the terrain became very rugged very quickly outside the cozy environs of Loot Fiesta. The forests north of the capital were sporting the little snow graphics that indicated this start was close to the northern tundra, and scouting with the initial warrior seemed to find nothing but endless stretches of plains tiles. There were no rivers east of the capital, no hill tiles, only plains after plains after plains with a single silks resource and then some wines further to the east. The southeast was more promising where there was another dry corn along with a plains cow (the most meme-worthy tile from AI Survivor) and a plains horse which made it the obvious choice for the first settler. I was able to establish Plains Cow on Turn 34 which would be a fantastic production city throughout the game while lacking much of anything in the way of commerce. This certainly was not a start that matched up with England's Fishing and Mining starting techs.
But it wasn't just the poor land quality causing issues out of the gate, I had another huge problem on my hands in the form of rival AI neighbors. A Portuguese scout had appeared out of the south on Turn 6 and was joined one turn later by a Japanese scout from the east. This meant that Joao and Tokugawa were both very close indeed and both located in the only viable directions of expansion. It was clear that there was some kind of backlines to the northwest but I didn't think there was much land available up there and later scouting confirmed that the continent ended rather quickly in that direction. North of Loot Fiesta was little more than tundra that gave way to frozen ice tiles so that was never an option either. All that I could do was push expansion south and east as quickly as possible to claim what I could before it was snapped up by these rapacious AI leaders.
There were some actual grassland tiles south of Plains Cow but that region was snapped up by Imperialistic Joao before I could even make an attempt at it. What was still available was a marble resource, an ivory resource, and a second horse resource sitting in the middle of another vast sea of plains tiles. After floating some ideas with the Livestream audience, I decided that I had to make a play for this area and attempt to chop out the Oracle in the new city itself. That wonder would provide enough culture to hold its borders against the encroaching Portuguese and the ivory resource was desperately needed for more happiness. The only other luxuries were those silk and wine tiles which wouldn't come online until later and of course ivory would unlock the overpowered war elephants for potential offensive action. I hurried the third settler down to establish Delphi which was planted directly on top of the marble while researching through the otherwise useless monk part of the tech tree. A whole bunch of worker turns and chopped forests turned into a Turn 77 Oracle build which was used to take the pictured Monarchy tech. I desperately needed this plan to succeed as my civ would have been completely sunk if another AI empire had completed the wonder first.
My biggest weakness at the time was commerce as my English civ had seemingly no research ability at all. The Immortal difficulty cost penalties can be brutal when faced with a low-commerce and low-happiness start like this one, and then I had compounded things by settling my first two cities in the middle of dry plains-heavy regions with no rivers or coastal tiles to bring in additional income. I was now doing my best to remedy that problem but this was a nasty economic hole that I found myself in. My fourth city of Deerfield was located northwest of the capital further up the only river visible anywhere on the map, and then out of desperation I founded the embarassingly weak city of Brexit in the northern tundra because it claimed a pair of furs resources. There was only one problem: I realized that I still didn't have Hunting tech researched yet to connect those furs!
Whoops. 
Even worse, founding Brexit left my civ sitting on -1 gold/turn income while running 0% science on the slider. Yes, my entire civilization was losing money even while pouring everything into gold generation - not where you want to be when playing on high difficulty! The situation was bad enough that some of the Livestream viewers thought I should abandon this game and start over again with a fresh start. I didn't think things were quite that bleak though, as my cities and my workers were beginning to turn the corner and get the sluggish economy back into gear again. The biggest limitation had been a lack of happiness resources to increase the size of my cities. That was starting to change now with ivory, furs, and Hereditary Rule military police happiness allowing the capital in particular to start growing again. The tiny river running through Loot Fiesta and Deerfield was the only truly cottage-friendly land that I had, so that's exactly what I build there, and the income of the English civ began growing once more as those cities began working a series of new cottages.
I was also expanding with new cities planted along the coasts, spots that had better land quality thanks to a series of offshore fish resources but which I'd had to ignore earlier in favor of claiming territory in the disputed eastern portions of the map. Silky Fish was off in the west with a pair of fish resources and then Fish N Chip was squeezed in to the south where it could take advantage of that fish that had been tantalizingly out of the capital's reach for the whole game. This brought me up to seven cities and if that wasn't enough to keep pace with the AI civs who had more territory and more resources in addition to all of their high difficulty cheats, it at least kept me from falling even further behind. Delphi even generated a Great Prophet from its earlier Oracle build plus Philosophical trait, and for lack of anything better to do with it, I merged it into Fish N Chips as a super specialist. There was no point in saving endlessly for a Golden Age and getting 2 production / 5 gold per turn was legitimately useful when I had this few cities to work with.
Barbarians had been raiding out of the northern tundra periodically, being their normal annoying selves, which I did my best to control using some chariots out of Plains Cow. Chariots were the best unit that I could train for a very long time as I lacked the commerce to spare for Iron Working tech while the only copper resource in the vicinity was in the fourth ring of Loot Fiesta, just barely out of reach and not worth founding a city just to claim. I found myself wishing for the ability to plant a colony on that copper resource like in Civ3 but no dice here in Civ4. The barbarians eventually spawned the city of Bantu (which appeared before I later founded Silky Fish) and I planned to capture it once I could put together a military force with something better than chariots. Unfortunately the AI empires had scouted the barbarian city as well and they forced the issue earlier than I would have wanted by marching several units to the far northwest. When I saw that Tokugawa had half a dozen units about to attack, I gathered as many chariots as I could get into range in an attempt to snipe the city. Toku killed one archer and damaged a second one so I had to act now... only to see my first chariot win outright at 22% odds, heh. Well that made this easy! My second chariot even had the good fortune to win the following 50/50 coin flip and Bantu was now mine.
For about the first 125 turns of the game, I had been totally defenseless with nothing but warriors and chariots running around in my cities. I was praying that Tokugawa and Joao would never start plotting war; I kept an eye on them diplomatically and neither one of them ever went into "We Have Enough On Our Hands Already" (WHEOOHA) mode which meant that I was safe. Still, I couldn't count on being lucky forever and thus I proritized Construction tech which finally gave me a real unit to build in the war elephant. Plains Cow and Delphi got to work training a bunch of them as my primary barracks cities since they were both so weak in terms of commerce generation. Plains Cow did have enough surplus food to run a pair of Scientist specialists for a while and generate a Great Scientist. That allowed the capital to look like this:
And that was how I solved my economic woes from the early game: Financial trait plus a whole bunch of warriors for Hereditary Rule happiness. 
Loot Fiesta did have genuinely good terrain, as did Plains Cow in terms of pure production, it was only the rest of the map that was so weak here. The Oracle play into early Monarchy tech for Hereditary Rule happiness was what unlocked this start and allowed it to be playable, letting me grow Loot Fiesta up to the pictured size 14 where it was working eight cottages. With an Academy added by that Great Scientist, Loot Fiesta was already generating more than 100 beakers/turn at 100% science and I would later amplify this further by prioritizing Civil Service for Bureaucracy civic. This is an important tip to keep in mind: the smaller the map and the weaker the land quality, the more powerful a strong capital running the Bureaucracy + Academy combo will be. This kind of setup isn't very useful on gigantic lush maps where the value of any one city is minor, however it was absolutely perfect on a small and food-poor map such as this one.
Once I had grown Loot Fiesta and Deerfiend up to decent sizes and set them to work as many cottages as possible, I found that my science rate was roughly comparable with most of the other AI leaders. Portugal seemed to be the furthest ahead since Joao had the only grasslands-heavy portion of the map but I was at least respectable with the other competing nations. I had also met the game's other two leaders, Saladin and Brennus, who I eventually figured out had to be further east beyond Japan somewhere. I had thought that there might be a path beyond Tokugawa in the extreme north, only to find that there was a wall of mountains up there blocking any movement. This was good in the sense that Saladin and Brennus couldn't even reach me though it did make conflict with Japan almost inevitable.
Around Turn 150, I chopped down the remaining forests at Loot Fiesta and used them to construct Shwedagon Paya in the capital. Although this is a wonder that I almost never build in my games, I had access to gold via a foreign resource trade and this was a perfect spot for its effect. I had no self-founded religion and the English cities were sporting a hodgepodge of various religions that had been spread by missionaries. I couldn't even pick a state religion at this point as Tokugawa, Brennus, and Saladin were all running different faiths and I didn't want to annoy any of them. Thus Free Religion was the perfect choice and Shwedagon Paya allowed me to adopt it much earlier than normal. I paired Free Reigion with a swap into the aforementioned Bureauracy after which Loot Fiesta reached 177 beakers/turn and the whole English civ topped 370 beakers/turn. I had come a long way from losing money at 0% research only 50 turns earlier!
The next goal for this game was dealing with the threat posed by Japan. Although I was happy with how I had built my own civ thus far, it was doubtful that I could achieve some kind of victory condition faster than my AI competitors with a mere eight cities and such low quality terrain. The obvious target for any kind of aggression was Tokugawa, whose Japanese borders were intruding heavily on my territory (I still didn't have control of any of those nearby wine tiles) and who, by virtue of being Tokugawa, would never sign Open Borders or become a viable ally. With Joao Pleased-locked and therefore prevented from ever declaring war on me, I had carte blanche to engage in wars of expansion with Japan. I started the military buildup with war elephants and moved on to knights upon reaching Guilds tech. With Tokugawa lacking knights of his own, my goal was to strike and take as much territory as possible even though I knew I wasn't strong enough to conquer all of Japan in a single war.
The fighting kicked off on Turn 173 and largely centered around the border city of Nara. If I could seize control of Nara, that would unlock those wines resources and open up the path to Tokyo, which held the Pyramids, and Osaka which was the Jewish Holy City with a shrine inside. Unfortunately, the AI is pretty good at defending itself in Civ4, and even if Tokugawa had poor economic traits, his units were all sporting an awful lot of promotions with his Aggressive / Protective combo. Toku was also a good bit higher than me on the Power chart (very common when playing on high difficulty) and I had to be careful about when and how to engage his forces. I was able to get my main stack onto the forest tile directly south of Nara where Toku threw his own units into it, which went exactly as poorly as you would expect for enemy forces attacking into heavy defensive cover. This cost Toku his mobile counter-attacking force and then I was able to wipe out another large stack that unsuccessfully tried to defend Nara, though I had to sacrifice my own siege stack of catapults to pull it off.
Thus I captured Nara successfully and won the unit exchange by a wide margin in my favor. However, Tokugawa still had a ton of units remaining and he had even constructed Chichen Itza for another +25% defense above the 100% that he was getting from castles. Pushing on to further targets beyond Nara began looking more and more dubious with each passing turn. I had a stack of one-mover units that had advanced onwards to Tokyo, however with only a couple of catapults surviving from the last battle, it was chipping away at the city's defenses 2-3% per turn. Meanwhile, Tokugawa was amassing more and more defenders and I was starting to sweat as far as whether I could get my army out of there before it was wiped out. It was therefore a relief to sign a peace treaty on Turn 184 that handed over the city of Nara and nothing else. Although my gains from this first conflict had been limited, I had still gained a valuable border city and bled Tokugawa of a lot of units that he would need to replace. I hoped to come back again with superior tech before Japan had fully rearmed.
The gameplay shifted into the Renaissance era at this point and the advent of Paper tech allowed me to secure a map trade with Saladin that revealed the eastern half of the continent. Saladin and Brennus both had far superior starting locations to the English one, with lots of grassland tiles in their respective cores and a big mountain range that separated their territories aside from a one-tile crossing point. That was strange enough but Japan's geographic position was even weirder, crammed on top of a mountain range that split the continent and stretched up into the tundra, though there was a narrow peninsula east of Kyoto (still fogged in this screenshot) that extended well south of the equator. I think the other three starting positions in this game were better than the one that I'd drawn but definitely not the unlucky start that Tokugawa rolled.
Back at home, I fired off the one Great Person Golden Age on Turn 192 by making use of an otherwise unneeded Great Prophet. I used this Golden Age to construct cheap Philosophical universities across England, followed by Oxford University in the capital once the building requirement had been met. I hoped to make a play for Taj Mahal but it was never in the cards for this game, with Joao heading to Nationalism tech and knocking out the wonder himself at an early date. Instead, I had concentrated on pursuing the Liberalism prize which none of the other AIs had beelined in this game. I made it there first and tried to sandbag the free tech for a few turns, hoping to slingshot Replaceable Parts with it. Unfortunately Joao made it to Liberalism too quickly himself and I was forced to take the cheaper Nationalism tech instead which slowed my path towards Military Tradition and Rifling. These were prosperous and peaceful turns for my civ as it rebuilt from the last war and geared up for the conflicts to come.
I was following Tokugawa's path through the tech tree with great interest, watching to see if he would head down the Rifling line. Much to my delight he did not: Toku chose the Scientific Method into Physics line instead, along with diverting all the way to Democracy tech at the top of the tree. We've seen AI leaders make this mistake over and over again in AI Survivor and I was certainly going to seize every opportunity that presented itself. The previous war had given me enough unit experience to unlock the Heroic Epic at Plains Cow which had been training first knights, then cuirassiers, then finally cavalry as the units unlocked. Once I had half a dozen cavs on hand, I initiated a new war with the intention of striking before Toku could make his way to rifles himself. I had earlier sent a spy to walk around in Japanese territory which revealed that Osaka was almost completely undefended. The pictured stack of mounted units raced after this juicy prize at the start of the war and caught Toku completely off guard. My initial cavs won a pair of 50/50 coinflips and that allowed me to take Osaka with no losses at all, delivering a huge victory at the outset of the fighting.
Meanwhile, Toku's main army was stationed up in Tokyo where my spy was watching its movement. I was fortunate that Japan completely lacked horses which meant that Toku's whole army was made up of slow-movers that could only travel a maximum of three tiles per turn, even in his territory along his own roads. Thus that big army of some 30 units couldn't attack the captured Osaka without my own units getting a chance to hit it first. Instead, it traveled to the west to the former city of Nara which I had designated as a crumple zone. Now renamed to Thermopylae, I cleared out all but a handful of defenders and allowed Toku to recapture the city while placing my own slow-moving siege stack just out of reach. The fall of Thermopylae immediately turned into a Pyrrhic victory for Tokugawa as I slammed my catapults into his big stack, now defending a captured prize that had no cultural defenses and where their City Raider promotions were useless, followed by hitting it with waves of cavalry and cuirassiers. It was an absolute bloodbath as the core of the Japanese army was slaughtered followed by Thermopylae being retaken into English hands again. Nothing tells the story better than this massive sharkfin on the Power chart which effectively ended all real resistance on the part of Toku.
The rest of the war with Japan wasn't nearly as interesting. English cavalry made their way from city to city while never facing anything more advanced than muskets on the part of Tokugawa. I've written so many times before about how cavalry annihilate everything from earlier eras thanks to their high base strength and rapid movement, with this campaign certainly not being an exception to that rule. Pinch-promoted cavs would get roughly 50% odds against Toku's muskets, even with full cultural defenses in place, and then much better odds against everything else. I took losses in capturing each city, especially among the cuirassiers and knights when I ran out of cavs to attack with, but nothing stopped the conquest train from rolling onwards.
Well... there was one thing that could stop the conquest train: war weariness. It ramped up quickly and kept going up with each new city taken. The English homeland still lacked much in the way of luxuries, and even with me importing every resource that I could find, the war weariness soon reached unsustainably catastrophic levels. In the screenshot above, my poor nation was running a full 50% on the cultural slider to keep my cities from frantically starving and that wasn't survivable for any length of time. As a result, upon taking the Japanese city of Satsuma I sued for peace with Tokugawa, having taken control of the central core of his empire. He still wouldn't cede over an additional city in the peace treaty despite all of the damage dealt, heh. This was honestly good enough though as I knew that I could come back and complete the conquest at a later date. My English nation was only going to continue getting stronger while Japan was clearly finished as a power.
With the war concluded for the moment, I could ditch the massive luxuries spending and get back to teching down the tree again. It hadn't just been war weariness killing me during the conflict, I had also been suffering from nearly all of the other AI leaders adopting Emancipation civic which caused 3-4 additional unhappy faces to appear in every city. I was forced to target Democracy tech (though Statue of Liberty was long gone by this point) followed by triggering my two Great Person Golden Age. Japan had fortunately constructed the Mausoleum earlier in their capital city of Kyoto which granted me 12 turns of boosted yields from the captured wonder. It was a great time to fire off the Golden Age with the Japanese conquests coming out of resistance and also benefiting from the boosted tile yields everywhere. I was able to reach Communism tech before the end of the Golden Age and adopted what I intended to be my final civics: Representation / Free Speech / Emancipation / State Property / Free Religion. I had finally reached the point where the general benefit of Free Speech outdid boosting the capital with Bureaucracy and since I was forced to run Emancipation anyway I would be growing all of my various cottages into towns that much faster.
The other tough lategame civic choice is usually State Property versus running corporations. That wasn't much of a decision on this map, however, which had few resources for the various corporations to exploit. For example, I had all of three fish, one clam, one rice, and zero crab resources which wouldn't make for a very impressive Sid's Sushi. Instead it was State Property that was the big winner here, which I've generally found to be the case on food-poor maps where getting +1 food on workshops and watermills has more of an effect. The other critical tech from a tile yield perspective was Biology which I beelined at an early date as seen in the screenshot above. The extra food from Biology was incredibly valuable on this map, transforming the food deserts caused by those massive stretches of plains tiles into viable cities for the first time. A standard 2 food / 1 production plains farm only has enough food to feed itself, however a 3 food / 1 production Biology plains farm suddenly can support half of an additional population point. The tech allowed me to grow cities like Thermopylae, Riposte, and Yoink up to size 17-18 and then convert a bunch of plains farms into workshops or cottages depending on whether I wanted to emphasize more production or commerce. These barren wastelands for most of the game were developing beautifully into modern metropolises thanks to the power of more advanced technology.
Tokugawa did need to be completely eliminated from the map as there was too much residual Japanese culture in his cities and a bunch of unhappy faces from "we long to return to the motherland" unrest. All of that goes away if you commit genocide against the leader in question, completely eliminating their nation entirely, but no one ever said that Civ4 was a particularly gentle game. I restarted the war on Turn 260 and did my best to race through the remaining Japanese cities as quickly as possible, with the renewed conflict plunging most of my captures from the last war into severe unhappiness again. A gigantic stack with some 40 mounted units raced through the narrow peninsula to the south while a smaller force of cavalry along with my slow one-movers pushed through the much rougher mountain passes in the northeast. There's not much more to say about the fighting since I'd added several dozen more cavalry since the last war while Tokugawa's technology hadn't advanced at all. It took seven total turns to capture the remaining cities and eliminate Japan from the game on Turn 267.
Now the question was what to do next and how I should go about approaching the ending stages of the gameplay. Conquering the entirety of Japan had finally pulled my empire into first place on the scoreboard and I thought that I might be able to out-race the remaining AIs to space from this position. Maybe. Brennus was a bit behind in tech while Saladin was roughly equal with me, helped in part because he kept stealing techs from England! He lifted four or five of them until I finally started running counterespionage misions to put a stop to that nonsense. Neither of them was the problem though, the real issue was Joao who was four or five techs ahead and who had cleaned up most of the key modern era wonders for himself. Portugal had been a perfect neighbor the whole game and Joao remained Pleased-locked with me so that he would never declare war unless relations dropped. However, he was also neglecting the military portions of the lategame tech tree and I thought that I could run him over without too much trouble with a dedicated effort. This was rather cruel from a diplomatic standpoint but it would lock down a guaranteed victory so I set myself on a collision course with my southern neighbor.
Before I could attack Portugal though, first I had to industrialize as a nation. Joao had already researched Assembly Line and added factories across his territory which meant that I had to do the same if I wanted a realistic chance to defeat him. The pollution from constructing factories and coal plants quickly drove my cities into a health crisis with seemingly everything falling into starvation of some kind. Even with Biology farms all over the place, there still wasn't enough food to feed everyone with the health penalty caused by all that additional pollution. I had to build the public transportations at Combustion tech and then detour to Medicine tech for hospitals to keep my cities secure before I could swap over to training tanks. There were a bunch of turns here where I was frantically juggling tiles from city to city to keep them from starving while workers ran around swapping tile improvements as needed. It was pretty funny and I think some of the Livestream viewers got a kick out of seeing how I handled the pollution crunch. Obviously this is the kind of thing that the AI struggles to understand which is why we've so often seen competitors in AI Survivor fall apart after building their factories.
After I had the factories built and the unhealthiness under control, it was time to convert over to heavy tank production at any city with decent production. That's almost every city on the map in the late game as Biology farms plus State Property workshops allow even weak terrain to pump out lots of production. I also had airships and then bombers on hand by the time that I was ready to launch this latest conflict, which together gave me complete map hacks of the whole Portuguese territory. Using the F5 Military Advisor screen, I could see that I had 29 tanks and 9 bombers on hand to face 37 infantry and 7 SAM infantry on the part of Portugal. Joao had built exactly 2 tanks and had no air force at all - mistakes that would prove to be catastrophic for his empire.
The war that began with Joao on Turn 307 might have looked close on the Power graphs but was immediately revealed to be a one-sided slaughter. I don't think too many of the Livestream viewers (or readers of this website) are that familiar with lategame warfare in Civ4 since it doesn't happen that often. The recording of these war turns is a great showcase of what these kind of conflicts can look like, particularly the strength of air power if one side has a decisive advantage. There really is no counter to bombers in Civ4 other than having your own planes up in the air to shoot them down, as unchallenged bombers can remove city defenses and then apply collateral damage to the defenders in complete safety from a dozen tiles away. With city defenses removed and the infantry inside shredded down to half health, the poor defenders were then hit with City Raider III tanks who could often use their innate Blitz ability to attack multiple times per turn. There's no standing up to that without having an equally strong force of air power and tanks to hit back against the attackers; Joao's policy of building a whole bunch of infantry and having them sit isolated in individual cities was an utter failure. (The sharkfin on the Power graph tells the story once again.) My tanks rampaged across the grasslands of Portugal capturing a city roughly every turn, including sniping the one holding Statue of Zeus early in the fighting to prevent war weariness from spiking to dire levels. Had to get that thing out of the way quickly, whew.
There were a few humorous moments during this campaign. My biggest blunder came when a single Portuguese cavalry unit, which had apparently been scouting around up in the northern arctic, ran into my territory and captured the city of Deerfield which had been defended by a single warrior. Ummm... 
I had been getting half a dozen "warning" messages in the event log each turn and I didn't bother to check for enemy units coming down out of the ice fields. Fortunately the AI never razes cities on capture so I was able to take it right back again with a tank. Joao also started building some fighter planes along with more SAM infantry which was enough to shoot down some of my bombers along with most of my airships. It wasn't enough to slow dow the offensive in any serious way though it did show that air power isn't invincible if the defender trains some of their own anti-air forces. Nevertheless, this was a speedy campaign and in a mere 8 turns it was all over:
That was all of Portugal's continental holdings though Joao did survive because he had three offshore island cities. It wasn't worth the effort of fighting through his navy and sailing over there to capture them as I was content to sign peace and hold here for the rest of the game. Portugal's core served up nine additional quality cities for my empire even if it would take a little time to repair their infrastructure and shuffle their tile improvements around to my liking. Taking these cities also removed the green culture that had been suffocating some of my cities, especially Delphi which had the Ironworks and could now grow to its proper size. For the curious, these conquests brought England up to about 47% land area and unfortunately this map required 68% land to get over the Domination hump. I certainly could have done that but it was faster and easier to head to space which was only about two dozen turns away. No one was going to beat me there now as Brennus and Saladin had both fallen a good ways behind, plus the two of them were locked in a long-running war of their own. Perfect.
The final two dozen turns were a pure economic sandbox exercise as I tried to speed along the spaceship as quickly as possible. I followed the standard route through the tech tree for a spaceship win, starting with Superconductors tech to unlock the labs and their research bonus, then Fusion tech for the super expensive two engines, followed by Genetics and then Composites / Ecology. There are a whole bunch of techs that aren't required to launch the spaceship at all, our infamous poison pills from AI Survivor, such as Robotics, the Laser, and the whole Stealth line. I didn't need to research these techs to win the game, so I didn't. I had enough Great People to fire off the final three-person Golden Age which gave my empire 12 turns of boosted science and production at exactly the right time. With most of my cities not building spaceship parts swapping over to Wealth or Research builds, I was able to climb up to 3000 beakers/turn, then 4000 beakers/turn before the finish. Not too bad for a map with such weak terrain.
Speaking of that terrain, I also swapped from Representation into Universal Suffrage once production became more important than research capacity towards the end of the Golden Age. That led to insane screenshots of city interiors like Riposte above; the former Tokyo had mostly been a plains hellscape for the bulk of the game only to be transformed into this state at its conclusion. Biology farms backed by irrigation chains handled the food load to reach size 20 and support eight fully mature towns with ridiculous 1 food / 3 production / 9 commerce yields. Obviously this was all being heavily boosted by the Golden Age along with Financial + Free Speech + Universal Suffrage + Printing Press but it was nonetheless gorgeous to behold. This is my single favorite thing about Civ4: taking weak, poor portions of the map and managing to turn them into beautiful cities with proper planning and management. Civ4's tech tree essentially makes everything worth settling by the end of the game (much like the real modern world where humans can live almost anywhere) and it was truly satisfying to compare the harsh early game screenshots against the paradise that England had become by the finish.
I think that I timed the spaceship research versus part construction quite well overall, with the last parts finishing three turns after discovering the final needed tech. They can and have been timed together more closely but this wasn't bad for someone who wasn't simming things out or trying to meet a Hall of Fame finishing date. The spaceship launched on Turn 344 and then I had to mindlessly click Next Turn another ten times before the actual victory arrived on Turn 354:
That extra ten turn requirement for the spaceship added in Beyond the Sword is still one of the dumbest ideas of all time. 
Anyway, this was a pretty tough game due to the low quality of the surrounding terrain and the close proximity of AI neighbors. The Oracle into Monachy play for early Hereditary Rule happiness was the saving grace of this effort, without which I'm not exactly sure what I would have done. I also benefited from having Tokugawa and Joao as AI neighbors, two of the less dangerous opponents to have on your borders. Neither one of them was aggressive enough to be scary in the way that Shaka or Ragnar would have been, and yet they also weren't economically strong enough to be a longterm threat in the vein of Mansa Musa. Both of them were pretty mediocre in this game and largely sat around doing nothing until I was able to pick them off one at a time and steal their lands for myself. It also helped that the AI leaders were divided by religion this whole game and never formed a concrete diplomatic bloc, plus Saladin and Brennus even wasted a lot of time fighting pointless wars with each other. So it was definitely a tough map but it also could have been a lot worse.
This was a pretty stressful game for the early session, most notably the first 125 turns when I had no military whatsoever and three hostile spears could have captured my whole empire. Thanks for not coming after me then, Toku! I still wasn't confident that I was going to win until I captured Japan's core cities in the second war against them, after which things were downhill from there. Sooner or later I'll end up losing one of these games on Immortal difficulty but not yet, not today.
This game also coincided with the birth of our second son who made his first cameos on the Livestream at the end of the final sessions. Welcome Charles Alexander - Charlie!
