Civ7's designers made the drastic gameplay change of breaking the flow of time into three distinct eras. I had just completed the Ancient era and China would now transition into the Exploration age, the middle of the three periods. These era transitions bring everything that the player might be doing to an immediate halt: all wars cease, all city production ends, all units move back into your territory, and any units beyond a preset limit are deleted. Back when Civ7 was first announced and these era transitions were introduced, I reacted with skepticism and predicted that they wouldn't be received well by a wide stretch of the Civilization community. That has largely proven true as the forced division of the gameplay into three entirely separate eras continues to run a lot of people the wrong way. I still don't understand what the purpose of doing this is supposed to achieve - why did Civilization's gameplay need to be split apart into three distinct minigames? Are we sure that was a good idea? I really wish that I could just play the game straight through without these discontinuities and without almost all of the stuff I built in the Ancient era suddenly becoming obsolete.
But anyway, Civ7 does have era transitions so let's take a look at one of them:
The beginning of the Exploration age meant the swap to another civilization, from Han China to Ming China. Unlike in Humankind, there's no option to continue onwards with the original civ choice for the whole game; each civ only exists in a single era and cannot be played outside that era. Ming China is relatively similar to Han China in the sense that it has an upgraded version of the same Great Wall unique tile improvement, this one granting 5 culture per tile instead of 2 culture when added to rural districts. The Cho-ko-nu was now gone to be replaced by the Xunleichong, a unique unit replacement for the normal sword unit that also has a ranged attack. That's kind of nice to have your melee units also able to employ ranged strikes but it does make them somewhat superfluous given the easy access to crossbows in this era. The weird Shi Dafu was also traded out for the Mandarin, a unique unit merchant that grants extra gold on establishing a trade route. I have to confess that I didn't do anything with trade routes in this era so I can't say much about their usefulness. One of those "nice to have" but not essential benefits, I would guess?
Unfortunately Ming China has a pretty terrible innate civ ability. They get +50% science in the capital but -15 flat beakers for each non-tradition social policy that the player chooses to run. Traditions are poorly explained in-game but as a reminder they are the handful of social policies granted by the unique civics tree of each nation. They are also the only policies that carry over from age to age and I had a couple of them left over from Han China. This might be less of an issue if the player were running one of the power civs from the Ancient era, however I felt that Han China's traditions were fairly mediocre and I wouldn't end up running too many of them here in the Exploration age, not once I opened up better civics as options. Thus I would be eating that negative science penalty a good bit which wasn't a lot of fun - I really dislike the design here as it either limits player choice or forces them to take a penalty. Aspiring game designers, this is the kind of stuff to avoid.
As a final point on the civ choice, Ming China once again lacked a unique quarter so we'd be missing out on that option again. Unique quarters are awesome because they are always classified as ageless and get to keep their benefits across the era transitions. Han and Ming China both lack these unique quarters and therefore just miss out, which is weird given that out of every potential civ available, you would think that China would be a civ with strong continuities extending across the centuries!
The various legacy scoring goals from the previous era translate into legacy points at the start of the next age, with the player getting more of these points based on how many of the scoring goals they were able to achieve. Most of the legacy points translate into attribute points in the six attribute trees but there are a couple of other options worth discussing here. Each of the four legacy scoring categories has a "golden age" choice for the next era which requires spending two legacy points and can only be taken if the player fully achieved that scoring goal, i.e. building 7 wonders in the Ancient era or having 12/12 expansion points. I had fulfilled this criteria for everything except the Cultural option (stupid wonders!) and therefore qualified for the other three golden ages. However, the player can only pick one of these golden age options which doesn't make sense to me; if the player unlocked them, and has the legacy points to spend on them, why not let them choose it? I don't particularly understand this design decision since it seems to be penalizing success.
Fortunately the golden age options are poorly balanced and most of them aren't worth taking anyway. For example, the Military option grants a starting infantry unit in every settlement conquered last era. That's... terrible? Infantry units are cheap to train in Civ7 and the tight settlement cap means that players can't possibly conquer more than a handful of enemy cities over the course of the era. I vastly preferred dropping two of my three Military legacy points into Fealty for +2 settlement cap and then putting the remaining point into the Expansionist attribute tree. The clear winner seems to be the Economic golden age option Silk Roads which causes all of your cities to remain cities in the next age. Under the normal rules, every city other than your capital reverts back into a town at the start of the next era, which is unbelievably painful and anti-fun. I'm shocked that this made it into the gameplay and the Economic golden age is the only one that I actively target in each game because I do *NOT* want my cities reverting back into towns again. The Scientific golden age is also quite good, as it prevents the tier 2 science building (academies in the Ancient era) from going obsolete and therefore provides a major boost to science in the next age. I never take it though because I don't want to lose my cities - seriously, who thought that was a good idea?!
There's a tremendous amount of busywork that has to be done at the start of a new age and it always takes me a long time to work my way through the era transitions. First, every city has to select something new to build and there's a new list of potential options as the new age has a completely different list of buildings and units. Then I have to go through all of my military units, figure out where they're all located, and decide where I want them to move. Keep in mind that there's no military advisor or unit listing in Civ7 so every unit has to be found manually on the map itself. Then I have to go through the resource list and reassign every resource to cities and towns; the resources themselves also change a bit with each era transition so it's not as simple as redoing where the resources were placed in the past age. Then I have to decide which tech and civic I want to research, since they both have entirely new trees to start the Exploration era, followed by picking out my social policies. All of the non-tradition policies from the last era are now gone so if you had something you enjoyed using, too bad, sucks to be you.
This process is both lengthy and tedious; I find myself disliking the transitions and I've abandoned several games because I didn't want to bother reconfiguring everything yet again. The new era also trims back the yields of every non-ageless building from the prior era, with the Ancient era ones being capped at 2 of their respective yields. I had a super academy at my capital that was producing about a dozen beakers and that fell back to 2 beakers/turn as well since the academy was now "obsolete". It's one of the most baffling design decisions I can remember; did the developers think it would be fun to see most of your hard work go up in smoke every time the era changes? Some players might enjoy this but I have to think that most of them don't. Anyway, the ribbons at the corner of the screen totalled up the summary: I fell from 167 science to 118 science, and from 139 culture to 98 culture. In addition, all of the AI empires who had been light-years behind me in techs and civics were now completely caught up again, with all of us having access to the identical tier 1 militay units. I can't say that this feels very fair or much fun.
The one piece of genuine good news was that the settlement cap had been raised for my empire. Previously I had been sitting at 10/7 which was about the limit that I could manage in the Ancient era. Thanks to taking the Fealty legacy for +2 settlements along with another +1 increase that had been rolled into the age transition, I could actually begin the process of expanding again. (Not to belabor the point but the hard limits on expansion resulting from the settlement cap also aren't a lot of fun in Civ7.) The gimmick of the Exploration era is that everyone can finally cross ocean tiles for the first time, tiles which are utterly impassable no matter what in the Ancient era. Hooray for railroaded and inflexible gameplay! 
There are many different aspects of the Exploration era which are tied to "distant lands", i.e. any part of the map that isn't on your starting continent. In order to achieve most of the legacy scoring goals for this era, players are essentially forced to expand overseas into those distant lands whether they want to or not.
At the start of the era, only ships can cross ocean tiles and they only move one tile at a time through oceans, taking damage from "rough seas" along the way. This painfully slow naval movement combined with the need to have "distant lands" present for scoring goals has resulted in Civ7 having some of the most predictable and dull map generation in any 4X game to date. Nearly all of the default map scripts produce exactly two main continents, one starting continent and one distant continent, with chains of small islands running between them. The islands have to be there or else ships would sink from the rough seas initial penalty, and the second continent also must be present or else there wouldn't be any distant lands. Thus it was literally impossible to play a Pangaea setup when Civ7 came out, or even have a setup like the popular Inland Sea from past games. The design decision to force everyone into replicating the historical overseas exploration period, over and over again, in game after game, badly straightjackets the options available to the player. This is OK for a couple of games but it starts getting really tiresome by your fourth or fifth time reaching the Exploration age.
I had some gold carry over from the Ancient era and the mementos that we were using for this game provided everyone with an additional 400 gold to start the age. I used some of that to cash-rush a few cogs, the early exploration ship, in order to start revealing the overseas map. I needed to find a bunch of treasure fleet resources like the tea in the screenshot above in order to achieve the legacy scoring goals for this age; more on this in a bit.
My military units and army commanders that carried over from the prior age had another mission of their own: track down Amina and finish her off. I did not want her to start founding overseas colonies and continue being a pain in the rear, I wanted to eliminate her immediately while she still had only one city. (In a better designed game she wouldn't have had the technology to expand overseas, but of course here in Civ7 she magically had tech parity with me at the start of a new age.) I sent everything available to the northeast immediately at the start of the Exploration age, only to come across an Amina settler plotting an escape from her icy prison on Turn 7. This couldn't be allowed to stand: I had no choice but to declare war right away and shoot down the settler with my ranged units before it could retreat. I figured that this would bring Trung Trac into the conflict as well, which she predictably did a mere two turns later. Those two ladies had been tight allies throughout the game thus far and they both needed to go ASAP. What I was not expecting was Augustus Caesar dogpiling into the rapidly escalating war as well starting on Turn 11. Wait, hadn't we been friends all throughout the Ancient era?! Not even a dozen turns had passed and I found myself in a three-way conflict, argh.
At least my little army was already mostly past Trung Trac's two cities when she declared war. My ranged units took a few nicks but I was able to get them back in the army commander and then sail over to Amina's pathetic little spit of land. Its territory was so small that I could only have two units attack at once, though my commander had been promoted enough times that he was able to grant a Second Wind attack to one of those archers every 5 turns. I wish that I'd been able to get some ships up here because Koloe was a total sitting duck against naval assault; unfortunately this part of the map was incredibly remote as compared to my core cities. I had to spend a number of turns chipping away at the city defenses, followed by killing the one defending unit inside Koloe. And yes, Amina was still trying to escape with another settler but my besieging units prevented it from getting away.
Meanwhile, I was suffering major unhappiness in my cities due to the negative war support from this fighting. I had -3 with Amina and another -1 with Trung Trac, plus I could only hope that Augustus would stay at that zero value. This was having a visible effect on my science output, which had dropped from about 125 beakers/turn down to 105 beakers/turn. Players definitely want to avoid lengthy wars in this game if at all possible since they will hinder your economic development due the unhappiness. Back at home, my cities were mostly working on the default production buildings like Sawmills and Stonecutters. Civ7 essentially has the same buildings in each era, usually a tier 1 version and a tier 2 version associated with each yield, and the numbers simply get bigger in each era. So the Ancient era has Barracks and Blacksmiths while the Exploration era has Armorers and Dungeons, each of which grant production with some minimal differences. This can make the city building feel a bit repetitive because you're kind of rebuilding the same stuff over and over again with slightly better yields in each age. Once again, my default setup was getting all the production buildings in place first, followed by anything else that I wanted afterwards. Production is king in this game.
The Exploration era also adds religion to the gameplay, or perhaps more accurately a religious-like substance. Founding a religion requires researching the Piety civic and then building a temple in one of your cities which will prompt the player with this screen. Note that Civ7 never explains this anywhere in-game and I had absolutely no idea how to found a religion the first time that I played this era. Religion does very, very little in Civ7 and it's telling that the gameplay gives prominence to the Reliquary belief over everything else. This is a choice as far as how the player's religion will generate relics, which are the Cultural scoring goal for this era: obtain and display 12 relics for maximum scoring. All of the various options are associated with first-time conversion of foreign cities (never your own cities!), often with absurdly specific criteria. For example, Evangelism has "1 relic for first time conversion of another civilization's settlement in distant lands that is not a city state" which feels pretty silly. I decided to take the first option, Icons, since it seemed pretty easy to convert a handful of city states for two relics apiece, then I could ignore religion for the rest of the age. (Wait, aren't they independent powers now - sorry, already made that joke in the last era.)
What's really bizarre is that there are almost no rewards at all for converting your own cities to your own religion. All of the Founder beliefs are tied to converting the cities of other players which leaves your religion subject to the crazy behavior of the AI civs. I took Tithe here (4 gold per foreign city following your religion) and didn't particularly care about the belief. Converting AI cities does not stop them from producing missionaries of their own religious type and they love to spam out those missionaries which, incidentally, cannot be attacked or killed or impeded in any way. They will spend the whole era converting your cities and converting each other's cities, and you gain basically nothing by spending your own production on converting them back to your faith. It's another place where the gameplay design does not make any sense to me whatosever. Where were the developers trying to go with this mechanic??? 
In any case, while my cogs were out exploring the seas, my main army finally competed the siege of Koloe and eliminated Amina from the game. There was no escape this time and I found it kind of incredible that an AI leader who had spawned right next to my capital had to be tracked all the way up here. Koloe was completely useless as a settlement, without even having any resources that I wanted, and therefore I began the process of razing it. That was going to take 11 turns to complete and now every future opponent in warfare would get a free point of war support against me. Once again, these razing penalties are set way too high given the idiocy of where the AI leaders put down their settlements.
With Amina out of the way and a peace treaty secured for the moment with Trung Trac, I could start focusing on the legacy scoring goals for this era in earnest. While the non-Cultural legacy goals for the Ancient era are all well chosen, the four objectives for the Exploration age are significantly weaker from a design perspective. I mentioned above how the Cultural path in this era centers around collecting relics and involves the poorly thought out religious mechanics. This is something I've been skipping in my own games because I really don't care to invest into the religious stuff. The Military goal is needlessly complex in this era: gain 12 points from settlements but ONLY in distant lands, counting double if conquered or follows your religion, and quadrupled if both is the case. This is really dumb because it once again involves the bad religion mechanics and also fails to give any credit for settlements captured on the starting continent. Once again, the game is forcing the player into a particular style of gameplay for no reason. At least the Scientific legacy goal is genuinely interesting: have five districts which are not the city center tile with a yield of 40 or greater. This requires smart city building via the adjacency system and lots of specialists, fortunately helped here by Confucius getting +2 science per specialist. I always try to go after this one because it's genuinely fun to do.
The Economic legacy path was the most important one for me to achieve because I could not afford to have all my cities collapse back into towns in the following era. This time the legacy goal was gaining 30 "treasure fleet" points from resources acquired in distant lands. The way this works is that certain resouces have the treasure fleet designation, like the spices and sugars in the screenshot above. These resources will never appear on the starting continent and therefore they require settling new towns in distant lands to gain access. Once these resources are connected with a rural district and a sea route through a Fishing Quay, they will begin generating treasure fleets: 1 fleet per resource every 8 turns. The fleets then must be moved back to your territory to collect the resources, and they can theoretically be attacked along the way although the AI never does this. The player realistically needs at least 5-6 of these treasure fleet resources to hit the goal of 30 before the era ends; this island where I had added Nanchang contained five such resources and the next island to the north had another four which together felt like it would be sufficient.
One last note: treasure fleets also don't start appearing right away, even if connected with a rural district and a Fishing Quay. They also require the player to research the Shipbuilding tech, an additional restriction which happened to me in this game and which is NEVER MENTIONED anywhere while playing Civ7. I swear, this game is such a mess.
I thought that I'd have a bit more time to continue exploring the map and pushing out settlers to treasure fleet resources. I had two cogs heading west and two cogs heading east, with the pair off in the west having already uncovered nearly all of the island archipelago that always sits between the main continents. My eastern cogs were having less luck since I'd tried to make an ocean crossing over there and was forced to turn back to keep the ships from dying; apparently I had managed to find one of the only wide ocean passages in the entire world. While heading further to the north, one of those cogs stumbled across a settler from Trung Trac who was trying to establish a settlement off in the islands. I had a real feeling of deja vu here since this was repeat of the same circumstance with Amina earlier. My reaction was the same: I declared war and chased away the unfortunate settler, needing to keep Trung Trac bottled up with her two cities as well. Once again it was back to further warfare; at least I did get Augustus to end our meaningless conflict shortly thereafter.
The real prize in this conflict was Trung Trac's original capital of Pataliputra. I had been building up to assault this spot before discovering that settler prompted a start to the fighting a little bit before I was fully ready. The army commander that had burned down Amina's icy redoubt was sailing down from the north while I had a secondary force assembling at Guangzhou, a new fishing town that I had planted earlier with the intention of being a staging ground for the attack. Pataliputra was surrounded by difficult terrain between the lake to its west and the wide navigable river to its south. I would not have been able to get my crossbows over to the other side without my two eastern cogs providing naval support. They were invaluable here by sailing up the river and savaging any of Trunc Trag's units that were dumb enough to venture into the water themselves. Naval units are oddly overpowered in Civ7 for no clear reason, as ranged land units attack them using their fortification strength while melee land units can't attack them at all. Siege units like ballistas and catapults actually hit them the hardest which doesn't make much sense. My units fought their way first to the north side of the river, then began reducing Pataliputra's fortifications all while taking fire from the defending heavy archers. It finally fell on Turn 39:
I had a lot of red healthbars on my surviving units as they had taken a pounding during the assault. It was a good moment to pause and rest up before pushing on to Trung Trac's final city. By the way, check out the yields on the ribbons in the corner of this screenshot now that we had progressed further into the Exploration age. My western ships had crossed the International Date Line and encountered Ibn Battuta over on the eastern continent where I was just starting to pull back the fog of its distant coastlines. Unfortunately Ibn Battuta wasn't doing any better than his AI peers who were all thoroughly getting crushed. Himiko was somewhat competitive in science and culture, possibly because she was wise enough to ally with me instead of fighting China, while Augustus and Ibn Battuta were just sad. I genuinely have no idea how Augustus could have seven settlements but a mere 35 beakers/turn this late into the gameplay. What could he possibly be doing up there?! This is another massive, gaping flaw with Civ7: just like in Civ6, the AI leaders have no idea how to play the game, and it gets more and more apparent the deeper the player makes it into the gameplay.
There was one last Trung Trac city just to the north of Pataliputra. It was almost completely surrounded by mountains and could only be reached through a one-tile choke point via land. However, Wilwakikta was much more accessible by sea and my cogs, now upgraded to caravels, were able to facilitate the landing of a packed army commander. I had a catapult pop out and begin bombarding the city's fortifications, which soon resulted in the removal of a second leader from this game:
The city was completely empty at this point and the nearby knight walked in to deliver the final blow. I wasn't sad to see Trung Trac depart from the field as she had been a thorn in my side for a long time. I was especially pleased that I managed to halt both her and Amina from escaping out into the islands where it would have taken even longer to wrestle them into submission. (And yes, there was yet another settler still trying to sail away on this final turn!) Trung Trac's demise gave me control over the bulk of the starting continent but I didn't plan to do any further expanding for the immediate future. Himiko had been a good ally who was still willing to sign Research and Cultural Agreements with me, whereas Augustus had too many cities for me to eliminate and I lacked the happiness to capture them. I was sitting at 14/11 on the settlement cap after choosing to keep both cities and a mere +15 happiness on the global meter. Any future settlements were going to have to target treasure fleet resources in distant lands which basically ruled out any more expansion on the starting continent.
Speaking of treasure fleets, here's one of them in action as the first such ships returned home to deliver their bounty. I had already paid to convert Nanchang into a city and spent additional gold there on a liberal basis to connect all four of its treasure fleet resources as quickly as possible. Nearby Hangzhou was necessary to get the final spices resource into play and I figured that I could keep it as a town where it would generate food for its western sister settlement. This island had originally been packed with hostile units from an independent power and it took some effort to clear them out, not helped by the fact that my main army was off on the other side of the continent fighting Amina and then Trung Trac. One thing that did help was an unintended ability: ships were somehow able to disperse independent powers simply by sailing next to them and without having to gain control of the central IP tile. This appears to be a clear mistake because the previous Civ7 patch introduced the ability for ships to disperse IPs, and then the following patch that released after I completed this game required them to have control of the central IP tile for dispersal. Whoops, someone coded that incorrectly!
There were even more hostile units on the island north of Nanchang and Hangzhou where I used this same trick to remove the IP. The barbarian units themselves didn't magically disappear, of course, and I had to fight through them with a crossbow + cog pairing which would have failed without the naval support. An incoming settler is barely visible at the top of that screenshot; I tried to land the thing earlier and it nearly died before I could evacuate it and go heal. There were four more treasure resources up there and my gold income for the immediate future would be concentrated on speeding up that site with rushed buildings.
Back at home, I was charging through the tech tree at a fantastic pace and in many cases outpaced what my core cities had available to build because they had already constructed everything. At times like that, I could have my capital fall back on some of the unique tile improvements; I actually had two of them available between the Ming Great Wall and this Company Post that I had gained as an option from befriending a Commercial independent power. (It was the Exploration age version of the Emporium from the last era.) The unique tile improvements can be fun to mess around with since they do not remove the yields from rural districts, only stacking on top of them with additional benefits. They don't scale as well into the lategame where urban districts are clearly better but in a situation like this there was no reason not to add some more walls for free bonus culture. Sharp eyes might even notice the distinction between the Han Great Wall tiles worth 2 culture and the newer Ming Great Wall tiles worth 5 culture. Plus the unique tile improvements are also ageless which is why the Han stuff was still valuable in the Exploration era. Now if only they were as good as the unique quarters...
Remember that the Scientific legacy goal for the Exploration age is to get five different tiles with a total yield of 40, not counting city center tiles. That sounds incredibly daunting at first, however it turns out to be pretty doable through the use of specialists and strong adjacency bonuses. Specialists are the third population type in cities that I haven't discussed yet, joining together with the rural and urban districts from earlier. They are the last one to unlock and don't even appear as a possibility until halfway through the Ancient era, then the player is limited to only a single specialist per urban tile (specialists can never be slotted into rural districts) until unlocking more of them during the Exploration age. As the little graphics indicate, specialists do not grab additional tiles on the map as rural and urban districts do. Instead, they build vertically upwards by enhancing the yields of previously-existing urban districts at the cost of 2 food and 2 happiness. I believe the base yields for specialists are 3 beakers and 2 culture which can then get modified by a whole bunch of different factors, starting with the adjacency bonuses of the buildings in their urban district. Long story short: if you have some killer adjacency bonuses on your buildings, you'll get boosted specialist yields as well.
A prime example of this was the urban district hosting a kiln and a temple in the mountains north of Chang'an. These are both buildings that get adjacency bonuses for being next to mountains, and this tile was already producing a whopping 1 gold / 2 culture / 18 culture / 15 happiness even before slotting in a specialist. That specialist was then worth another 6 beakers / 4.5 culture / 2.5 happiness which easily crested the requirement of 40 total yields for the legacy scoring goal. Now this was pretty unusual to hit the scoring goal with only a single specialist; more commonly, it takes three specialists combining together on the same tile to hit the mark. I was helped here by playing as Confucius with his +2 beakers on specialists, plus I was running the Han China tradition policy that grants another +1 science on specialists. With even the most basic urban tiles getting 8 additional yields from each specialist, I was confident I could get five of these such tiles before the Exploration age concluded.
By Turn 70, the next crisis was already under way and I found myself approaching the end of the era - wait, what?! 
How could we already be at 78% of the era finished only 70 turns into this period? Unbeknownst to me, I had run afoul of some of the hidden mechanics that are never explained anywhere in Civ7's gameplay. That percentage-based era meter slowly ticks up each turn on its own, but the biggest jumps come from hitting various "era score" milestones along the way. These normally come from achieving the legacy scoring goals in each category, with the first two partial objectives worth 5 era score apiece and completely finishing a category worth 10 era score. Thus the player (or the AI civs) completing the legacy scoring goals moves each age closer to its conclusion, which probably sounded good on paper but leads to some weird gameplay in practice. There's a pretty huge incentive *NOT* to finish the legacy scoring goals since they result in more era score and end the age at an earlier date. Instead, the player has every reason to hold them just short of completion and then rush a bunch of them at the same time at the last minute. This is pretty dumb but it's clearly the optimal path at the moment due to how the mechanics are set up.
But as I said above, there was more going on behind the scenes that I didn't know about until after finishing this game and doing some poking around in the CivFanatics forums. For one thing, every time an AI leader is eliminated, the era score for the current age advances by 20 points. Thus knocking off Amina and Trung Trac had actually shortened this Exploration age by a good bit - not that the gameplay ever explains this to the player! It makes no logical sense either; why does eliminating an AI cause the era to end earlier (?) Next, the era score associated with the legacy goals increases in the Exploration age. It's 5 / 5 / 10 era score for hitting the legacy goals in the Ancient age, but then advancing to 5 / 10 / 20 era score in the Exploration age. Again, you are penalized with a shorter Exploration age if you are succeeding at the goals the game is setting for you! Finally, there's yet another mechanic under the hood making the Exploration age even shorter. Each point of era score is worth 20 ranks on the hidden age meter (never seen by the player) in the Ancient era. But in the Exploration age, each point of era score suddenly becomes worth 35 ranks on the hidden age meter, almost doubling the cost of era score! Put all of this together and the player gets a very, very short Exploration age that begins coming to a close barely after it starts.
My best army commander was over on the eastern continent poking around to explore the map and possibly try to capture some cities from Catherine, since that's what the Military scoring goal for this era asks players to do. But the rapidly expiring era meter meant that I had to abandon any such thoughts due to lack of time remaining. I had to buckle down and get as much legacy score as possible before the clock ran out. I had been sitting at 78% on the meter on Turn 70, only to get a fifth urban district to 40 total yields a few turns later and complete the Science legacy path. That was great news - except that it jumped the era clock all the way up to 88% when it was only Turn 76! By way of comparison, the same meter was sitting at a mere 48% on this same turn back in the Ancient era. This definitely caught me off guard as I had been expecting a lot more time to work my way through the scoring goals. The most important one was getting the 30 treasure fleets to complete the Economic legacy path so that my cities wouldn't collapse into towns in the next era. I spent a few minutes calculating the math and figured out that I was sitting at 21/30 treasure resources at the moment, with my 9 such resources coming in the next wave of deliveries being exactly enough to get me to 30/30. So it looked like I would have that done shortly after Turn 80 which would be sufficient in the most important category, whew.
But I was going to have to hustle and bend the gameplay in awkward directions to line up my other objectives before the era concluded. First of all, I absolutely could not finish researching Future Tech until the conclusion of the age, as it grants 10 unwanted era score upon completion. I could waste some time knocking out all of the tech masteries before I had to research Future Tech but I was still definitely operating on a timer. I actually stopped constructing more science buildings because more beakers/turn were actively bad here! Then over in the Cultural category, I still needed to convert one more independent power for the last two relics that I needed. I could have easily done that at the pictured Buansa where I had a missionary incoming from the east. However, if I converted the IP to my religion and claimed the last two relics, that would award me 20 more era score and leap the clock up to 97% or 98%, which I emphatically did not want. I would end up holding the missionary right next to the IP, ready to convert it, while also befriending another IP on the other side of the map which I could also convert if necessary for the last relic. (Missionaries apparently can't convert IPs to your religion unless you've achieved friendship with them first, mechanic #732 that Civ7's gameplay never explains or documents to the player.)
So what was I doing in my cities during these final turns aside from frantically trying to line up the remaining scoring goals? I was spamming culture in my cities by constructing lots of Great Wall improvements because I wanted to get through as much of the remaining civics tree as possible. I was sitting at 18/13 on the settlement cap which was more or less the absolute limit of how far I could push expansion in this era. What I needed more than anything else was to raise that settlement cap, right here in the Exploration age, so that I didn't need to worry about it and could go back to expanding in the next era. And the place to do that was on the civics tree, which had three different civics that added +1 to the settlement limit: Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the pictured Social Class. These three civics are split up across entirely different parts of the civics tree, forcing the player to research practically the whole thing if they want all three of them, and they have a massive cost at 2100 culture apiece. (For whatever reason, researching the whole civics tree is a lot more expensive than researching the whole tech tree, plus there are multiple civics trees when including the unique civ trees and the religious tree while there's only a single tech tree to research.) I honestly did not care about any of the social policies that unlocked from these civics, I only wanted the extra settlement room for the next age.
Thus these turns became a tense countdown as I continued to hope that the blasted era meter in the corner wouldn't increase with each new turn roll. How far could I push down the civics tree for those extra settlement benefits before I had to roll over to the Modern age? I hit the 90% mark on Turn 79 which triggered the "culminating" crisis event for the Exploration age:
This was essentially a massive unhappiness event that forced me to pick between three new government options, Monarchy or Republic or Dictatorship, all of them with bad options. I didn't write down what all of the options did but I remember that the Monarchy and Republic choices were even worse than the Dictatorship one that I ended up choosing, since they hit my core cities instead of my limited number of distant lands settlements. The unhappiness penalty was brutal in my offshore island cities though, as multiple buildings were burned down in all of them due to the revolting peasantry or whatnot. I did have enough money on hand that I was able to repair the damage at the cost of something like 1500 gold but this was still really annoying. And that was on top of the four crisis policies that I had to slot into my government which were lowering various yields across my whole empire. I know some players like the crisis concept but it doesn't appeal to me at all; I'm glad I can turn it off in my own games.
Unfortunately I had researched every single tech on the tech tree by Turn 81 which forced me to finish that Future Tech research. This took me up to 96% on the era meter on the following turn, sheesh! The Exploration age would already be over if I didn't have a single treasure fleet sitting offshore at Saba keeping me at 29/30 on that legacy scoring goal. But I was nearing completion of Bureaucracy civic which would open up access to Imperialism for another +1 settlement limit - I had to hold on here as long as possible!
Here's a pretty cool screenshot: the urban complex at Aksum and Jinyang showing off the massive Great Wall that I had nearly finished north and west of Amina's old capital. I have mixed feeling about this whole setup; on the positive side, it does look really impressive to see the two cities sprawling out into the countryside and with all of those urban buildings grouped together into quarters. The traditional gaming press absolutely raved about the appearance of cities in Civ7 and I know a lot of the players enjoy this look as well. So while it is cool and all that... I have to say, the whole thing is also a freaking mess! 
Everything is jumbled together helter-skelter and there's no way to tell at a glance what any of the buildings might be or even which of these two cities they're attached to. It's even worse without having the tile yields turned on as I do in this screenshot. Civ6 was wise enough to color-code all of its districts, and while that made the cities looking a little cartoonish at times, players could tell everything apart pretty easily. Civ7 heavily priorizes cool-looking graphics over actual functionality and I've found myself getting more irritated with this over time. No, I don't love having to mouseover a dozen tiles every time I look at a city just to tell what building is located where! There's a desperate need for icons or an overlay to identify buildings at a glance as opposed to all this clutter.
Each turn passed nervously since one of the AI leaders could complete an era scoring objective and tick the meter up to 100%. I did finish my civics research into Imperialism for that +1 settlement limit, and then managed to sneak out the El Escorial wonder which granted another +1 settlement limit. I was almost back to even now at 18/17 settlements and my global happiness ballooned back up to +300 now that I wasn't absurdly over the cap. I was hoping that I could make it to Sovereignty civic as well for the final additional to the settlement limit, but then the global era meter hit 98% and that was way too close for comfort. Therefore it was time to bring the age to an end manually on Turn 87:
First my missionary converted this independent power over by Ibn Battuta to obtain the final relic that I needed, which instantly shot the era meter up to 100%. I dropped close to 1000 influence into this IP in the final dozen turns because I needed to speed up the befriending process in time to get the missionary conversion - whew, just made it with three or four turns to spare. Then I unloaded my parked treasure fleet to put me over the top on the Economic scoring goal as well. I'm guessing that finishing both the Cultural and Economic categories on the same turn would have taken me to something in the 115-120% range if the era meter could advance past 100%. What really bugs me is that these ridiculous shenanigans are unquestionably the correct way to play the game due to how this era score mechanic works. You want the legacy scoring points and this is the best way to get more time to achieve them; I've also read elsewhere about players dropping four or five settlements simultaneously to land the Military goal on the final turn of the era, for example. In theory, I should have abused this even further: I shouldn't have turned in *ANY* treasure fleets until the final turn of the era instead of getting 5 and then 10 era score from the first two tiers of that category. This is all bad for gameplay and I think it highlights the flaws in the design that's now deeply embedded into Civ7.
If I'm talking a lot about the scoring goals, it's because the traditional "build the strongest empire" Civilization gameplay had become an utter joke by this point. Look at those comparative yields under the diplomatic ribbons; I hadn't even attempted to increase my science rate over the final 20 turns and I still had triple Himiko's beaker rate along with 6x to 10x everyone else. Culture and gold income were equally ghastly as I somehow had something like 20x the cash flow of Augustus and Catherine. And despite being well under the settlement limit, these AI empires also were doing terribly when it came to happiness as well. It's the same problem that stopped me from playing Civ6: the AI simply cannot build its cities. At all. Unfortunately, if they can't play the economic side of the game, there's not much staying power here for expert players.
Here's the final summary of the legacy scoring goals for the era. I managed to hit everything except ironically the Military category because my various conquests were not in "distant lands" and therefore didn't count at all for this scoring objective. I think that's ridiculous and this is a poorly designed legacy goal; Himiko actually had more points here despite my empire far exceeding hers in size with 18 total settlements. I suppose what I should have done was queue up a bunch of missionaries and convert all of my distant land cities to my religion on the final turn. Converting all four of them would have resulted in another four points and the second tier of the Military scoring goal. But again... doesn't that sound really, really stupid? What does any of that have to do with "building an empire to stand the test of time"? These legacy scoring objectives continue to feel like something out of a board game that you would sit down to play with friends. And to be clear, I love playing those kind of setups when we get together for a game night! But I don't see how this system works for the Civilization series and it baffles me why the developers picked this to be the core of their new flagship title.
It all translated into 11 legacy points which put me at a total of 21 when added to the 10 from the previous era. As for the AI leaders, Himiko was the only one achieving anything while the others were all pathetic once again. I don't even have words for Catherine and Xerxes down at a mere 2 points apiece. Anyway, that was the end of the second era, on now to the concluding Modern age. The final era is basically a sprint to the finish line so if this age felt like it moved along quickly, get ready for an even faster ride as we move to the conclusion of this report.
