It was time to start the final age of Civ7 as the sun dawned on the Modern era. This age is a bit different from the first two because most of the legacy scoring goals now become completely irrelevant, since the player only needs to complete one of the four paths to achieve a victory. The gameplay doesn't recognize this, however, as there are still various end-of-age legacy points listed on the interface that can never be claimed or spent, which seems to be an obvious sign that a fourth era will be coming later as downloadable content. For this particular game, the CivFanatics staff had tasked players with achieving an Economic victory and therefore that's what I would be driving towards. Players would be ranked based on fastest finish with their total legacy score subtracted from the ending date, with lower numbers being better as in golf. This was going to be a mad dash towards the finish line as I tried to line up all of the pieces for a fast conclusion.
Once again everyone would be playing as China in the Modern era, this time switching from Ming China to Qing China. The Qing have what looks to be a weak innate civ ability, with extra gold, culture, and influence from imported resources but one beaker less science. Given the enormous amount of beakers and culture and gold that can be generated in the Modern era, it's hard to see this ability doing much of anything (there are a bunch of places where the developers seem to have greatly underestimated how high the science/culture/gold numbers would get in the final era). Qing China's unique features are an infantry unit that gets +4 strength when standing next to another infantry unit and a merchant that generates a small amount of gold when creating a naval trade route. Neither one feels particularly impressive.
On the other hand, Qing China does finally get a unique quarter after the Han and the Ming both lacked this option. The Huiguan contains a science building and a gold building, then if both of them are placed together to complete the unique quarter (which you should always do), the city in question gains +25% influence. Given how difficult it can be to obtain more influence through all of Civ7's duration, this is a genuinely nice bonus and both the Shiguan and the Qianzhuang seem like solid buildings in their own right. Now here's the unfortunate part: a huge portion of the value of these unique quarters lies in the fact that they are ageless. The player can construct the two buildings that make up the Mauryan unique quarter in the Ancient era, both of which grant happiness, and they'll continue providing maximum value for the whole rest of the game. This is obviously much less useful for a unique quarter situated in the Modern era since there are no further ages, making the two unique Qing buildings functionally identical to all of the other Modern era buildings. We finally had access to a unique quarter and it wasn't even going to provide most of its benefit!
Furthermore, I keep emphasizing that the whole Modern era was a sprint to the finish line, and there simply wasn't time to pause the Economic victory path to construct the Qing unique quarter. I would end up ignoring these completely while playing which was a bit of a shame.
There was another era transition that I had to play through which began by making my legacy point selections. I had the maximum points from the Exploration age for everything except the Military category where I certainly would have happily taken the same +2 settlement limit from the previous era transition. Even if that were an option, however, I didn't have the legacy points to grab it. Instead, I made certain to take the Economic Golden Age for the Treasure Fleets above everything else, as I had ten cities already and I absolutely could not afford to have them fall back into town status. Having gold on hand for cash purchases was critical to speeding along my victory condition and I couldn't afford to waste thousands of it turning towns back into cities again. This meant that I had to give up the Scientific Golden Age but I think Lyceums was a better option anyway. Maintaining the full beaker output of universities would get my civ out to a faster start, however getting 3 science on EVERY quarter should outpace that pretty quickly. It didn't really matter since I had to take the Economic Golden Age no matter what but I did find the balance here to be a little off.
I spent some time here looking at the various attribute trees trying to decide where to spend my Wildcard point. That could go into any of the trees and eventually I decided to invest it into the Economic one. There were two different economic attributes that I thought would be extremely useful to have: +1 resource capacity in cities and 15% cheaper purchases in all settlements. I didn't have enough attribute points to get both of them and I realized at this point that I had probably over-invested a bit in Scientific attribute points during the previous era transition. It's really important to get the Economic ones when going for the Economic victory condition since it's based around collecting factory resources. Long story short, I found myself one attribute point away from getting the extra resource capacity and I had to cross my fingers that I'd get a narrative event to that effect during the upcoming turns.
Speaking of resources, this is what that screen looked like at the outset of the new age. The resource categories shift around significantly in the Modern era and a whole bunch of them are newly classified as factory resources. These cannot be slotted into settlements normally but instead require the player to construct a factory before they can be added. Each settlement can only hold one type of factory resource too as you'll have one city devoted to producing cotton, one of them devoted to canning fish, and so on. The Economic victory condition that we were shooting for was based around these factory resources: each such resource slotted into a settlement produces 1 railroad tycoon point each turn, and the player must collect 500 of them to trigger the win. Thus I had to accomplish several different tasks as quickly as possible: collect as many factory resources as I could, research up to factories on the tech tree (which are located at a tier 3 tech), then build the factories and slot in all of the various resouces. The faster that all of the factories were up and running, the sooner they would generate 500 railroad tycoon points.
Look back at that resource screenshot again though - notice anything missing? What happened to all of the resource slots from previous eras! These slots are severely truncated for the Modern era, with the capital getting four slots but other cities getting two slots and towns getting a mere one apiece. It also hurts that the camel resources providing extra resource slots completely disappear for the final era which is a rough blow. There are a couple of buildings that add more slots, the port and the department store granting one slot each, and then the factory itself is also worth +1 resource slot. Still, every additional building needed to get those factory resources into place would be a delay on my victory arriving. Getting an extra slot everywhere from the Economic attribute tree would really help out - I already had about 25 factory resources in my possession, I just needed the factories themselves and enough slots to add them to cities!
This is the tech tree for the Modern era that I needed to work my way through to reach those factories. They arrive from Mass Production tech, the aforementioned tier 3 tech (3400 beaker cost) at the bottom of the middle column. Before that, players have to research two tier 1 techs in Steam Engine and Military Science (1400 beakers each) plus two tier 2 techs in Combustion and Industrialization (2475 beakers). Picking up that Future Tech in the Exploration era had helpfully discounted the cost of Steam Engine in half and cut it from 4 turns to 2 turns - every bit helped. The other crucial tech to research was Industrialization, the tier 2 tech also at the bottom of the tree with the little factory icon. This tech unlocked Rail Stations which were a necessary prerequisite to build factories; to construct a factory, each settlement needs its own rail station ahead of time plus a railroad connection back to the capital. That means EACH settlement on the path back to the capital needs its own rail station plus the capital also has to have a rail station too. This can get very tricky very fast because Civ7 calculates the connection between settlements in really bizarre ways and in past games I've had to purchase rail stations in some insane places to get that "railroad connection back to the capital". At least I had plenty of gold to throw around as needed for rush purchases.
So this was the overview situation after I went through all my cities and assigned new builds, reallocated all of the resources, figured out where all of my units had teleported across the era transition, and planned out my tech and civics research. I was pleased to find that my beaker and culture output hadn't dropped as much as I'd feared, falling from 651 to 402 beakers/turn and from 830 to 436 culture/turn. Having a bunch of ageless Great Wall tiles probably helped with the latter case. Gold generation was a bit lower than I'd like but that was something I'd be working to fix in the upcoming turns. Players can carry over several thousand gold between eras (yet another mechanic never documented in-game) and I'd received another 600 gold from our memento choice to arrive at the 3600 gold listed here. I planned to spend heavily to get rail stations and factories in places that lacked the production to build them quickly on their own.
This screenshot also captures my only settlement on the eastern continent, the little town of Guiyang. There was one factory resource here in the form of that fish tile but that wasnt why I had gone to the bother of sailing a settler over here back in the Exploration age. I had wanted to make sure that I had a settlement on the other continent to ensure that my trade route connections would stretch to all three of the eastern AI leaders:
This is the screen that appears whenever a merchant unit is trained (or in the case of Qing China their unique Hangshang). I hadn't bothered with merchants in the first two eras since I already had all of the resources that I needed within my own territory, however this was a way to get even more factory resources above and beyond the ones under my control. The little pop-up screen lists the resources that can be obtained by creating a trade route with each city in question; the main limitation is that only one trade route is permitted with each AI leader under normal circumstances. This is another place where the user interface is pretty terrible in Civ7: why does it only take up 15% of the screen and can't be expanded in any way? There are only two ways to sort the list, the default "cities with the most resources on top" and then a listing of cities by AI leader. Under either sorting, the player has to spend a lot of time scrolling down the list to see all of the options.
I only cared about the factory resources (which had a little blue factory icon next to them about 10 pixels in size) and it took some time working my way through the list to see where the best trade routes were located. I actually got out a physical piece of paper to write down which cities had the most factory resources for each AI leader and where they were located on the map. It looked like I could get about a dozen factory resources in various trades which would boost my civ up to almost 40 such resources in total. That would bring in the 500 railroad tycoon points very quickly, in something like 12-15 turns once the factories were constructed, which should be plenty fast enough. I started training additional merchants right now while still working my way through the tech tree, to ensure that they could all be finished and move to their final destination cities to get the trade routes in place before rail stations and factories unlocked.
Industrialization tech and rail stations arrived on Turn 11 and my core cities started working on them quickly, usually after completing an Ironworks building for additional production. My towns couldn't build rail stations at all though and I knew that I'd need to rush-buy several of them to make rail connections out to cities like Pataliputra and Zala-Bet-Makeda. Pictured here was the gold cost for the rail stations and yikes, that wasn't cheap! This is one thing that I like about the Economic victory condition in Civ7, as it's a test of research, income, and production to get everything lined up in the proper places as quickly as possible. Weaker science output doesn't get to Mass Production tech fast enough, poor gold generation can't cash-rush the buildings needed, and then strong production is needed for the rail stations and factories, plus there are the logistics of collecting the factory resources and having enough slots to get them into the individual settlements. It's a juggling act and honestly pretty fun trying to coordinate everything.
I had a huge stroke of luck pop up out of the blue on Turn 17:
An Economic attribute point simply appeared out of nowhere, opening up that coveted +1 resource capacity in cities slot. I have no idea what triggered this narrative event; I think that there are reference guides out there on all of the many narratives but this hit me out of the blue with no planning ahead of time. It was a very big deal indeed and would help me fill all of those necessary factory resource slots with much more ease. Again, if I were to run another game targeting this victory condition, I'd allocate more attribute points into this category because it seems like some of the resource stuff at the bottom turns out to be critically important here in the Modern era. (The top of the Economic tree is pretty bad unless the player is running a lot of trade routes for some reason.)
Mass Production unlocked on Turn 19 and any city that had already completed a rail station began working on its own factory. These buildings aren't cheap as the rail stations cost 650 production and the factories cost 600 production each. (Since playing this game, another patch for Civ7 came out that increased the production cost to 1400 and 1200 respectively, which sadly will ruin any comparative results with anyone trying their hand at this challenge later.) I was scrolling through some of the town specialization options at the little settlement of Ji, which I had founded back in the Exploration age as a space-filler mostly to keep the AI from spawning new independent powers in a gap in my territory. I was shocked to find this new town focus:
Wait, there's a factory town specialization option?! Yes, this only appears in the Modern era and it's down at the bottom of the list so it's extremely easy to miss that this town focus is even a possibility. The factory town focus also requires having a factory resource present at the town in question which rules out even more potential locations. However, if everything lines up correctly, the town can specialize in this factory setup which cuts the cost of rush-purchasing the factory in half and adds an extra resource slot. Since the factory innately also adds a resource slot, this specialization takes towns from 1 resource capacity up to 3 resource capacity which is a lot more palatable. The town of Ji was actually a perfect spot for the factory option; I had only purchased a rail station here earlier for the rail connection to Zala-Bet-Makeda but now I could add the factory on top of that and get genuine value here. Similarly, I had been forced to dump 4000 gold on rail stations at the towns of Changsha and Guangzhou over in the east to run a railroad over to Pataliputra. Now both of them could specialize as factory towns as well and speed up the whole process. I'm really glad that I discovered this option by little more than pure chance.
By virtue of getting its factory cash-rushed, Ji turned out to be the very first settlement to have its factory in place:
I had more fish resources than anything else so I assigned Ji with the fish specialization. Be careful about choosing which resource to use for the factory as there's no way to change or undo this decision once made. There were enough fish resources lying around that I would later pick one of my main cities and also specialize in fish manufacturing; I think that I had nine of them in total, with three here and six in the full city eventually. Something that Civ7's interface doesn't explain very well is that these factory resources have a global benefit: that's 5% additional growth for *ALL* settlements on the map, *PER* fish resource slotted into a factory, with all the other factory resources working the same way. And remember that I had about nine of them in total, plus I had Confucius' innate 25% faster growth rate leader ability, plus magnified food yields from specializing my farming/fishing towns here in the Modern era. In other words, my cities were about to start increasing in size very quickly, leading to lots and lots of extra population.
What to do with those new population points? Turn them into specialists:
The main civics tree in the Modern era funnels players towards picking one of three Ideologies. You can put off the decision for awhile by researching your civ's unique civics tree first, but eventually the player has to make a choice between Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. I did not delay my civics research as I wanted to pick an ideology as quickly as possible for this game; sorry unique Qing civics, I had to skip you as a result. Each of these three ideologies has their own small civics tree attached with various different policies that can be researched, and they each immediately grant two attribute points upon discovery, predictably tied to their nature (like Cultural and Diplomatic attribute points for Democracy). The biggest effect of the ideologies is how they change specialist yields, however, as each of them has two immediate social policies that adjust specialist yields. Democracy grants extra happiness and culture, Communism grants science and food, while Fascism grants production and gold. Unfortunately this makes Fascism overwhelmingly the best choice, as production and gold are much more useful than the other specialist options except possibly the science from Communism when going for the Spaceship victory. I genuinely dislike this gameplay setup because Fascist governments were absolutely not productive or efficient (any more than Communist governments were great for research!) but that's the route that the Civ7 designers have decided to take in this game. Fascism even gave me another Economic attribute point so I could grab that 15% cheaper rush-buy option that I'd been hoping to snag earlier.
Thus I was getting all of this food and I translated it into absurdly powerful specialists after choosing Fascism and adopting these policies. 3 production / 6 gold / 7 science / 4 culture per specialist at a cost of 1 food and 1 happiness? Don't mind if I do! I spammed these specialists in every city upon every growth and my total civ-wide yields just kept growing and growing and growing. I was quite literally getting everything that I could possibly want from each new specialist except I guess influence. All of the cool city-building from the early portions of the gameplay had now gone out the window because these specialists were so game-breakingly powerful. No wonder the AI leaders can't put up any fight in the later eras since they don't know how to leverage this kind of setup.
I had discovered Mass Production tech on Turn 19 and started that flurry of factory construction / rush-purchasing. By Turn 25, most of my factories were either complete or nearly finished as I wrapped up the task of slotting resources into each one. In a handful of turns, I went from an initial trickle of railroad tycoon points up to a flood of them, eventually topping out at 39 points/turn if I remember correctly. Amassing 500 total points happens very quickly once those conditions were met as the Economic victory condition hits terminal velocity. The whole meter would fill up in roughly a dozen more turns and there wasn't really anything that I could do to speed things up further, not with every factory resource in my territory plus most of those possessed by the AI empires already toiling away in various factories. The ending victory date was essentially already locked into stone and all that remained was counting down the remaining turns.
On that note, the screenshot above is what the legacy goal screen looks like for the Economic victory condition, and yeeesh, is this ever a failure of interface design! This setup was clearly designed with the "build 7 wonders" goal or the "control 12 settlements" goal from the Ancient era in mind, where having individual notches at the bottom of the screen makes sense. It works much more poorly with the "30 treasure fleet" goal from the Exploration age, as the little ticks on the meter start getting too close together, and then becomes a ridiculous joke with the "500 railroad tycoon points" goal here in the Modern era. This looks more like someone doing a parody of a bad interface than an actual interface in a commercial product. Needless to say, this setup was completely useless and the only way to track the actual progress towards this scoring goal was using the Rankings screen, which had a numerical listing of the railroad tycoon points achieved thus far. Did the developers realize how bad this screen looks?
Like I said, once the factory resources were all up and running, the whole Economic victory condition essentially went on autopilot and there was little that I could do to affect the final result. I could build whatever I wanted in my cities, goof around on the tech or civic trees, it didn't particularly matter. Except... just as I was getting the final factories into place, Augustus declared war on Turn 25. He seemed to be targeting my island holdings off the western coast with this extraordinarily ill-advised invasion. Well, OK then, you just Chose Unwisely and signed your own death warrant buddy. I had been pondering a war with Catherine or Xerxes who both looked pretty weak and which would grant me a few extra military legacy points here in the Modern era. But this worked perfectly fine too and was probably even better since Augustus' cities were closer to my own core. I had the world's best tech rate, near infinite gold to throw around on upgrades and rush-buys, plus nothing else to divert my civ's attention now that the factory stuff had been completed. Let's rumble! 
This was not a war that I'd been expecting so it took a few turns to begin marshalling a counter-offensive. First I needed to secure my offshore islands which required purchasing a few units over at Nanchang and Hangzhou. I also needed to start training my ships as I hadn't built a single one thus far in the Modern era, with all of my earlier production having gone pell-mell into rail stations and factories. My best-promoted army commander was actually over at the eastern continent as I'd been expecting any wars to break out over there; I ended up keeping him over there because it would take too long to sail all the way back here. Fortunately, I had all of the tier 2 military units for this era while Augustus was relying on the basic tier 1 units which left him with little chance of breaking through my defenses. Hangzhou had to absorb a few attacks but was never seriously in danger before field guns and cruisers were able to chase away its attackers.
On the main continent, Augustus' city of Pompeii was the obvious first choice to attack. It was a tough nut to crack due solely to the presence of that navigable river flowing along the city's south banks; my attacking units had difficulty crossing the waters because Augustus had no less than three ships of the line protecting the river. This was the reverse of my assault on Pataliputra in the previous age where I had the naval advantage, and it took several turns for my ranged units to shoot down those naval units to clear the path forward. I had to ignore the last one and just tank its shots to get the job done in expedient fashion. The tide was quickly turning, however, as I started getting more and more of my own hulls into the water. I could rush a new tier 2 naval unit every turn out of the dockyards at my island fortress of Fuzhou and there was no way that Augustus' outdated ships could stand up to that.
He certainly did his best to try though! China's shiny new cruisers stumbled across this wolfpack of three ships of the line up in the northwest seas, and I was surprised to find that I had little in the way of combat advantages against them. Even with +12 combat strength from niter and coal resources, plus having tier 2 against tier 1 ships, Augustus' ships of the line were formidable opponents. That's largely due to them being the "heavy" naval unit which has higher strength but slower movement in comparison to my cruisers being the "light" naval units from this period. Still, these enemy ships were able to sink one of my own cruisers even though I did send all of them to the bottom of the ocean within a few turns. This is one thing that AI does reasonably well in Civ7: they are perfectly happy to spam out units everywhere when they come under attack. On the higher difficulties, this often results in a real Carpet of Doom effect where every tile is holding some kind of unit because every AI city is spitting one of them out every turn. That's because military units are TOO CHEAP to build in Civ7, as they are inexplicably much less expensive than in Civ5 and Civ6, which inevitably turns lategame military stuff into a true slog. I wouldn't experience that issue in this game being we were playing on Viceroy difficulty but I've certainly encountered it a lot in my other solo games.
Like I said, Augustus tried his hardest to put up a fight, and by spamming out cuirassiers, he was able to hold me to a standoff in the deserts north of Pompeii for a few turns. However, I had unlocked several of the tier 3 military units on the tech tree by this point, and I used those turns of stalemate to upgrade my units to tanks and and AT guns while healing the units that had been injured in the earlier fighting. Meanwhile, my fleets had swept the seas clear of Augustus' units and conducted a successful backlines landing at Aquileia that eviscerated the enemy position. Ships are extremely powerful in this game (much as they were in Civ6) and they can easily take cities on their own; there isn't even that "only melee units can capture cities" rule from Civ6 to worry about anymore. With my whole military upgraded and Augustus' units hopelessly outflanked, my army rolled forward and crushed this whole pocket of resistance over the next two turns. Once they were gone, the route was wide open into the heart of former Roman territory.
I was also able to include the comparative empire-wide yields from the diplomatic ribbons into this screenshot (anyone who has watched my Livestream knows that the darned things bug out CONSTANTLY while playing). If the Modern era had been even removely close before, it certainly was no longer, with China opening up leads of 10x the science and cultural output of most other civs. Himiko was the only one doing anything economically, probably because she was smart enough not to attack me. I was growing several cities every turn and stacking more and more of those overpowered specialists, with my own science/culture/gold/etc. skyrocketing ever upwards. I had also used my considerable influence advantage to ally with nearly every independent power on the map, with their bonus yields extending China's advantage even further ahead. Whatever balance the developers were going for had been shattered into pieces here in the Modern era.
Turn 38 was also noteworthy because I reached the goal of 500 railroad tycoon points for the Economic victory. Again, I discovered Mass Production tech on Turn 19, had all of the factories and resources in place by about Turn 25, then hit the endpoint on Turn 38. I'm sure others will hits these goals faster but I was quite pleased given that this was the first time I'd ever tried to land this victory type. Reaching 500 railroad tycoon points grants the player a Great Banker unit who begins the final endgame countdown:
The Great Banker must establish a world bank office in every foreign capital city in order to achieve the actual victory. While this might sound tedious, Civ7 makes this a speedy process because the Great Banker can teleport instantly to any city on the map (at the cost of one turn of travel time and the capital must already be revealed on the map). And, in a true rarity, the Civ7 interface is actually helpful here by telling the player which foreign capitals still need to be visited, hooray! I'm honestly surprised that the player doesn't have to figure this out by trial and error while tracking where they've been with pen and paper. Anyway, the Great Banker portion of the victory condition effectively functions like a spaceship countdown, with 5 remaining AI empires meaning that it would take 9 more turns of teleporting and establishing world bank offices to wrap up this game. My war with Augustus was now officially on a timer.
By the way... there is one way to speed up the Economic victory condition: eliminate the other AI leaders. 
Every leader that's been removed from the game means two fewer turns needed to teleport to their capital and establish a world bank branch. That's a bit ghoulish and probably not what the developers had in mind but it very much does work. I absolutely had been thinking about this throughout the earlier ages and removing Amina and Trung Trac was now going to shave four turns off my finishing date. Could I manage to wipe out Augustus as well before the clock struck midnight? The race was on.
Even as my Great Banker was gallivanting around the world, drinking tea and visiting corporate headquarters in far off cities, my military units continued pushing deeper into Augustus' core. China's rampage through the Modern era tech tree had unlocked all of the lategame toys for me to play around with, two of which were noteworthy here. The first of these was the tier 3 naval units, with battleships and destroyers getting an extra tile of range to allow them to shoot 3 tiles away. (Again, highly reminiscient of Civ6 where battleships gained the same ability which was a big leap in effective power.) The extended range allowed these ships to shell Augustus' capital of Berlin despite it being situated well inland, removing the fortifications and allowing a nearby tank to roll inside the city center. That did not result in the city being captured, however, which meant there was another fortified district somewhere. Unfortunately, Civ7's interface is so poorly designed that I couldn't find it and had to roll my tank over tile after tile trying to find it. Eventually it turned out to be the fishing quay east of Berlin, which I didn't even know COULD be fortified, which finally delivered the enemy capital into my hands on Turn 44.
The other big new weapon in my arsenal was air power which is very strong indeed when unopposed. Air units need some kind of air base to operate from, typically either an aerodrome building or an aircraft carrier, but they have awesome range and can only be opposed by other air units. I was using bombers since Augustus lacked any air power of his own, with these bombers specializing in removing city fortifications and hitting from a full 10 tiles away. That was way better than walking ballistas up to Ancient era cities one tile at a time! There was one major bug with air units though: they did not activate on their own each turn and each one had to be manually selected by the player or else it would never queue up for its turn. It was really easy to build a new plane and then have it sit around doing nothing in its aerodrome because the game never told you that it had been built. Hopefully that will get fixed at some point in patching.
Fortunately I knew about this bug from my one previous game that made it to the Modern era and I stayed on top of managing my planes each turn. Between my tanks on the ground, modern ships with 3 range in the sea, and air power in the sky, Augustus collapsed in record time. The above picture showed his coastline crumbling on Turn 42, followed by:
This state of utter ruin only two turns later. I was pushing forward as aggressively as possible on every front, with the 4 movement points on tanks letting them race forward into the shelled out remains of city center tiles once they had been blasted into submission by bombers and battleships. The two Augustus cities in the far north fell on Turn 45 leaving him with only Madrid remaining:
This had been his capital in the Exploration age when Augustus had been running the Spanish civ before he swapped over to Prussia for the current era. Although it was a bit better defended than Augustus' other possession, I was very confident that I could take the city on Turn 46 which would immediately end the game. I had deliberately left Augustus' capital city for last on the tour of the Great Banker since there would be no need to visit it if Augustus expired, and I was establishing a world bank branch in the final non-Augustus capital on this same turn. There was only one problem: I had conquered so many cities from Augustus that I was sitting at 18/20 points on the Military legacy goal. I was under the impression that capturing this last city would take me to 20/20 Military legacy points and instantly end the game - with the wrong victory type! After all, that's how Domination has worked in every previous Civilization game.
I've since learned that this belief was incorrect; hitting 20/20 Military points in the Modern era does *NOT* end the game, instead opening up the chance to build something called Project Ivy which then ends the game. That design decision makes no sense to me and I don't understand the need to build some kind of project after hitting the conquest limit but that's how it is. My ignorance of Civ7's Modern era was showing here, which makes sense since I had only played a single game out to a finish before this. Whoops! 
Thus I signed peace on Turn 45 and left Augustus with one city remaining, out of fear of accidentally triggering the wrong victory condition. I could have won the game a turn sooner and scored an additional legacy point in the process if only I had known, sigh. Experience is the best teacher and all that.
Therefore the game ended on Turn 47 instead of Turn 46. My Great Banker teleported to Madrid on the previous turn, I clicked the button to establish a work bank branch, and that was it:
From a gameplay perspective, I genuinely like the Economic victory condition in Civ7. As I said above, it's a fun balancing act between acquiring resources, getting the factories and rail stations in place, and avoiding all of the many bottlenecks along the way so that everything lines up seamlessly. It's a weaker thematic fit since I don't really understand how building the world bank results in the world declaring you the victor, and certainly the AI has no concept whatsoever of how to play for this ending condition. The Military victory condition also works reasonably well by requiring the player to conquer a bunch of enemy cities, and Spaceship functions the same as always by finishing the whole tech tree and building the spaceship projects. The Cultural victory condition is the real dud since it requires running around with those ridiculous Explorer units and digging up artifacts, where cultural output has little to do with actually winning the cultural victory. I'd love to see that reworked into something entirely different but I doubt it's going to happen.
For legacy scoring purposes, I naturally maxed out the Economic victory and would have achieved the Military victory as well had I understood that it wouldn't end the game. I'd have to settle for 2 out of 3 potential legacy points there. In the Science category I went ahead and built the first spaceship project before running out of time to build the second and third projects for the other two legacy points. I did complete the entire Modern era tech tree in 46 turns, however the game simply ended too fast to get the other projects done (since you can't start the second one until the first one finishes and they cannot be cash-rushed to completion). And while I'm certain that I could have gotten at least one legacy point in the Cultural category, I detest that artifact nonsense and didn't care about making an attempt to dig them up. More power to the players that can stomach that ridiculous busywork.
All told I wound up with 28 legacy points across the three eras. Combined with a finishing date of Turn 47, that results in a score of 19 (with lower being better here) for GOTM2 ranking purposes. This will not be a winning score but I do think it will be reasonably competitive. If there's one issue that I noticed in some of the other reports, I think that some of the other players were excessively chasing the legacy scoring goals at the expense of making their overall civ stronger. Each legacy point only counted for one turn of faster finish so I'm not sure it was worth contorting into knots for some of the more useless objectives in the earlier eras. That said, there were a few players who significantly outplayed my effort while also landing more legacy points at the same time and I'm hoping to pick their brains to see just what they did to get so far ahead!
If I had one major takeaway observation from comparing with other players, it was that the traditional metrics of strength for a Civilization game (i.e. getting as big and as powerful as possible) were still what led to the fastest finishes. Most of the legacy scoring goals didn't end up mattering very much in the long run; what actually did matter was having more cities and more science and more culture. This was also something that absolutely did translate across ages: the players who had the best science in the Ancient era maintained their lead in the Exploration age and then again in the Modern era. Conversely, players who fell behind in the Ancient era were basically already out of the running for any kind of fastest finish. Civ7's decision to split the gameplay into three separate eras didn't seem to have much effect at all in terms of how the player rankings shook out from this game. That's probably a good thing since it means that Civilization remains a snowball game despite the best efforts of the developers to thwart it, they just threw up a bunch of irritating roadblocks that don't actually work in practice. Anyway, it's clear that if you want to win a fast victory in the Modern era, it very much starts with amassing as much territory / science / culture / gold as possible from the start of the game and never stopping the snowball process. Building or not building 7 wonders in the Ancient era doesn't seem to affect this in any notable way.
This was a long, long report that ran to approximately 25,000 words and took me quite a while to put together. I wanted to make the effort because I'm not sure how much I'm going to write about Civ7 and felt that it deserved at least one full writeup. Let's see what happens with this game moving forward - it certainly didn't make a great first impression. Thanks as always for reading along!
