I thought I had done a pretty good job to get eight flips before 1500AD. Imagine my surprise when I landed a ninth one on the next interturn!
I would replace Bombay one tile to the west, placing more culture on Delhi. "But Bombay was the Jewish Holy City!" Didn't matter, it was better to push further into the Indian core by going west. It's a shame I didn't see Bombay flip a turn earlier, and score another 30 points! Well, good news regardless.
I was surprised to see Suleiman declare war on Gandhi of his own accord a few turns later. (Gandhi soon came asking me to be his vassal again, which I refused.) The diplomatic situation was getting pretty complicated:
With all this warring going on, there was no chance of me losing to Pericles in the UN anymore. That was a relief. The fighting didn't seem to slow down the AIs from teching along at a good rate though - Fred and Lincoln remained at the very least even with me, if not ahead. How Lincoln was managing this with half his core swallowed by my culture, I have no idea.
The next dozen turns passed in the same fashion, keeping each city at one defender and basically waiting around for flips to take place. I remained at war with Pericles, Elizabeth, and Frederick, keeping soldiers on garrison duty outside more than a half-dozen pressured cities. Once the AI runs out of its mobile reserve, this is actually pretty easy to do. I got revolts in Athens (1520AD), Cologne (1545AD), Hamburg (1565AD), and London (1580AD) - all first revolts, so no flips as yet. The German core in particular was taking a beating, as that's where most of my recent push cities had gone.
By 1585AD, I was up against a serious problem: too much culture!
Cumae and Rome had both already gone Legendary, and Antium would hit the same mark on the next turn. But I didn't want to win a Cultural victory, as I was a mere 5% away from reaching my targeted peaceful domination:
Alas, this is one flaw in the game design that I didn't catch when I was vetting the game with Deranged Duck. The Cultural victory condition should have been turned off for this Adventure. Unlike in Civ3, where you could sell off buildings to delay a 20k cultural victory, there's not much you can do in Civ4. Every city of mine with all three corporations was getting at least 600 culture/turn; there was simply nothing I could do to stave off Legendary status.
So... I'm leaving this issue up to the game Sponsor. What I did was record all my scoring info for 1585AD, then save the game and edited Antium's culture in the Worldbuilder, taking it down to only 19k instead of 49k. That way I could play on and grab the final 5% land area for my Domination victory. I essentially "ignored" the unwanted Cultural victory, if that makes sense. It didn't seem fair to have a nearly-complete peaceful domination game ruined by the cultural victory tripping, but I will of course go with the Sponsor's decision on this. I will say that I think it will be all but impossible to win by peaceful domination before a cultural victory is triggered.
Next, I landed my tenth cultural flip of the game, at Cologne:
I mentioned before that the German core was taking it on the chin, and this screenshot demonstrates that well. Remember how little Virconium was attacked on the borders earlier? Now it's far inside Roman territory, and even my next push city (Signia) has advanced the frontier further east. I would refound Cologne one tile east, and start putting pressure directly on Berlin for the first time.
The absurdity of Cologne's replacement city on its first turn. 30 food/turn, 22 shields/turn, and 622 culture/turn. Madness. Although the corporations are fun to play around with at first, there's a major drawback to using them: every city ends up feeling the same. Terrain becomes irrelevant when you can pull massive food and shields from any spot on the map. It quickly becomes boring. I had every new push city follow the same build list: granary, forge, broadcast tower, theatre (the last three all opening up Engineer/Artist specialists to run). T-Hawk has remarked on a number of occasions that using Sushi all the time gets uninteresting in a hurry. But it's so clearly the best move, you have to use it or play suboptimally. A lot of things about Beyond the Sword are like that: they're fun additions to the game, at first, but they just require too much micromanagement. (Like Espionage. Fiddling with those points gets old real fast.) Since the whole design goal of Civ4 was to remove tedium and micromanagement, I've always felt that this expansion feels off-kilter. Then again, that's what you get when a totally different team leads the expansion design...
Anyway, nothing noteworthy happened over the follow ten turns. The Americans eventually declared war on me, and I eliminated a bunch of their units, then sat around waiting for their cities to flip. The Germans actually teched all the way up to Robotics, and had mechs running around at the end of the game. (Wow!) I had Standard Ethanol in one city, my Heroic Epic location, and was pumping out tanks to counter them. And... that was basically it. No more flips. I had a single revolt at seven different cities (Athens, Knossus, Hamburg, London, Vijayanagar, New York, Seattle) without getting any of them to flip. Guess that's life. I'd been lucky earlier with the flips, then hit a major dry spell after 1500AD.
Domination victory hit in 1640 (T238), exactly ten turns after I would have won by culture:
Here's a final look inside Rome for scoring purposes:
I'm sure I could have spread the corporations around a little more at the end of the game. The final turns were taking a long time to kill all the AI units, and frankly I was getting tired. Moving execs around also gets tedious after a while, especially when every city had boatloads of culture anyway. I would have had to spread my corporations to the AI civs to score significantly better, and I didn't want to do that - I wasn't about to HELP them acquire culture!
Replay shots:
Now to tally up the final scoring, with both potential ending dates:
Turn 238 = -238 points
Passive Domination = +200 points
19 + 24 + 26 corporate branches = +69 points
24 cities over size 10 = +48 points
Total (1) = 340 (1AD) + 561 (1500AD) + 79 (ending) = 980 points
* * * * *
Turn 228 = -228 points
19 + 23 + 25 corporate branches = +67 points
23 cities over size 10 = +46 points
Total (2) = 340 (1AD) + 561 (1500AD) - 115 (ending) = 786 points
A difference of almost exactly 200 points; essentially, the question is whether or not you award the bonus peaceful Domination points. That's up to the Sponsor to decide - for once, I don't have to be the one making the rulings. I'd like to mention here in closing that I really enjoyed this game, and thought it was a well-designed scenario. The ending was a bit on the tedious side, but that happens in pretty much every game of Civ4. I especially liked the idea not to have oil on the map; I didn't even talk much about how many headaches I had with enemy destroyers, who kept tearing up my fishing nets all over the place! My strategy for most of the game was "wait until they leave, then build another work boat." It was a lot of fun, and Deranged Duck has my thanks.
