The Modern era is by far the shortest of the three in Civ7 and typically sees a sprint towards the finish line. It has not been received well by most players and the general feeling I've gotten from reading various Civilization forums is that people are either rushing to end the era as quickly as possible or simply skipping it entirely. Because the age goes by so quickly, it doesn't feel as though the third civ choice matters very much, ironic given that the entire purpose of having era transitions and civ swapping was supposed to make them all feel unique. I thought about which one I wanted to play for this variant and ultimately decided on Buganda:
Buganda is not one of the stronger Modern era civs and part of the reason why I chose them is that I didn't expect to be using them in future games. The developers apparently organized this civ around two completely unrelated topics: pillaging and lake tiles. For the first of these two, Buganda's civ ability grants additional culture when pillaging enemy tiles, their unique melee unit heals for extra health when pillaging, and their unique army commander adds +50% pillaging yields within its radius. There's more stuff that improves pillaging within their unique civics tree as well, though of course that information wasn't displayed here on the loading screen. I've seen screenshots of players stacking all of these pillaging bonuses together to get something like 400 culture at a time, which sounds great in the abstract but doesn't really do that much in practice. Culture moves extremely fast in the Modern era and it's easy to get thousands of it every turn, making these bonuses from pillaging pretty trivial. This reminds me of the "culture on kills" ability of Gorgo from Civ6 which also sounded impressive without doing much of anything.
The other Buganda uniques revolve around lake tiles in some fashion, starting with the unique tile improvement Kabaka's Lake. This improvement doesn't have to go on a lake itself though it gets any bonuses associated with lake tiles and can only be placed one per settlement. I thought that the happiness on Kabaka's Lake looked appealing for this variant, along with the fact that it could be added in towns without requiring them to become cities. However, the gameplay ended up moving so fast that I would cash-rush only one or two of these things before finishing the game. Other Buganda lake-related bonuses include tradition policies granting +6 combat strength when units are next to lakes, all buildings gaining adjacency bonuses next to lakes, 2 extra food on lake tiles, +1 culture and happiness on quarters next to lakes, and +1 population in settlements next to lakes.
Unfortunately this is exactly where splitting up the game into three eras undermines the whole lake-based concept of Buganda: none of these lake benefits appear until the Modern era, when the whole map is already settled! Are players supposed to be planning out their settlements and districts in the Ancient era with the assumption that 200 turns later they'll become Buganda and finally unlock these bonuses? It doesn't make any sense. Clearly Buganda would function much better as a civ if they were playable from the start of the game and city building could be planned around their abilities. Instead they exist in this weird state where it almost never makes sense to choose them for the final age. I genuinely don't know what the developers were going for with these guys.
Now it was time to do another era transition again, hooray. I had to do all of the jumping back and forth between the legacy screen and the attribute screen to plan out where my points would be going and where I could best use the Wildcard points. Unfortunately there was no Fealty option for +2 settlement limit as there was in the prior era transition (why not?) and therefore my Military scoring went into a bunch of attribute points instead. The legacy that most interested me was Lyceums: +3 science per turn for each quarter. That sounded like an amazing way to get more science, my ongoing great weakness for this variant, and I had set up a bunch of ageless quarters earlier to take advantage of any quarters-based bonuses. I picked Lyceum along with a Scientific attribute point that added +1 beaker per quarter... only to find that my quarters were merely getting the +1 beaker apiece, with nothing from Lyceums. What the heck? Well apparently, despite using the identical descriptive text, the Scientific attribute point grants a beaker to *ALL* quarters while Lyceums only applies its beakers bonus to *NEW* quarters specifically added in the Modern era. 
Yet another absurd failure on the part of Civ7's user interface.
Thus I went through the long era transition checklist once again at the start of this Livestreaming session. Assign all the new attribute points (I think I had eight of them to spend), check. Assign new build orders to every city, at least that one was fast. Pick a new tech and civic to research and plan out a new route through each of their respective trees, check. Go through the resource list and figure out what resources disappeared and which new ones appeared, then assign new resources to every city and town accordingly, check. Look through the social policies and assign the best-fitting traditions that survived the era transition, check. Figure out where all of my units went and then give all of them new marching orders, check. Go through every town and assign a new specialization - argh! I was so done with this whole process. I still had to finish though... A whole bunch of my towns got the hub town specialization for lack of better options which swelled my influence up to more than 400/turn. It would definitely be fun to play around with that kind of influence generation. All told, it took about an hour to do the whole transition - an hour! I think that I'm hating these more and more as I have to keep doing them.
This was the new overview status after I finished sorting everything out. I had picked up enough Scientific attribute points that my beaker level remained essentially unchanged, going from 375 to 358 per turn, which was still enough to put every other AI empire to shame. I wish that I could have said the same for culture generation since that's where I had been whacked by the era transition. All of those kiln/pavilion pairings that had been producing a shared 15 culture/turn were now obsolete and fell back to the base 6 culture/turn (Exploration buildings are capped at a maximum 3 of any yield once they obsolete). I've written this a bunch of times before but it bears repeating: why did the developers think this would be fun for players to experience? I had this awesome setup in the previous era where I annihilated everyone else in terms of culture, and now my reward was that I lost most of the benefit in an attempt to catch up the other AI empires. Well it still didn't work because everyone else remained far behind in culture but it certainly was frustrating.
Happily, most of my gold generation was situated in Ortoos and Company Posts which were ageless and escaped the wrath of the era transition. While I did drop here from 2100 to 1600 gold income, that was still a lot of moolah and enough to lap the field of competitors. I also benefited from the settlement limit increasing across the transition, from the previous 24/20 to the new 24/24, which caused happiness to explode up to 700+ happy faces. I had previously been getting 20 unhappy faces in all 24 settlements which now disappeared so yeah, that sounded about right. This would make it easy to land a bunch of early celebrations where I had taken the government with the +20% science and +20% culture options. I was going to be using the initial celebrations on extra culture generation to speed me through the civics tree because I needed to land an ideology as soon as possible.
Perhaps my greatest advantage lay in influence where all my hub towns were pumping out close to 500 influence per turn. I signed all of the friendly endeavors with Ada Lovelace in the hopes of getting her back to alliance status quickly, then launched fresh espionage missions against Isabella to see if I could get anything useful from her (spoiler: I didn't). That still left massive amounts of influence on hand which I began directing into friendships with every independent power on the map. They all appear at the start of Turn 2, popping out of thin air wherever there's some open space on the map, which in this game largely meant the other continent where Tecumseh and Catherine had done a poor job of settling. I could pay 510 influence to start the friendship process with someone new almost every turn and quickly grabbed every IP available. There was no chance that any of the AI empires could keep pace, not with them making 30-40 influence while I had ten times their amount. Neutral IPs take 15 turns to reach full friendship while the hostile ones take 30 turns; I started with the neutral ones and therefore a big rush of them started hitting full friendship around Turn 16-20, followed by another wave of the hostile ones around Turn 35. The only downside was that Cathy and Tecumseh killed several of the IPs that I was trying to befriend though fortunately about eight of them managed to survive.
This time around there were several Scientific IPs and therefore I made sure to grab them first along with the Cultural ones. It was too late in the game to get any use out of their unique tile improvements, but I did take the option of "discover a free tech every time that you suzerain a city state" which delivered a number of prizes over the following turns. It's too bad that this always gives the player the cheapest option possible, including tech masteries that aren't too useful, but a free tech is still a free tech. I also took +25% production towards projects since I knew that I would need to run one of them for the eventual victory condition. When in doubt, I took the percentage based bonus to the IP's respective yield; getting 5% more culture per city state friendship starts to become pretty good once you've taken hold of half a dozen independent powers.
During these initial turns of the Modern era, I was moving all of my various military units into position for a strike against my longtime rival Isabella. I wanted to go for the Military victory as it looked to be the fastest and most thematically appropriate for the game that I had been playing. The Military victory requires the player to score 20 points for city captures, which initially award only 1 point per settlement taken, increasing up to 2 points if the player has an Ideology, and 3 points if the captured settlement is from an AI with a competing ideology. I knew from experience that the AI leaders take forever to pick an ideology so the 3 points thing was likely out of reach, however I could massively speed up the victory process by getting my own ideology and only then going on the attack. Ideologies unlock in the main civics tree after researching the initial four civics and that meant that I needed lots of culture to push there ASAP. (This also meant delaying the Bugandan civics tree which is why I didn't see much of them in this game.) Civ7's interface made it unclear if I needed to *UNLOCK* the three competing ideologies or *ADOPT* one of the ideologies to score the extra Military points. It turns out that the requirement is investing a single turn of research into one of the three Democracy / Communism / Fascism ideologies without having to finish the research, which is about as weird of a mechanic as I can recall. I could have attacked a little sooner if I had known how this wacky process worked ahead of time.
Thus my rush purchases proceeded in two stages. First, I unlocked museums, the first Modern era cultural building, and bought them absolutely everywhere across my territory. This essentially doubled my cultural output between Turn 1 and Turn 15, and would only go up further as I began claiming the various benefits of IP friendship thereafter. Second, once the museums were in place I stopped purchasing buildings and shifted over to rush-buying military units. I had plenty of units heading after Isabella's scattered island holdings but there was always room for more of them. Over here in the northwest at Sevilla, I conjured a naval squadron out of nothing including having a fleet commander on hand. I had more than enough income to purchase double ships of the line each turn, might as well do so.
Hostilities commenced with an all-out attack against Isabella's new nation of Mexico on Turn 17. Izzy had two island settlements to the west of my continent, plus two more even further west on the shores of the other continent, and then finally this utter junk town Guadalajara that she had squeezed next to my territory a few turns earlier. I was attacking simultaneously at all four of her holdings with a mixture of ships and land units, with the intention of grabbing all of them quickly and then swinging over to Guadalajara. Most of these settlements fell quickly, such as the pictured Cordoba getting shelled into submission on the second turn of the fighting. There wasn't much that Isabella could do given my enormous territorial edge and ability to cash-rush an unlimited amount units right on her doorstep. As if the deck wasn't stacked badly enough against her, I also used my influence edge to dial up an advantage of +7 in war support and was also a technological era ahead with tier 2 ships and ranged units. The combat starts to get pretty stupid at that point as one side simply rolls over the other.
In a mere three turns, it was finished:
There's not much to say, she picked the wrong side in the conflict with Xerxes earlier; Ada Lovelace had made the correct decision and therefore managed to survive. Taking Isabella's five settlements was sufficient to bring me halfway to the tally needed for the Military victory, which meant that I would still need to take five more targets to bring this game to a conclusion. Based on the geographical nature of this map, Catherine was the better choice to assault next (given that I was not going to attack my ally Ada). Two of the final Isabella cities were situated right next to Russian territory and Cathy had two other cities on the other side of her territory which were highly vulnerable to naval assault. I had been staging my military in a completely inconspicuous manner in anticipation of going after Cathy as soon as Isabella was out of the picture. "Don't mind all those ships right outside your borders, it's just a training exercise!" Or something like that, heh. 
I used one turn to reposition and then the Bugandan military charged across the frontier on Turn 21.
To her credit, Catherine put up a respectable fight given the hopeless position that she found herself in. She followed the by-now standard AI practice of spamming out copy after copy of whatever the highest strength unit happened to be, cuirassiers on land and ships of the line at sea. I had to sink a whole lot of her ships over here east of Athens and Knossus, maybe as many as a dozen during the process of taking Cathy's island city in the archipelago and then strangling her eastern seaboard. This would have been a tough battle if I hadn't been rush-buying tons of my own ships and backing them with fleet commanders; it was once again another victory for the power of the purse. Things were a little bit dicier on land because I couldn't supply reinforcements as easily, not with the captured Las Palmas still in resistance and unable to serve as a place to spend gold. I had the advantage of an extremely promoted army commander up there, however, along with a technological edge with some tier 2 units. And I even was able to use Buganda's pillaging bonuses to good effect a few time, pillaging enemy farms for a quick 45 HP heal on several landships. Athens and Knossus both fell by Turn 25 to put an effective end to the fighting in this theatre.
There was less resistance on the other side of Cathy's territory where my naval units did most of the heavy lifting along with some support from more landships. Those are the early World War I era tanks, by the way, which serve as the tier 2 cavalry unit of the Modern age. Cathy only had a handful of cuirassiers running around over here which were easily dispatched, with the only slight pause coming when my dreadnoughts had to fight their way through the narrow one-tile waterway south of Preslav. Taking that city resulted in my tenth total capture of the Modern era which was enough to trigger the Military victory condition since I had been getting 2 points per capture. (No, neither Isabella nor Cathy ever discovered their own ideology for the extra point.) I could have easily taken Cathy's remaining four cities but there was no point in doing so. Instead, I shut all of the military units down by holding them in place, then waited out the mandatory 10 turn duration of the war before signing peace on Turn 31. I forced Cathy to hand over Korinthos as well in the peace deal, for no particular reason other than being mean to her.
So what actually happens after the player achieves the full 20 points for the Military scoring goal? When I wrote my GOTM2 report, I thought that the game ended immediately upon achieving the full military goal. And in any sane universe, the game would simply end here; the player has just run over the rest of the world militarily, what's the point of dragging things out further? Unfortunately, it seems that the pattern in recent Civilization development has been to drag out the victory conditions for no reason, whether that's the 10-turn spaceship travel time in Civ4 or the massively expanded lategame tech trees in Civ5 and Civ6 or the repeated World Council votes needed for diplomacy in Civ6. This is something that was supposed to be addressed in Civ7 to make games closer and more interesting in the lategame, but has done absolutely nothing of the sort and instead leads to finishing countdowns that are more pointless than ever.
Anyway, filling up the Military scoring column only unlocks the potential for a victory instead of simply achieving it. First the player must construct the Manhattan Project wonder which was fortunately pretty cheap to do at my single city. Then after the wonder finishes, the player can build a nuclear weapon... or just end the game by completing Project Ivy. This whole thing is so utterly bizarre, why would anyone ever want to build the nuclear weapon when they could simply win instead? It also means that nukes functionally don't exist in Civ7 because anyone who can build one can always choose win the game instead and they'd be crazy not to do so. It's pretty obvious that this whole setup is an incomplete part of the game design and another fourth era will be coming down the road, something that I have no intention of ever playing since three eras already feels like too many right now. At least I was able to amuse myself by assigning whale resources to all of Eternal City's resource slots since they had the biggest bonus to production at +6 hammers apiece. I should have picked Fascism for my ideology since that would have given extra production to every specialist as well; I was running Democracy out of unhappiness concerns, oh well.
And that was it, I captured the tenth settlement on Turn 26 to unlock the Manhattan Project, then built it followed by Project Ivy over the next ten turns. Absolutely nothing of interest happened as I clicked "Next Turn" ten times before winning the game on Turn 36. I could have easily spent more gold here, run up my science and culture totals higher, captured more enemy cities, etc. But there was no reason to do any of that and it would eat up more real-world time so all I did was click the button until victory arrived. It's also worth checking out the comparative yields on the ribbons one final time where the AI continued to embarass itself. Note that I never engaged with Tecumseh in any way beyond sending him a trade route and he still couldn't muster more than 150 beakers/turn here in the Modern era. It's difficult for me to put into words how atrocious of a performance that truly is; this may even be worse than in Civ6 where the AI was also horrible at building their economies. The era transitions are covering up the shoddy performance of the AIs, repeatedly catching them up in science and civics and without which they would be waaaaay behind in everything, and they're STILL pathetic even with those crutches! I really hope they get better somehow through the patching process because right now the only thing they can do is spam units on defense when attacked.
Speaking of which, did the AI make any progress towards any of the various victory conditions? Not really! Tecumseh had apparently dug up some artifacts as that's the only victory condition the AIs will pursue thanks to them spamming explorers everywhere. Everyone else had made zero progress towards anything, including Tecumseh for the other three victories. The AIs are awful at generating science so the spaceship takes ages for them, they don't understand factories or the Great Tycoon so they can't go for the Economic victory, and they're never going to capture enough settlements to get the Military path finished. Whether they can win any victory whatsoever is unclear to me as I suspect most games will eventually end by Time if they player doesn't cross the finish line. This entire system needs a total rework since it appears that the AI literally cannot win the game in most situations.
Civ7 ends with a short splash art image that has some camera panning to look as though it's a cinematic video even though it isn't. And that's all she wrote, as the player can see the same victory condition scoring pictured above along with the total legacy points scored for the whole game. There is no replay of the map, there are no stats or bar graphs to view, there is no Hall of Fame or other scoring. There isn't even the "One More Turn" option to keep playing after winning which has long been a staple of the Civilization series. It's an utterly pathetic way to conclude a game that takes most players 10-20 hours and I'm not exaggerating when I point out that the original Civilization back in 1991 had more endgame features included. Civ1's finishing screen used primitive graphics but there was a replay of the whole game plus a Hall of Fame score tallying up your results! It's yet another sign that Civ7 was released in an unfinished state and lacks polish of any sort. Is anyone really surprised that this game is so unpopular, especially given the $80 price tag that the publisher has been demanding?
I did have fun while playing this game but it's hard to avoid talking about the glaring flaws with Civ7's gameplay. There's a patch dropping this week and I really hope it improves things. For the moment - yikes. 
Thanks again for reading along!
