The Exploration age was now finished and I found myself wishing that the entire game had come to a close as well. This was clearly a won game at this point: I had the most territory, the best science and culture, the biggest pocketbook, and the AI competitors who still had viable empires ended the last era allied with me against Harriet Tubman. There was little need to play things out further and I knew that, once again, the Modern era would consist of little more than a sprint to the victory condition of my choosing. That's the problem with splitting off the eras into separate pieces: the final age can never be anything other than a race to achieve a victory, since nothing else that happens can be more important than checking off the requirements needed to achieve a win. It's an obvious design flaw that the developers should have thought about before heading down this route with Civ7.
I needed to choose a new civ for the final era and eventually I ended up choosing Qin China again. They were my pick essentially due to having the Shiguan district with 6 science which I thought might be helpful in pushing towards a Spaceship victory. This decision ended up being a mistake because the Modern era moved so quickly that I never really had time to build the unique Qin districts, even though they would have been helpful otherwise. While the Ancient era typically runs for about 120 turns and the Exploration age usually lasts around 80 turns, a strong player will race through the Modern era in as little as 40 turns which simply doesn't leave enough time for the choice of civilization to matter much. I would have done better to pick a civ with a passive benefit that didn't require building a district to get a benefit, probably something like Britain with its production bonus on building construction or Meiji Japan who grants extra science when overbuilding older outdated stuff.
For the legacy scoring bonuses, I had the maximum possible points to spend since I had achieved every goal in the previous era. The only thing that I really cared about grabbing was the Treasure Fleet Golden Age which ensured that all 14 of my cities would remain as cities across the era transition. Aside from that, I was content to grab a whole bunch of additional stat points and push further down the various attribute trees. One thing that's really irritating is that the player can only take a maximum of two attribute points in any one category; for example, I had 3 Science points but could only take 2 Science attribute points. Why? There's no reason for this limitation to exist and if I earned those legacy points, I should be able to spend them wherever I want. This forced me to take Lyceums in the Science category to avoid wasting points, which is supposed to grant 3 beakers per quarter but inexplicably doesn't apply in most situations. I decided that I'd use this game to test what Lyceums actually does since it certainly doesn't match its description.
This was what Himiko's empire looked like after I spent about an hour doing the era transition once again. I was really annoyed at how badly my territory had been gimped by the era transition this time; I had been making 1500 beakers and culture only to fall down to the 400-500 range in each of them. Even worse was my gold/turn income, which had been cruising along at 1500 only to fall back to a mere 191 gold/turn. It felt like I was being punished for playing the game successfully while the loser AIs, who couldn't build an empire successfully despite their enormous cheats, were suddenly thrown a lifeline that they absolutely didn't deserve. I used to be making 4x the income of Tecumseh and now he had more than double my gold to play around with! Now that was largely due to him collapsing back down to two cities while I had fourteen of them but it still didn't change the fact that this mechanic was PAINFULLY unfun. Civ7's gameplay was doing its best to blue-shell me back into the middle of the pack, not that it would end up mattering because the AI empires were all so incompetent. (Again, this is the fatal flaw of the whole obsolescence mechanic: either it doesn't do enough to slow down the player and ends up serving no purpose, or it slows the player down so much that the earlier eras become completely pointless. I don't see any way that this can ever be balanced properly - what a poorly designed concept.)
Readers may notice something else strange about this screenshot: I didn't have a build queue item listed in any of my cities. That's because I didn't want to construct either of the two buildings available at the start of the Modern era, city parks (extra happiness) or grocers (extra food), whereas I was only two turns away from discovering Steam Engine tech where the more useful ironworks building (extra production) would unlock. Civ7 has a mechanic (exploit?) whereby the player can use Shift-Enter to force the turn to end without selecting an item for a city's build queue. This saves the production which starts stacking up, accumulating in the background while going into nothing, and can therefore be dumped immediately upon discovering a new tech or civic. Basically I built nothing for the first two turns and then on Turn 3 had every city start working on the new ironworks which sprang into existence half-finished. This feels pretty dodgy to me but it's extremely useful and hard not to exploit once you know about it.
I was prompted to select a government on Turn 2 and the only choice that made any sense was Elective Republic. This government has two celebration options: +20% culture or +20% science, and I would be slamming the extra science on every celebration for the rest of this game. With several hundred excess happiness, the initial celebration triggered on Turn 3 and I would spend most of the Modern era experiencing one celebration after another to take advantage of this bonus. Even better, Benjamin Franklin also chose Elective Republic for his government and that allowed me to sign him to an immediate alliance, followed by triggering the Friend of Wei unique endeavor once again for a further 25% bonus to science. This pair of science boosts was sufficient enough to jump my empire up over the 800 beaker/turn threshold as soon as Turn 4 where science would plateau for a while until I could start constructing some of the Modern era science buildings.
The other big thing that would boost my science was allying with all of the various independent powers scattered across the map. The IPs pop into existence on Turn 2 of every age and as usual I was operating with quadruple the influence generation of everyone else, making it easy to start befriending each and every one of them. I had picked up a Diplomatic attribute point that decreased the cost of befriending them by 50%, thus the pictured 340 influence cost instead of the normal 510 cost in the Modern era, which meant that I could start a new friendship about every 1.5 turns. Those friendships would take 15 turns to mature and therefore I'd start reaping the benefits shortly after Turn 16 as one independent power after another was snapped up by Himiko. Even better, four of the eight IPs on this map happened to roll as Scientific which meant that I'd be able to take all the science-boosting options when those friendships matured. Anything to get me through the tech tree faster and wrap up this game.
Thus not much happened during these early turns as I kept spending influence on independent powers while my cities worked on the initial Modern era production buildings followed by schoolhouses, the tier 1 science building from this age. I was experimenting a bit with the Lyceums legacy, the one that's supposed to give 3 beakers on completed quarters, and I verified again that it does not grant the beakers bonus on ageless quarters from other eras. (This is in contrast to literally every single other "per-quarter" benefit in the whole game.) On top of that, Lyceums also does not apply to an ageless building paired together with a Modern era building as demonstrated in the screenshot above. The schoolhouse was worth 7 beakers on its own and therefore Lyceums was doing absolutely nothing here. Eventually I figured out that Lyceums applies *ONLY* to two Modern era buildings paired together on the same tile - it does not apply even when an ageless building from the Modern era is paired together with another Modern building. None of this is documented in-game and this legacy operates completely differently from every other mechanic in the game - what a buggy mess.
My path through the tech tree was based on unlocking the production and science buildings to the exclusion of everything else. There simply wasn't time to construct anything else becase the game was moving so quickly and techs were coming in every few turns while even the cheapest buildings took 5-6 turns to complete. Over on the civics tree, I was ignoring the Qin unique civics because I wanted to unlock an ideology quickly. Some of the most powerful policies in the Modern era can be grabbed quickly while picking an ideology, then the rest of the civics tree is pretty weak aside from a bunch of +1 settlement limit and +1 policy slot bonuses. I was also ignoring culture because science was simply more important for a Spaceship finish and there wasn't enough time to go for both sets of buildings.
The independent power friendships began coming to fruition shortly after Turn 15, beginning with the Scientific people of Mandalay. These are four of the five options that the player can pick between when befriending a Scientific IP; the fifth one was a unique building called the Institute which would have been fun to play around with in a longer game but didn't seem practical here. I planned to take all four of these city state bonuses since they would all be extremely useful. The most immediately helpful in terms of beaker count was +5% per city state, which would scale up quickly as I added more city states to my collection, along with +1 beaker per science building per city state. I would eventually have schoolhouses worth a dozen beakers apiece due to that bonus. The +25% production on projects would also be helpful for knocking out the final projects needed to launch the spaceship - although, now that I think about it, I can't remember if I actually put a science building in the cities where I did the spaceship projects later. I totally forgot about that aspect of the city state bonus while playing, whoops. I'll have to keep that in mind for future games since it's easy to miss.
The first such bonus to take, however, was of course the one that grants a free tech upon becoming the suzerain of each city state. There were eight total independent powers on the map and in time I would become the suzerain of all of them, facing very little competition from the AI empires in the process. This would eventually translate into eight free techs:
Unfortunately Civ7 almost always grants the player the cheapest possible tech whenever getting a free one, and since the Modern era tech tree is clogged up with lots of tech masteries, that's what I ended up getting from most of those freebies. Some of the masteries can be pretty useful, granting extra production or food or more combat strength on different types of units, however none of them are particularly essential for trying to reach the end of the tech tree and launch the spaceship. I believe that the free tech mechanic will never award what the player is currently researching, so someone who's better at optimizing this stuff like T-Hawk could likely manipulate the free techs to maximum advantage. Ideally the player would set things up so that they're getting the uber expensive Aerodynamics (7450 beakers) and Rocketry (9475 beakers) for free which I, uh, did not do. There's also a wonder called Oxford University which grants two techs for free upon completion and which I didn't even consider while playing. I know the Ancient era wonders in Civ7 but I know almost nothing about the Modern ones because the era always ends so fast. Basically I picked up a lot of tech masteries and I think two actual techs for free along the way, while a more dedicated player could have done much better here.
I reached my choice of ideology on Turn 21, once again taking Fascism which feels like the best of the options available. Fascism's core policies grant extra production and gold on specialists at the tradeoff of some truly paltry disadvantages in towns (not cities). One of the interface mods that I was running helpfully detailed the benefits in this screenshot, with the gold bonus in particular being a huge advantage. The other two ideologies feel less useful in most circumstances, with Democracy being particularly bad in this game as it provides happiness and culture. I guess that would be good when going for a Cultural victory and not elsewhere. There was a case to be made for Communism in this game since it provides extra beakers and extra food on specialists, plus the final Communism civic has a policy that grants +30% production on projects. It was hard for me to turn down the extra gold and production from Fascism though since both of those things are so insanely useful to have seemingly everywhere.
In the other policy slots, I was still running several of the Mauyra traditions from the start of the game to generate extra science and gold from my surplus happiness. Those remained better than anything else even this late in the game. Social Science and Living Standards were also policies that unlocked from tier 1 Modern era civics which made them very useful at a cheap cost. As for the policies deeper in the Modern era civics tree, well, there wasn't much of interest to be found. The developers badly dropped the ball in terms of balance here with stuff like Demogogy: gain happiness on the Palace equal to your Cultural attribute (?!?) and Ambassadors: 6 influence/turn. Did they understand that getting roughly 5 happiness on a single building and a flat 6 influence are both beyond awful in the final age of the game? I really hope that the developers go through and rebalance the policies at some point because it's literally embarassing that this stuff is in the released version of a game. By the way, the first civ to discover an ideology also gets two additional social policy slots, something else never documented in game - more fun times with the Civ7 user interface.
With Fascism's two specialist-boosting policies in play, every city looked like this when growth took place. The specialist yields were so insane by this point in the gameplay that it was essentially never worthwhile to pick a rural tile, not when I could choose a specialist instead for 3 production / 10 gold / 5 beakers / 9.5 culture at a "cost" of -1 food each turn and neutral happiness. I think it makes sense for specialists to become better and better choices as the gameplay goes on, however I think that Civ7 currently goes a bit overboard in the lategame. This just feels way too good and it makes city building completely brainless in this era. Keep turning everything into specialists and it's basically impossible to go wrong, while the AI utterly fails to keep up since they don't understand how to achieve yields like this.
By Turn 25, I had boosted my science back above 1500 beakers/turn, meeting or exceeding the point where I had been at the end of the previous era. I still had very little in the way of Modern era science buildings which meant that there was plenty of room to keep pushing further ahead. The AI empires were struggling to break 300 beakers/turn which meant that they had no chance at all to compete for the same victory condition. I could easily swap over to training military units and go run them over, or collect the factory resources and become a railroad tycoon, or do whatever I wanted. On that note, Harriet Tubman apparently decided to throw a temper tantrum over her increasing irrelevance and declared war on Turn 25:
This was not a conflict that I wanted to fight since I would be forced to divert resources away from my ongoing scientific efforts. I knew that I would have to save my gold to cash-rush production buildings in my best cities to help them complete the final projects faster (no time to build factories and aerodromes) as well as purchasing the launch pads at the end to avoid wasting time. I wasn't sure how much gold these purchases were going to cost and therefore I planned to err on the side of caution by over-saving and being very stingy with my money. In terms of fighting against Tubman, therefore, it meant not cash-rushing units or paying to upgrade my tier 1 units into their tier 2 or tier 3 equivalents. I found myself fighting this war with units that were either technologically equal or in some cases outdated despite being far, far ahead of Tubman in research. It made for an interesting dynamic even as these turns now stretched out and required additional real-world time to play.
Tubman's main attack was arriving along my western shores, pushing against Samapa as well as the town of Nekheb further north which I had captured from her at the end of the previous age. The military units that I did have were mostly already grouped around Samapa, as well as south of Gao at Waset, which meant that I wasn't in any real danger at my current cities. Nekheb faced more of a threat and I did have to bit the bullet and purchase a tank there while waiting for more reinforcements to ride to its rescue. For the moment, I was mostly occupied with shooting down the incoming enemy units while gathering together forces for a new offensive. I wanted to remove the blight that Gao posed on the map and I doubted that the rough terrain over there could keep me out for long.
The specific mechanics to win the Spaceship victory in Civ7 require the player to research every tech in the Modern era and then construct a series of projects. These are Trans-Oceanic Flight which unlocks at Flight tech about two-thirds of the way through the tech tree, then Break the Sound Barrier at Aerodynamics (the second-last tech), followed by Launch Satellite at Rocketry (the last tech). Once all three of them are complete, the player can then start the final project Crewed Space Flight which ends the game upon finishing. I was trying to set things up so that Sopara would build the first project, Athenai would do the second project, and then Pataliputra and Sopara would both save up production for half a dozen turns to complete the final two projects immediately when Rocketry finally finished researching. As I mentioned above, this required cash-rushing the various production buildings into these cities since there wasn't time to build them manually. The factories were incredibly expensive after their hammer cost was increased in one of the prior patches, and of course I also needed to purchase rail stations earlier since that building is a pre-requisite for factories. This was where my income was going for most of the Modern era; I couldn't spend gold on the projects themselves, but I could spend gold on the production buildings to do those projects faster.
So all of this was proceeding nicely, even with the annoyance of the unwanted war with Tubman. It took a little more than half a dozen turns to kill the units invading my territory, then push onwards to Gao and seize control of Tubman's latest capital city:
Good riddance! She still had a number of ships operating on the oceans (and I have no idea how she could build so many of them at her crummy tiny island holdings) but her landbound units were effectively finished at this point. I planned to keep pushing forward into the western seas in the hopes of grabbing Tubman's last two settlements and eliminating her from the game entirely. I had planes and aircraft carries unlocked by now on the tech tree, and a single carrier loaded up with bombers would be more than enough to blast through the defenses of her island holdings. Even with essentially no ships in this ocean, I could simply walk into her undefended settlements once air power did all of the work. It become a race to see which would happen first: winning the space race or eliminating Tubman from the game.
This was the core of my territory a few turns later when Aerodynamics tech finished and I began researching the last tech Rocketry. Several turns of using Shift-Enter to save up production in Athenai allowed the city to have half of the Break the Sound Barrier project already done, though somewhat amusingly the interface stated that the city was building an aerodrome in another obvious bug. All that I needed to do was wait six more turns for Rocketry research to complete, then have Patilaputra and Sopara complete the final projects, and this game would be done.
That's when Tecumseh decided to declare war as well, argh! 
The trigger here was Tecumseh making it far enough through the civics tree to declare his own ideology. He did not pick Fascism and apparently that was enough to drop our relations from neutral down to bitter hate in a handful of turns, followed by an invasion of my territory on Turn 39. Tecumseh had a lot of territory scattered all over the map and I was still trying to save money for rush-purchasing launch pads which limited what I could do in terms of an immediate response. My cities on the eastern continent were probably the ones most at risk though Tecumseh also had a number of ships and units landing along my western coast. This was going to make it much tougher to continue my attack against Tubman, where I still pushed onwards despite my units at sea now finding themselves targets in a shooting gallery for Tecumseh's passing naval units.
The first thing that Tecumseh did in this conflict was start killing my city state allies, ack! There was a Commercial city state immediately north of Tecumseh's Prussian territory and he rolled through it with a sizable force in a handful of turns. As soon as that happened, I observed that I was being attacked by a hostile independent power north of the city of Berune - what the heck?! Yes, this indedepent power spawned out of literal nothingness on the turn following the disappearance of my ally, with units suddenly attacking me across the border. This was ridiculously stupid and not the sort of thing that should be happening in a strategy game; the hand of the programmers was very obvious with one IP disappearing followed by another one instantly appearing elsewhere on the map. Fortunately I had some units in the area to push this back without needing to spend more money though it was still a pain in the rear.
Meanwhile, I had captured one of Tubman's two offshore islands, a little spit of land with three total tiles off to the west of my continent. She had a single city remaining and I had a ragtag group of landships, mortars, and an army commander sailing towards it even as Tubman's and Tecumseh's ships nipped away at their health bars. The one aircraft carrier that I had over here was also targeted by enemy fire and sent down to the ocean's floor before it could finish bombing out the city's defenses. But it was all worthwhile, since I was able to attack with my remaining land units and break through the walls to capture the city:
Thus eliminating Tubman who had been such an irritant throughout this game, and... wait, what's that? Why wasn't she eliminated yet?
Oh come on, she had another one-tile island city?! 
The AI leaders in this game are all obsessed with sending out a flurry of settlers whenever they get close to elimination. Combined together with their propensity to set up new settlements in far-flung portions of the map, it makes it very difficult to eliminate anyone as they always seem to have some godforsaken hiding place on the other side of the world. I also blame the terrible map scripts for this as well; every map always has those archipelago island chains running between the two main continents which seem hand-drawn to serve as refuges for the AI leaders. It's essentially never worthwhile to waste a settlement on a one-tile island like the pictured Mukono, these places serve no purpose other than being stepping stones to the other continent. The maps would be so much better if Civ7 didn't have the foolish "distant lands" concept at all, and if the developers removed the "ships take damage in ocean" mechanic so that every map didn't have to have those identical island chains between the continents. I still find it incredible that this game launched without even letting players have a Pangaea map option... So many of the problems in the gameplay stem from the decision to have era transitions and legacy scoring, wrecking even seemingly unrelated things like the map generation.
Anyway, I signed peace with Tubman because there were only a handful of turns remaining in the game and not enough time to reach her final saferoom. This did allow me to concentrate more fully on Tecumseh:
Here's a small demonstration of air power in action. I had a bomber and a dive bomber stationed at the aerodrome next to Lumajang and they were easily able to fly across the nearby inland sea to attack Tecumseh's units at Tuban. Land units have essentially no defense against these air attacks, relying on their own fighters to protect them, something that I've never seen the AI build yet due to their incompetence in the Modern era. The air units therefore have great range and they can bomb out the city defenses in complete safety from a distance, making it trivial to capture enemy cities that lack their own air defenses. In fact, this whole mechanic makes the Military victory condition incredibly easy to achieve, since the player doesn't even have to focus on targets of strategic importance. You can win the game by capturing as few as seven cities anywhere on the map, and sniping tiny island colonies or iceball tundra settlements works as well as taking out the core cities of your opponents. It's yet another way that the victory goals are poorly designed in Civ7; at least in Civ5 and Civ6 the player had to capture the AI's capital cities to win the military route.
I discovered Rocketry tech on Turn 43 and instantly rushed launch pads in Pataliputra and Sopara. They only cost 1900 gold apiece, significantly less than the earlier factories, which meant that I had overshot things with my 10,000 gold in the treasury. At least now I could upgrade all of my military units to their tier 3 forms and start cash-rushing more units wherever I pleased. Pataliputra had enough production saved up via Shift-Enter skullduggery that I could one-turn the Launch Satellite project. I thought that Sopara would be able to do the same with the Crewed Spaceflight project but that one is apparently super expensive at 3000 production cost and it took an additional four turns to finish. I guess I could have saved more production ahead of time there, oh well. This meant that the game was ready to be wrapped up at the end of Turn 46:
Note that again the interface did not correctly display the name of the project that Sopara was working on, though I guess I should have expected that by now. In terms of economy, I was making more than 5x the beakers of Tecumseh and close to 8x the beakers of Franklin, with the AI utterly unable to keep up with my empire despite this supposedly being Deity difficulty. They simply do not know how to build their economies at all which is a true danger sign for the long term health of this game. I also had insane amounts of happiness and was finally starting to regrow my advantage in gold/turn income despite not having built pretty much any of the gold-generating buildings in this era. As I mentioned earlier, I never really had time to consutrct either of the Qing unique districts because the game simply ended too fast. I had only recently unlocked them on the civics tree when the spaceship was getting ready to blast off. Militarily, I had absorbed Tecumseh's initial sneak attack and was now getting ready to punch back on all sides. With him having a different ideology and city captures being worth 3 scoring points apiece, I think that I could have won a Military victory in less than 10 turns from this point.
The spaceship launched at the end of the turn, I watched the very short cinematic, and the game was over on Turn 47 with no further stats or map replay to enjoy. Hooray.
As was the case in the Exploration age, the AI does a pitiful job of achieving the scoring goals in the Modern era as well. That's a massive problem because this is the era that determines who wins the game, and the AI simply doesn't know how to do it. The only one of these four categories where they are decent is the Cultural one, since they can and will dig up those artifacts if given enough time. They don't do it quickly but they can eventually win the game that way. The other three categories though, yeeesh. They stink at researching all of the techs and they take forever to build all of the spaceship projects; I've heard that it can take them well beyond Turn 100 to win the game in that fashion. They are even worse at collecting the factory resources and apparently they don't know how to use the Great Banker even if they do stumble into the 500 tycoon points to rule out the Economic victory. That leaves only the Military path and I've seen little indication that any of the AI leaders can conquer the 7-10 cities needed to complete this goal. It looks to be trivially easy for the human player to pick a victory condition of their choice and complete it before the AI can cross any of the finish lines.
And that's a fatal flaw for the design that Civ7 employs. This whole system is cribbed from tabletop games where players are competing with each other over multiple rounds, with everyone trying to meet the same scoring objectives. For these games to work, however, everyone needs to be pushing to meet those same goals simultaneously. Maybe you're sacrificing in one area, giving up points in one category to meet another goal, understanding that the core of the gameplay is coming from the interactions between the various players. I've played many games of this sort and they're lots of fun when friends come over for a game night. However, the Civ7 AI leaders CANNOT achieve most of the scoring goals, and this type of system falls apart immediately under those circumstances. It's like playing a round of Monopoly against your dog and your cats: scoring goals exist, you can roll the dice and move the pices around, but the game has no meaning without those player interactions. I continue to find it utterly baffling that Civ7's developers ripped apart the classic Civilization gameplay for this era-based round-by-round scoring that the AI doesn't understand and can't achieve. What were they thinking?! 
In any case, this game came to a conclusion with a Turn 47 spaceship win. It could have been done faster with better management of the free techs and better accumluated production saving via Shift-Enter so that the final projects were instantly completed. I was happy overall though since my previous Science win on Livestream didn't finish until Turn 71 and this game's outcome hadn't been in doubt since the early Exploration age. I was deeply disappointed at the performance of the AI leaders though, who had held up well in the Ancient era only to collapse as always as the ages rolled onwards. Civ7 desperately needs an ageless or endless mode that strips out all of the era transitions, which I think is the only real thing that the developers could do to salvage the game's reputation. I don't expect that they'll ever do this though, as we'll likely get an endless string of DLC civs and leaders instead. The joke is on them however since there's no way Civ7 will bring in the same kind of revenue as Civ6 despite costing far more money to make; this game is genuinely unpopular in a way that I've never seen before in a Civ game. It's too bad since there are some cool ideas here, all of which get ruined by the legacy scoring and era transitions.
I have a few more ideas that I still want to try for Civ7 so expect a bit more content before we write this one off for good. Until then, thanks again for reading.
