As it turns out, I did get a tech popup the following turn for Liberalism. Yay! 
Constitution is the most expensive tech, so let's take that. And what's this, another pop up?
Oh, and I also win a Conquest victory. Nice of the game to throw that in as an afterthought. 
Unfortunately the free tech did not affect my score in any way, but it was pretty cool to get to pick one anyway. (The replay said that I was the first to discover Liberalism in 1502, so I guess it was actually counted as occuring on the previous turn, before the victory took place. Interesting.)
Now for some of the post-game statistics:
Charting my kills, archers were overwhelmingly the most unit produced by the AIs, which makes a great deal of sense. I was surprised to see so many axes, however, given that the AI usually doesn't build lots of them. (In Epic Five, I killed over 50 archers but only 3 AI axes!) I'm not sure if the Always War did something to their programming in that regard, but the many axes definitely made things a little harder. Of course, the AI also built enormous numbers of easy-to-kill swords, spears, and chariots, so par for the course there. Relatively few horse archers, because they apparently didn't research Horseback Riding until the game was almost over (the AI tech rate was absolutely pathetic). And I also captured gigantic numbers of workers/settlers, but that's to be expected in this kind of conquest game.
I wanted to highlight the huge number of galleys that I kill while I was here. 39 of them! The AI never got to Optics for caravels, but wow - that was a lot of galleys. I lost a total of one galley and two caravels in sinking them all, well over 10:1 odds. The AIs can be a real pain attacking from the seas in Always War, but I had them under control in this game.
As far as the buildings on the right side of the screen, the granaries and barracks were unremarkable, but look at all the forges! I wasn't kidding when I said that I was running a free Mercantilism engineer in every city. Hooray for early Metal Casting and double-speed forges! 
Here's the unit list again, this time sorted by units lost. As expected, axes have the highest casualty rate; even using Melee axes, you can't get better than about 80% odds when attacking other axes, so the losses are going to add up. Out of 16 axes built, 15 of them died across the course of the game. Don't sign up for an axe battalion, kids! 
I had similar grevious losses amoung swords (6 out of 7 died) and spears (2 out of 3 died, although both of them were due to misclicks on one particular turn, and it wasn't a big enough deal to reload the mistake). Then again, given that I was fighting for thousands of years without end, I guess it's not really surprising that I would have high losses among the older units. I kept them in use on the front lines even after they became obsolete, after all - no use in putting them out to stud in backline cities to no purpose.
In contrast, my more advanced units were barely scratched. 8 of my 10 maces survived (including Supermace, yay!), 14 of my 17 knights lived, and I only lost a total of 4 cavs despite having 44 of them at the end of the game. Don't forget, I was attacking aggressively everywhere with cavs too, often fighting at less than full strength, charging into the teeth of AI defenses. Even so, my advanced units took almost no losses. And although I lost 2 out of 6 caravels, I sank almost 40 galleys in the process. Once I was fighting with technologically superior units, everything became severely lopsided. Total kills: 544, Total losses: 49. Better than 10:1!
Oh, and you can also see the one Jewish missionary I lost showing up in the stats! 
There was no point in showing the demographics because I was the only one still standing at the end of the game. I finished with a land percentage of 58%, just narrowly avoiding Domination (my "eyeballing" of the map and estimating how many cities I could afford to keep was just about perfect). In terms of wonders, I landed every single one in the game - the first time I've done that since my very first game ever of Civ4, played on Noble difficulty with a currently non-existant Industrious/Philosophical trait combo. Ah, those were the days. 
I do think that the lack of ANY wonders in the hands of the AIs hurt them significantly as far as producing Great People and teching, but the lack of tech trading seems to have been the big crippler. More on this in a minute.
Here you can see the starting positions in the game. The player has a nice isolated position, while the AIs are rather cramped in the western half of the pangaea. Roosevelt and Alex were particularly squeezed, and in my game (probably will happen in all games) the Americans came out the bigtime loser. I also marked where I drew my "line in the sand" here on the replay screen for comparative purposes with later replay shots. Looking back and watching things play out again, I'm pretty sure the conflict with Gandhi will determine the relative ease or difficulty of each game. I bottled up Gandhi right away and never had any problems. Gandhi's a peaceful guy, and he has a well-deserved reputation for neglecting military, but I think some players will have problems with him. At the very least, if they need to expend more effort on taking him out, they won't be able to concentrate on developing their own civ in the early going. It will be fun to see how India expands when not under severe pressure from the player!
I have no idea what the "Roosevelt has made peace with Peter!" line is supposed to mean. Did Sirian lock those two civs into war at the start? Nothing came out of it in my game, but I hope we can get some kind of an explanation out of the map creator on closing day. This one has me puzzled. 
By 500BC, everyone has expanded a bit, and I've captured India's capital. About the only weird thing to see so far is Peter's strange placement of Novgorod, far out to the southwest of the rest of his civ. Did this have something to do with that early peace message (?) Tokugawa has also advanced a city far out in front of the rest of his civ, across the desert, but naturally I will burn it to the ground a short time later. Otherwise there was nothing unexpected up to this point in time, other than the incredibly late discovery of Bronze Working by the AIs (775BC? 520BC?!)
A thousand years later, Gandhi has been eliminated and I've massively expanded my civ, growing from four cities to nine. Two critical wonders also built around these dates in the Pyramids/Colossus combo. I razed Edo, but Toku will replace it with Kagoshima in almost the exact same spot, which will also be razed. Silly Toku. Everything else remains on the other side of my original line, and I will not contest it as yet.
The map at 1250AD looks almost exactly the same as the one from 500AD, and not really all that different from 500BC. (You can read the disgusting list of wonders being cranked by Berlin over the last few centuries if desired though.) However, with cavs on the horizon, I will now begin to push forward, cautiously at first, but then with increasing momentum.
1352AD was the year I discovered Military Tradition, so it made a good place to pause and snap another shot of the map. From 1250 to 1352, a total of 17 turns have passed, and in that time I captured two cities and razed three others. (On the replay maps, I have marked captured cities with red circles, and razed cities with red Xs.) Each of the following pictures takes place at 5-turn (30 game years) intervals.
I made decent progress during the first 10 turns of post-Military Tradition action, but it took about that long to get a decent amount of cavs into the field via a combination of production and upgrades. Don't blink or you'll miss what comes next.
And down they go, just like that, with the final cities from the last turn circled in gold. So after taking a total of 6 cities in the first 10 turns of the post-cav timeline, over the course of the last 15 turns I took out 24 of them. 25 total turns from Military Tradition to game over. Behold the power of cavalry. 
Just for the morbidly curious, let's take a look under the hood at what the AI civs were doing, shall we? I had a save from 1322AD, just before my big push would obliterate them all, so it should show the AIs at their highest point of development. Here's what I saw:
Err, where are all the city improvements in Moscow? The city isn't being run *THAT* badly (although not well), but it could desperately use some more buildings. A library to run some scientist specialists would be hugely helpful. There was a dreadful lack of city infrastructure in virtually all the AI cities, although they weren't all as bad as this. I singled Peter out for special treatment because his capital was producing a grand total of 2 beakers/turn of science. 
So was the AI being crippled by war weariness? Did that account for their feeble performance? According to debug mode, definitely not:
Despite being one of the most aggressive attackers and losing countless dozens of units in my territory, Alex has a grand total of one unhappy face from war weariness. Heh. Even here on Noble, the AI discounts on war weariness are massive. Despite the lack of city improvements, at least his commerce figures are somewhat repectable here, although certainly not good. The fact that he's researching Monarchy, when I'm researching Military Tradition, is pretty damning evidence though.
So if it wasn't accumulated war weariness, what happened to the AIs here? This is by far the worst AI performance in an Always War game I've seen since... well, since we were much, MUCH earlier in development! I have to believe it was the lack of AI tech trading. That's looking more and more like a crippling handicap for the AIs whenever it's turned on. The AI teching in Epic Five, even on Emperor, was pathetically below their usual speed by at least one difficulty level - maybe more than one. In this game, I expected the AIs to reach Feudalism around 1000AD at the very latest - but they never got there. Some of the AIs were doing decently - for example, Roosevelt had Machinery and I think Spain had Drama - but without being able to TRADE these techs to one another and share research, the result was... well, archers still defending in 1500AD. Yowzers.
And because I wasn't expecting that, because this performance was so much worse than I've seen from the AIs in past Always War games... I fully expect other players to shatter this time and turn in much earlier conquests. I ruled out a knight conquest or a maces/cats attack because I expected the AIs to get longbows before it could be completed. Well - they didn't, so someone who went that route has the potential to finish centuries earlier than I did. Of course, they'd have less of a production base than I did here, but I don't think that would really matter. So although this was a brilliant game setup by Sirian, ultimately the lack of AI tech trading dropped the game by at LEAST a full difficulty level, making it too easy. Sorry Sirian. Next time you'll have to either raise things to Prince or turn the AI trading back on. In any case, we'll have a nice referendum here on the results of the "tech and wait" versus early conquest strategies. I think the feebleness of the AIs will swing this towards early conquest, but I'm looking forward to reading just how everyone did it!
Honorable Mentions
First Enemy City Captured: 610BC
First Enemy Civilization Destroyed: 80AD
Forbidden Palace Constructed: 875AD
Cities Controlled in 1502AD: 40
Panzer Victory/Fifty Experience: N/A
It was certainly a lot of fun. If Firaxis can ever just fix the stupid war weariness issues, Always War could become a great variant again. Ah well, here's hoping. Thanks for reading, and I'm sure we'll get a more challenging scenario for the next Always War game.
