The war with Japan was won, and I quickly changed back into a Republic. I rarely change governments, but I do love that 1 turn anarchy anyway from the religious civs. Here was the post-war map from 1730AD:
Now that the end of the game was approaching, it was time to decide which victory option to pursue. Diplomatic was out, since everyone hated me thanks to 1 broken deal. I was nowhere even close to a domination or conquest victory, so that wasn't likely either. On Emperor, a cultural victory is virtually impossible to achieve due to all the cultural builings the AI civs build. That wasn't gonig to happen either. So it looked like a spaceship victory was the way to go here. But building the spaceship requires researching techs, something I hadn't done since the earliest stages of the game. My literacy rate was a piddling 3% on the demographics. Thus I conceived of the Great Literacy Campaign: a massive project to build Libraries, Universities, and Research Labs in all cities both to speed up research and move into first place in the demographics for literacy rate. It was an ambitious project, but you can see from this screen shot that it was well under way in 1730AD.
My research time was initially awful; it took me 12 turns to research Fission, since I had no libraries and not enough income to go 100% science. However, as my core cities produced the key research buildings, the time to research kept going down. I traded a few of my new techs away to the other civs for massive cash payments, which slowed down their research efforts and allowed me to go 100% science. Persia, a civ with whom I had had very little contact with the whole game, was my primary adversary in this regard. Along the way, I made sure to pick up a little something to ensure I wouldn't lose the game:
It would have been a trivial matter to research just the spaceship techs and blast off to Alpha Centauri. But I needed some more time for the Great Literacy Campaign to run, as the outlying cities were slow to build the desired facilities, and I had an eye out for another scenario goal. Therefore, I made the somewhat risky decision to research the bottom of the tech tree and get Robotics, then go back to the top and finish the spaceship. Why Robotics? Well, it allows you to build these things called AEGIS Crusiers...
I did in fact get up to Robotics, then went back to the top of the tech tree and began working on the other techs. I sold Robotics around for some ludicrous sums of money (over 200g/turn from Persia alone) to the AI civs, which can't understand that it isn't a necessary tech for the spaceship. Oh well. They weren't putting up much of a "space race" to be blunt. The drive to be #1 in literacy was more interesting though. I was slowly climbing up by percentage; first 50%, then 75%, then all the way up to 92%. But even at 92% literacy, I was still only in 4th place. Huh? Well, I had been saving up gold for the entire game, and it was time to make some good use of it. Thus, you see here the great rushing of research labs:
I rushed a lot of research labs there; my treasury went from 15,000 to 1500! But it was worth it in the end. 1854AD saw me with one turn to go on the last spaceship part, and with no one else close. The endgame was upon me.
