970AD       A Lull in the Winds of War


Well, I had finally claimed the whole starting continent as my own. Here's the map from 950AD, right after I kicked the Russians off of my island for good:

Why are the Russian cities starving? Well, I was starving them down to size one and then repopulating them with my own forces. It wasn't honorable, but I had already lost the chance to win that, so I was doing what I could to reduce the risk of a culture flip. Such a flip was not likely at this time, however.

My golden age had sadly just ended, but I embarked on a great building plan nonetheless. My longterm plan was to finish building my core into a model of production, then attack and destroy the Zulus for declaring war on me earlier. I have a loooong memory in this game, and the Zulu island had some of the best land on the map. I would use the great leader that I would hopefully get there to move my palace there, and my lands would stay productive thanks to the Forbidden Palace in Bangalore, which not coincidentally was in the center of my island. It was a pretty good plan, but would I get to carry it out?

For the moment, I concerned myself with wonders and infrastructure. I revolted to Republic immediately, and more than doubled my income as a result. I forgot to take a picture of my cities in 1000AD, so snapped this one in 1030AD. It shows the cities that had fish and whales in their radius in 1000AD; none of these cities were founded in the three turns after that when the screenie comes from. Trust me on this:

As it turns out, these four were the only ones evenly remotely close to the starting point. I'd imagine virtually everyone playing the game got to these. However, I don't think many people had more than these 4. Anyway, here's my "proof" on this one, not that I think anyone would refuse to believe my word.

In the zoomed out screenshot, you can see that I was building Magellan's Expedition. On many maps Magellan's is next to useless, but on this one it was mighty powerful. I made it a priority to get it, and achieved that without much trouble in 1060AD:

I thus netted four more scenario points. I could have kicked myself here, because I could have had Smith's too if I had been prebuilding it in another city. But I didn't think to do so, and as a result missed out on it. That was a waste. What was nice though was the discovery of Free Artistry in 1120AD. That led to this:

What do you think my leader is going to do next? Building Shakespeare in my capital was worth another 8 scenario points. It provided no other benefit, however. Turns came and went. Railroads were discovered, and I began covering my territory with them. All of my most productive cities built factories and hospitals. It was an ordinary building game for the most part, and rather unexciting. Still, I was developing the production and economic base for any future operations that I might desire, so I was hardly wasting my time here. But that didn't make it more exciting to behold. Here's the picture from 1240AD, with railroads just discovered: (incidentally, Bangalore missed out on being able to build the Iron Works by 1 tile! Someone else must have gotten it).

In 1355AD I built Women's Suffrage; I won't post the picture because I already have plenty of them on this page. Things were progressing along nicely, and I was beginning to think about building up my forces to attack Shaka. But out of nowhere, the peaceful lull in my game would be shattered without warning, sending my civ back into the fires of war.