D-Day for the invasion of China is 1806AD. My tanks roll across the border:
Yeah, that should get the job done. I landed four cats next to Beijing from my ship to deal with the city defenses; it was supposed to be an infantry and three cats, but I misclicked with a stack of units. Whoops. Anyway, Qin threw his own cannon at my tiny little cat stack while ignoring the huge stack of tanks racing towards him. Interesting... this might be exploitable AI behavior, sending in a stack of outdated junk just so the AI will use its collateral damage forces on it. I certainly wasn't trying to do that here! Anyway, my cats got shredded but my tanks advanced to the city untouched, and with City Raider II promotions, facing only rifles... they had no trouble winning.
Onward to victory! No losses aside from the cats outside the city, ten different tanks attaked and won against the city itself. My workers move in behind the front to add rails, the next target to the west is sighted. I love the late-game blitzkriegs. 
Now notice that hill tile still in Chinese cultural borders directly to the left of the "Yes, install a new governor" message. Due to my spies in Chinese territory, I could see that the little choke tile there was where Qin was going to move his forces. As a result, I plopped a few Guerilla II rifles and infantry on that tile and awaited the fireworks. Sure enough, Qin threw his whole mobile reserve force at that tile; I actually lost two rifles in the fighting, but I killed about 10 Chinese units. And just like that, Qin more or less surrendered the field to me. Spies are really useful for just this kind of thing, especially before Flight is discovered for recon missions. I finished Radio in 1810 and started heading for Flight, which would open up both fighters and bombers.
At Shanghai to the west of Berlin, my naval forces dropped the defenses to zero in two turns (I had three destroyers over there). From there, my tanks easily cleaned it up and took the city in 1814. Oddly enough, the cannon in the city did not emerge to attack my stack; looks like they had the wrong AI mission assigned to them, or something like that. Clearly a little tactical error. It was unfortunate that almost all of Qin's cities were one tile OFF of the coast, preventing me from applying the Sirian Doctrine more effectively. I mostly just ignored the city defenses and blitzed through with tanks, accepting losses in exchange for moving through China more quickly. The war weariness wasn't from losing units, it was from capturing cities, so I might as well speed this up and grab them as fast as possible to end the war!
Even with Jails in my major cities and Mt. Rushmore national wonder, I was still seeing serious war weariness by 1816 - yes, that's FIVE turns into the war. (Soren clearly intends for you to use the luxury slider to manage war weariness, because the amount you get for WINNING a war is simply ridiculous otherwise.) Turfan is blitzed and captured on this turn, prompting this map of my progress after five turns of war:
I've taken three cities and four more remain, but the Chinese forces aside from city defenders have all been killed. Also look at the line of sight provided by my spies! You've got to love those girls. 
(I find all kinds of uses for spies, I don't know why so many people think that they're worthless units.) Discover Flight on the following turn in 1818 (and start in on Rocketry, which I can research in only 3 turns!), tanks blitz on and capture Old Sarai. Somehow Qin managed to sneak a naval force past me, and he lands it at Tianjin:
Honestly, I don't know how these galleons slipped past me. I did have destroyers out to help me in bringing down the defenses! While it was a clever move by the AI, my rails allowed me to mass defenders in Tianjin and blitz-attack the stack with some tanks. I killed all of the Chinese units with no losses; the only thing I lost was a plantation on the bananas. I think I could live with that. 
With Flight in hand, all my core cities started on bombers. The only problem was that by the time they could get into the field, China would probably be gone! I finally had to swap to Police State in 1818, which hurt my research a lot, but hopefully I wouldn't have to be in it for long. Of course, just for kicks, Izzy landed a stack in my Chinese territory in 1822 and declared war as well. I really should have taken a picture of this, but I was being lazy, so I just smashed it with some leftover tanks and killed it to a man. Then my new bombers hit her destroyer/transport combo and I sank all the ships with my own destroyers. Not a unit survived from her expeditionary force. It accomplished nothing. Of course, Izzy refused to sign peace so we sat in a phony war for the next dozen or so turns.
Against China, I took Guangzhou in 1822, Xian in 1824, and Sanchu in 1826. Uh, and like that, Qin is destroyed:
Even though the destruction message hasn't printed out yet, you can see that Qin's score is 0. He's definitely dead. From start to finish, the war lasted a total of 10 turns. There's nothing like modern wars, I really enjoy them. I was able to swap back to Representation in 1828, so I spent exactly 5 turns in Police State. I don't think that really slowed down my research much at all. And as for what I gained... well, the game is almost over, true, but China had very good land and I have plenty of workers on hand to improve it. With State Property keeping my costs down, my research is about to explode even further, as the Chinese cities add their own considerable commerce to the rest of the civ. But first, take a look at this power graph from immediately before and after the big war:
It should be very clear where I started my military buildup, as I go from the middle of the pack to the clear leader. I also like seeing Qin's power abruptly drop off the map, hehe. I should also point out where the AI civs take a sharp bump upwards (look at Fred's bar there); this is where the AI gets a new tech and upgrades all its units for pennies on the dollar. Fred upgraded all his rifles to infantry on there, for example. This is BLATANTLY unfair to the player, but it's necessary to make the AI civs competitive. I was glad that Qin never made his way to Assembly Line while I was fighting him.
By the way, here's the corresponding Production graph:
THIS is the effect of going for early factories and building them across a civ already bloated in size and population. My edge in production is just ghastly. I could kill anyone in this game with ease, because once I take out their established "upgraded" forces, they are NOT going to be able to keep up with my production. In fact, I kind of wish this game hadn't been a space race. I could have gone for domination, and I think that would have been fun. Oh well, there's always more chances for that another time.
After finishing research on Rocketry in 1826, I started in on Computers and began the Apollo Program in Thebes, my top shield city. I had built the Ironworks there earlier, which along with Oxford formed my two national wonders in the capital. The site really was that good. After finishing Computers in 1834 (and starting labs everywhere), I began research into Satellites. I also suddenly saw on F4 that Asoka would be willing to trade me some techs that were critically important for my spaceship effort. Apparently, Asoka had had a monopoly on these techs, then Fred got them too and he became willing to trade. Go figure. Anyway, he was willing to sell me both Plastics and Fission! (I have NO clue how he got these techs before me, by the way.) I made this trade:
I send him Radio and Fascism for Plastics. Yes! Saved me a couple more turns of research. I would trade for Fission a few turns later in 1842. That saved me about a half-dozen turns of research on otherwise mandatory spaceship techs. Thank you Asoka! Now I had wasted some time by researching both Communism and Fascism (I clearly needed both State Property and Police State), but I skipped a LOT of other optional techs in order to get to the spaceship faster. I didn't go for Medicine, for example, and just dealt with the unhealtiness as best I could. You only need either Flight or Artillery to get to Rocketry, and while I did pick the more expensive option (Flight), I got good use out of my bombers and built a bunch of airports, so I don't think I lost anything there. For that matter, although I was "slowed" for 2 turns to get Fascism, I got good trade value out of it, AND my conquests would probably have been impossible without Police State civic. So all in all, I'm quite proud of my research choices here in the late game.
I finished the Apollo Program in 1844 and started spaceship parts all over my empire. All 8 Castings/Thrusters went into production immediately! Oh, and now that I was into building the parts and researching the last few techs, what better to do than trigger a late-game Golden Age!
My commerce and production of course exploded as soon as I triggered the golden age, which was really something to see with this many cities. The golden age also was well-timed for my Chinese cities, who were all out of resistance now and mostly building factories. I had done some extensive re-working of the tiles over there with my workers, adding lots and lots of watermills, which are amazing tiles with State Property. Here's how my Chinese domains looked at this date:
They have already been fully integrated into my civ. Since I can clearly support more cities, if there were more turns in this game, it would be time to lead the military charge further and eviscerate Kublai Khan. But... this game is almost over, so I'll be content with what I have. Still at war with Izzy, although as I mentioned earlier, that's a phony conflict. (I don't want to do anything, even though I could, because it will increase the dreaded war weariness!)
As far as my finances... well, maybe you should just see them for yourself:
I topped 3000 beakers/turn here for the first time ever in a game of Civ4. And, what's more, I'm actually running a PROFIT while I'm doing it! Of course this is in a golden age, but that's still pretty rare. I finally realized that it was stupid to be running at 90% research and just increased that to the full 100%. On the final turn of my golden age, the beaker count topped out at 3640 beakers/turn. If anyone manages to top that in their game, I will tip my hat to them - but I don't think it's happening. 
I expect that to be my top beaker count for a long time to come.
Researching at that speed, the techs fell extremely quickly. Fusion and Genetics, the two most expensive techs in the game (along with Fiber Optics), both fell in 3 turns. I had carefully planned my route through the tech tree in order to get the parts built as soon possible, and one aspect of that was getting the Space Elevator done. I expected to built it in Nanjing, which was right on the equator, where I had sent my Great Engineer from Fusion and where my workers had set up a ton of workshops for quick production. Only... I get to the tech, and I can't build the Space Elevator there. Huh? I go through my cities, and only those at the bottom of the map can build it. Let me demonstrate with this map:
Nanjing, circled in red, cannot build the Space Elevator. Meanwhile Elephantine, the city in green with tundra tiles in its radius, can build it. What's going on here? We've actually already tracked the bug down; apparently, Arathorn played either Great Plains or Highlands map script before he created the save file for this game, and a bug in the main menu caused the equator to remain at the bottom of the screen rather than be reset to the center of this map. It's already been reported and hopefully will be fixed in future patches. Even though I was a little frustrated, it was almost worth it to see the icy depths of the world being considered the "equator"!
Once I was down to one turn remaining on Ecology, the last spaceship tech, I swapped civics to Universal Suffrage and rushed the Space Elevator with cash:
I still think this is MUCH too cheap of a cost for a wonder; my own recommended solution is to disallow rushing with cash at all, but that's up to Soren. I was able to get the wonder for pennies, in any case. And - it really didn't matter at all. My cities building the last three parts (Thebes, Memphis, and Byblos) didn't gain any benefit from the Space Elevator at all! My workers spent the last couple turns shredding their towns and replacing them with watermills/workshops to speed up the parts. I definitely cut quite a few turns off the launch date by doing that. So therefore, NOT by coincidence, all of my last three parts were set to complete on the same turn in 1876. I snapped a picture right before that showing the heart of my civ:
A little hard to see there, but the parts are all due the next turn. The lack of towns in the heart of my civ is really amusing to see, since they were basically there for the whole game until the last five or so turns. I really enjoyed this game, it was almost sad to bring it to a close. Still, it was time to move on to the next turn...
