I had already captured the starting island of Temujin and Mao, but so far I still hadn't eliminated any civilizations entirely. I had half a mind to keep each leader alive with one city left, in order to sell them gems at the end of the game and score additional points, but the much-reduced empires of Mongolia and China both proved to be too poor to cough up even 1 gold per turn in exchange for gems. Well, if I can't sell 'em gems for scenario points, might as well wipe 'em all out. 
Here's a map from 1703AD:
In order to see all my territory, I have to zoom out to include over half of the globe. That minimap is also looking better and better - almost all light purple in the western hemisphere! As far as Domination was concerned, I was still only at 20%, so lots more land to go. Some notable features: Lucknow in the extreme north had a silver resource which I wanted to help with war weariness; I also planned to grab all the silvers eventually for the scenario points, so that explains the city in the horrible location. Notice the little silver star next to Karakorum too - I built my Forbidden Palace there, and it definitely helped out some with maintenance costs. The FP is nowhere near as important as it was in Civ3, however (when it was literally the single most important building in the game, especially in the earlier versions). Also note the Hindu Monastery going up at Xian; since I control the Hindu holy city and its shrine, I plan to spread the religion around a lot to help out my finances. There's no shortage of cities I control where I can add Hinduism!
I signed peace with Mao on the above date of 1703AD. Two turns later, in 1709, I decided I had had my fill of peace and declared on Tokugawa as well. Time to keep roughing up these AIs! As you can probably guess, this game is over already, so I will play with these AIs and try to hit Domination right around the point where I finish the tech tree. Then I can build me some nukes, grab 5 Future Techs, and win the game!
A couple turns later, I get my first request of the entire game to swap civics/religion from a gems customer:
Caesar wants me to go Confucian, so I do and swap back to Judaism 5 turns later. I think I only had one other request in the entire game, Cathy wanting me to adopt some civic or something like that. The AIs simply didn't ask me to do much switching at all, which was a little surprising. (I'm sure Sirian can remember back in testing when the AIs would ask you to convert to their religion almost every turn, heh. Those were interesting times.) I snapped a photo of it because it was such a rare event! I probably could have played this one without being Spiritual with no problems.
As far as the war went, I simply sailed from city to city owned by Tokugawa, snapping up his longbows with my elite City Raider rifles (upgraded from maces, naturally). He had no navy, and his forces were hopelessly scattered across the map, so resistance was almost nil. Kagoshima got me the world's supply of sugar, and outside Tokyo the game produced another strange combat animation:
First of all, my rifle is invisible. OK, but even stranger is that the samurai I was facing (who has just been killed), is running off the top of the screen! There he goes! Again walking on water. Perhaps he's gone to become one of the Japanese kami and watch over his descendants.
While scanning the map and trying to figure out where my forces should head next in picking off Tokugawa's scattered colonies, I spot something of tremendous interest: Cathy has another source of gems! 
I swear that wasn't there before! I know I scanned the whole world and had a monopoly on gems. After this game was over, I went back to the 4000BC autosave and loaded up the Worldbuilder, which revealed that I was not crazy and that gems source hadn't been there at the start of the game. In other words, Cathy has POPPED ANOTHER ONE and there are now seven gems sources in this world rather than six. Cathy and I are all the way up to Friendly relations from shared religion, but something tells me that won't last until the end of the game. 
Also of notice, I had popped a Great Engineer from Calcutta earlier (my National Epic fishing town!) and now I finally was able to use him on Wall Street:
...in my Hindu Holy city! This was a huge coup for me, as the tiny fishing city of Beshbalik would have taken forever to build Wall Street on its own, even with use of the whip. Along with a Hindu missionary spam (seen in effect above at Karakorum, and also not pictured down in the south at Xian), this would help keep my finances intact without State Property while running a world-spanning empire. We weren't allowed to found any religions in this game, but nothing says we can't capture holy cities and steal the shrine income benefits!
So what else is there to say about the military campaign against Tokugawa? I captured all his colonies, then invaded his homeland and took that too. Kyoto captured in 1772, Osaka captured in 1778:
Game over for Japan. Sayonara. 
I triggered a Golden Age at this point using some of my stored up Great People (I had a bunch of them just sitting around) because I had just discovered Assembly Line and I wanted to use the shield boost to construct factories/coal plants. I don't know if the golden age also triggered some extra good luck for my civ, but in any case I scored the easiest possible 5 points for this game by doing absolutely nothing:
POPPED ANOTHER ONE! Woot! Sometimes it IS better to be lucky than good!
In other news, I now have infantry and Temujin still only has longbows...
I'm baaaaack! Don't you wish you hadn't declared war on me in 305AD now, Temujin? I have no real notes or comments on the war, because infantry versus longbows isn't even worth mentioning. The most important thing I did during the war was hook up oil and upgrade my galleons to transports, my caravels to destroyers. I also built the Pentagon in Delhi, which would ensure that every unit would start with two promotions. No need for Theocracy or Vassalage (I can't run the former because Judaism is my state religion and I'm still spreading Hinduism around like crazy. And I'd rather run Free Religion for happiness/science.)
Well that didn't take long. Like I said, infantry against longbows is a done deal. And since Mao's last city is in this same neighborhood...
Two for one special.
Naturally I had planned to end my Mongolian campaign right next to the last Chinese city, but it's still nice to see the execution play out the way you drew it up. The map and the diplomatic screens are starting to get a little empty!
Alright, so time to fess up on how I'm managing all this. If you've been watching my screenshots, I'm never building units in any of my cities, yet I seem to have an endless supply of units to throw at these AI opponents. Granted, most of the heavy lifting is being done by those elite units with the City Raider promotions, but unless I leave a bunch of undefended cities behind me, I need to keep adding more units just to garrison what I had captured. Turfan is my military central, but there's no way one city can supply a civ of this size with all of its military needs, especially not on Epic speed. So where are the units all coming from?
Let me introduce you to Varanasi, my friends.
Varanasi? What's Varanasi? This is a two-clam city in the northern wastelands that serves as little more than a stopping point for my ships in transit. Yet because it has so much food and so little production, it is not only a perfect whipping colony, but a perfect DRAFTING colony as well!
What I haven't mentioned so far is that as soon as I got to Rifling tech, I adopted Nationhood civic and never looked back, aside from one brief stretch of Bureaucracy in the capital to speed along Ironworks. Could there be any better civic for this particular map script? Think about it. Nationhood gives you extra happiness from barracks, NO Upkeep cost (!), and the ability to pull an army out of thin air from cities with zippo production. If the first half of my game was dominated by the whip, the second half of this game was all about the draft. I first pulled an entire round of conscripts out of my cities when I got Rifling and replaced my antiquated archers everywhere with them. Then on my second round of drafting, I started using them offensively against the other AIs. My elite units would take out the defenders, rest for a turn, then move on while conscripts came in behind the front to garrison the captured cities. It was so easy to do! The draft was even more effective once I had Assembly Line tech and could start drafting infantry. In exchange for 2 population and some unhappiness, I could pull a 210-shield unit out of nothingness. Then I could do it again 15 turns later! I'm not sure how many times I drafted Varanasi, but at least 5 or 6 times. THAT'S how you take over the world on an archipelago Tiny Islands with virtually nil production. By drafting your people out the wazzoo!
I'll say it again: this game was pretty much a competition to see who could get the most out of the whip and the draft. And, as Sirian can testify, I pretty much wrote the book on drafting in Civ4 back in testing. I'd be embarassed if someone out-performed me in this area.
I actually soon began to pile up more conscripts than I knew what to do with, since I was drafting them faster than I could kill them or put them to work on garrison duty. Plus, with the acquisition of more and more cities, the draft steamroller only gathered greater and greater speed. Once the ball really gets rolling on this, it can become self-sustaining. So when I started the next war against Caesar a couple turns later in 1823 (no, I wasn't about to stop attacking now!), I opened the war on three separate fronts, two of them manned entirely by my conscripts from the latest recruiting grounds:
Just look at that group of conscripts, mmm, fresh meat! I lost two of them attacking Ravenna (since I didn't have any bombardment to knock out the defenses), but hey - plenty more where that came from! (I was also working on some more destroyers to get mobile attackers able to knock out city defenses, a la Sirian Doctrine). Oh, and since the moment was so appropriate with me attacking Caesar with an army of conscripts, I can't resist posting this image too:
Yes, I just spent twenty minutes searching through the RB1 thread's 10000 images to find that, but it was worth it! 
More seriously, here's the war plan I diagrammed when attacking Caesar:
I start out by hitting three cities simultaneously, and go from there. The two cities in the west were both slated to be attacked by my conscripts, fresh out of the nearby Indian cities, and they performed admirably by both taking their targets at the outset of the war. They would then rendezvous together at the Roman city in the extreme south and proceed around the international date line to mainland Rome. My elite units were in the east, and they fought their way through the stiffest resistance of Rome's core cities to meet up with the purely conscript armies at Rome's home island. All in all, it worked just the way I planned it to, and the forces did arrive at the final destination within a turn or two of each other. Ha! My favorite part of this game was probably designing these elaborate war plans to take down the AI civs. That was great fun.
I researched Flight instead of Artillery, because I had visions of huge carrier fleets loaded with Fighters swooping across the map and taking out everything in sight. I did indeed build one carrier and loaded it up with three Fighters, but then I realized a couple of things. First of all, I've already got so many cities that I can hit any target on the map just by rebasing planes. Second, bombers do a heck of a lot more damage than fighters do. And finally, carriers are expensive units to build. As a result, I largely skipped the Sirian Doctrine in this game in favor of huge swarms of bombers as soon as I got Radio. Why not - I had little air bases all over the map!
Here are the bombers in action against Rome. I think Sirian and I established for all time back in RB1 just what air power can do against an opponent that lacks a counter for it, so I probably don't need to go into any more detail on this one. Infantry against rifle is already a bad matchup for the backwards civ, nevermind adding aerial bombardment on top of that. Do I even need to go on here?
Thought not. Two civs to go, and the late-game scoring coming up as well.
