Budweiser Immortal Challenge - GP CV

It's getting crowded in here! The middle of the map is nice if you want to send trade routes for Tourism late on, but it's a bit of a clusterfook for land grabs, as Ash proved by leapfrogging me and forward settling Genghis. I'm positive that Nineveh will be captured before you can say 'Great Wall of China', and then, since I took DoFs from both to sell luxes, I will have at least one enemy. Then Genghis settled another city close to where I wanted. I wanted the tile indicated by my mouse cursor in the picture. So city #3 will go to the coast and we will see if there is any room left after NC, which should be pretty early with all this forest. I've never seen such a nice load of forest for a Celts game. Cheers, budweiser, and cheers to Bob for his Windoze trickery!

Decided to risk Genghis's and Ashurbanipal's wrath by squeezing in a 4th city and buying the fresh water tiles. The build queue is pretty straight forward. I could fill it all the way through to victory if it let you put stuff in there which you haven't tech-ed yet. If I'm allowed to conquer cities I'll try for Futurism. If not I'll sit back and do it the old-fashioned Freedom way. Without CN tower it means hard-building broadcast towers

After jumping into the tech lead fairly quickly, I proceeded to work on getting higher production and getting out as much units as I can. I kind of ignored science and growth but then again, I kind of didn't. World Fair and International Games were proposed on the same turn, which is the first time it happened to me. What was even more surprising was that I actually won both somehow

Later on, the diplomatic relations collapsed and I was attacked by Greece, Sweden and Assyria, with Ashur being my ally for over 5000 years beforehand. Oh well, The wars went on for around 20-25 turns, they couldn't really put a dent in my armor but both of them were kind of running away and with no tourism modifiers to keep up, it might have been problematic. Also, Alex got it together and bought every CS on the map except a pair I kept for myself and which proved to have saved me in the end, he had 38 and needed 40, hehs. I won on the next turn.

Now the screenies:

1. A bit random and showed how crazy Genghis was, he was the tech leader at the time and he BUILT quite a number of wonders.
2. Outcome of IG
3. Outcome of WF. Note how they were 5 turns apart.
4. Final screen showing I never founded a religion
5. Final screen showing I built no world wonders
6. Demographics
7. Win

Apparently the game is still bad enough on Immortal that even with such self imposed crippling disadvantages you can still pull off a win. I'm going to assume one of the next challenges would involve Korea/Babs/Maya/Poland, task it Science win obviously and Tradition/Liberty and Rationalism are not allowed That obviously hurt my tourism a lot but with a better tech rate, I'm sure it would have proved to be not as much a disadvantage. I probably could have built at least 15 wonders, production was very good on this map.