Game update, Industrial Age:
At the beginning of the Industrial Age, I underestimated the impact of the end of my Golden Age: I simply wasn't able to do my first industrial tech (Electricity) in 4 turns. Tried as hard as I could, but it took me 5 turns. After these 5 turns, however, more infrastructure had gotten ready, cities had been pushed to size 12 by joining workers and the first science farms had become up and running, so from then on I was able to do the remaining industrial techs at 4 turns a piece.
The plan was to first research the upper two thirds of the tech tree, hoping that in the time it took me to finish those 10 techs, Babylon would at least manage to finish Medicine for me, but no such luck...: they did Nationalism during that time, which I traded, even though it is not needed in such a game. Perhaps later on they will also finish Communism, then I can increase my science output with Police Stations, and Nationalism will at least be somewhat useful.
So after doing all the techs as indicated by the green arrows, Medicine was still not available, and I had to do the remaining 4 techs also by myself... Consequently I entered the Modern Age in 1050 AD.
Besides researching all those techs, the following projects kept me busy during that time:
- Making the occasional trade "outdated tech for lux resource", whenever a deal expired after 20 turns
- Conquering Spain
- Conquering Rome
- Building lots and lots of slaves, workers and settlers for ICSing Spain's and Rome's territory and clearing all that jungle over there.
- Building units and disbanding them in low production cities for markets and universities, where still needed.
The two wars against Spain and Rome were done mainly with Knights and a few Infantries. They had only spearmen, so no big problem.
Conquering Spain and Rome was necessary for getting the required territory for setting up a decent number of science farms, without which 4-turn research will no longer be possible in the Modern Age. Most of the game time went into managing all those workers, clearing jungle, planting and chopping trees into settlers, irrigating and railing all the grassland tiles down there. Once that job was done, I joined most of the native workers back into towns to bring them up to size 6 immediately.
Now I'm making 2155 bpt, which is broken down into 1411 bpt from my economy and 744 bpt from 248 scientists. The expensive ones of the modern age techs are around 8000 beakers, so I should be able to do those also in 4 turns each, especially as I will get another big boost from the Internet soon.
After that pretty boring chore, the end of the Industrial Age was quite interesting again: in the interturn after Electronics was finished, I dialed up Babylon, gifted them the remaining industrial age, and they got Ecology. Then I switched a pre-build to Theory of Evolution, which then finished the same interturn. I took Computers and Miniaturization as my free techs, dialed up Babylon again and traded Computers for Ecology. So even though the industrial age was a bit slow, I got a nice head-start into the modern age with three modern age techs already known, before that age has even started...
Now I used the SGL I had stored all that time, and rushed the Internet. So next turn I'll have Research Labs in all my cities, and enough science output for even the most expensive modern age tech.
I was a bit sloppy though: I haven't prepared any pre-builds for SETI and for the Hover Dam... It'll take a while to build these by hand. And I only have 36 turns left... Perhaps I'll have to skip SETI and instead start pre-building for the Apollo Program?!
