Thanks for a neat map! I built Broadway for the missing Happiness, but it was nice not to have to build Rock N Roll and Hollywood while still benefitting from the Happiness. I believe that I built Rock N Roll at the end of the game with my leftover Great Engineer from Fusion (as I'd gone for Space) just for the fun of building it.
In an interesting twist, I didn't even bother with Cuirassiers and was still building Knights near the end of the game, alongside of building Artillery and Marines.
Ali went down punching till the end, while the others survived in some form or another.
The Different Corner City ended up being my Ironworks City. I'd toyed with the idea of making it my Palace, but Forbidden and Versailles had already been built "on the mainland," and I wanted to run Corps, so moving my Palace off of our mega-island would have really hurt in terms of Colonial Maintenance and wouldn't have been worth it. So, I tore up the lovely Towns and Villages and replaced them with Hammer-based improvements, leaving only one Town for the sake of tourism.
It was interesting that the first "island" to which I'd expanded to the west, and on which I'd carefully only settled 3 Cities for the longest of time to avoid high Colonial Maintenance costs, actually turned out to be a part of our original island. The Barbs had kept me from exploring the northern part of our island for quite some time, and thus it took quite some time to notice that a couple of Peaks joined the two "islands." So, it really was a trick of the map... expand "overseas," only to find ourselves still on our original continent!
The island in the north-west of the map was fun... I settled a City on the water, but by the time that I'd settled there, I had to build a Galleon instead of a Galley. Then, I let the Barbs raze the Galleon-producing City and kept the island.
Thanks to the Great Spy, I saw that Sid's Sushi and Cereal Mills had roughly the same number of Resources, so I decided to try out Cereal Mills. It is a bit higher in tech cost, essentially requiring you to research twice the cost of Physics on top of the tech requirements for Sid's Sushi. Specifically:
- You need Biology for either Corp
- Sid's requires Medicine, while Cereal Mills requires Electricity, and the cost of those two techs is equivalent
- Cereal Mills also requires Physics plus Refrigeration, and Refrigeration has the same cost as Physics
So, there's a noticeable delay in when you can start spreading Cereal Mills around, but you also don't have to worry so much about unintentionally triggering the Domination Land Limit when using Cereal Mills, due to that Corp not producing any Culture (other than 2 base Culture that all Corporate HQs produce in your Wallstreet City).
I ended the game with all but 1 of the map's Cereal Mills Resources under my control, with 8 Corn, 7 Rice, and 6 Wheat under my control.
I have to say that I really liked the Flood Plains River Gems square, which was one of the top squares on the map.
With the world already undergoing Global Warming, I thought it prudent not to clearcut our National Park and decided that it was good to both preserve this planet and settle on another planet. We do have to set good standards by which to live if we want to preserve our planet and the universe.
