This happens to be my first post in the forums, although i have been an avid reader for over a year... I'm a regular Demigod level player and decided to play the COTM 27 after a ten month break from Civ.
I was prompted to start posting because of a weird event that struck in the middle of my game.
The year was around 640 AD and I had recently begun assaulting the German empire. At the time I was first in pop, land area, and power, although i was about 5-6 techs behind the faster tech pace on the other landmasses. The continual early wars between Rome and Germany had really slowed down our continent, and I was frightfully lazy in the early game with making contact with the other civs.
I had gone too aggressively after HB after realizing that horses were not in immediate vicinity of the starting area and this resulted in a much later SoZ build date than I would have liked...As a result of this and the slower tech pace, I went into the war with the Germans with a large stack of horsemen, AC, swordsman and trebs, but lacked the rider.
(Also really cool: the Germans finshed Leonardo's first turn on the attack in Berlin. Woohoo! Thank you Bismarck.) I quickly realized that my stack did not quite have the power to take out Berlin's fortified pikeman in their little hill fort. So I spent everything in my treasury to pull off some items + GPT deals for Feudalism and Chivalry (I had been researching Feudalism on a 40 turn gambit- not a smart decision) With these new techs, I had just enough money to upgrade one horseman to a rider, and quickly used it on a lone German MI and
snap!... China enters her glorious GA.
With the all the extra shields/GPT from the GA, I knew that Germany was toast and China was on a major roll. But...I didn't want to have to spend all my cash just to catch up to the other AI in tech, and upon looking at Beijing, realized that the GL could be built in just ten turns. I figured this would be a reasonable production/opportunity cost trade for all the GPT it would save me in the long run as I was hoping to get Monotheism, Gunpowder, Invention, and Education for it, plus the culture bonus. I couldn't remember at the time how to control, if at all, what techs the GL gives...it has been a while since I built it.
Fast forward ten turns. Berlin had fallen yielding the HG and Leonardo's, Chinese riders were closing in on the last bits of the German empire, and Beijing had just finished the GL.
I clicked the end turn button, waited through the inter-turn while expecting to get the message about techs from the GL. Sure enough, this happened just like normal. First my "sages learned Republic from...", then it was monotheism, then invention, and finally then a screen popped up asking me to give guidance as to what to research next. (At this point my though was, "oh, right, that's how you control the GL's free techs) So I clicked on Gunpowder as the next tech and...wait a sec, it popped up the message that Education had been researched, so the GL was now obsolete... Umm, obsolete? Guess again. Bummed it had somehow not gotten Gunpowder instead, I hit the enter key, and the next message said Gunpowder had been researched. Oh, cool.
I hit enter again, and then the GL went crazy.
A bit stunned, I kept hitting the enter key as in approximate order Printing Press, Astronomy, Banking, Navigation, Chemistry, Metallurgy were also learned from "other civs."
my sages. You guys are pretty cool. The only bummer to this quite surprising wealth of techs was that Metallurgy made my SoZ obsolete...but hey, I'll take the trade. Interestingly, when I chose to build the GL I temporarily stopped the Heroic Epic, and I desperately wanted a leader to rush the FP in a town near the Romans. So, this crazy good GL (10 techs!) that got me almost out of the MA turned out to be more than worth the cost. The other wierd thing is that as I checked around with the other civs afterwards there were two civs with Magnetism, but I didn't get that tech with the GL...I was tech parity or above with the rest of the civs...
To me, this GL business was really quite stunning. I've played quite a bit of Civ and I've never seen the GL keep researching past Education. I also searched on the forum for any mention of this occuring elsewhere, but saw nothing. My question is: Was this a seriously good "bank error in your favor" type of deal or is this a known deal that I've never heard about? My game is a straightforward Conquests version with no mods. Just in case this is a wierd deal, I quickly saved the post-GL turn with all those techs researched, and also reloaded the autosave of the pre-GL turn and saved that also as a separate file. I also quickly tested the saves to see if the GL would again produce this many techs, and indeed following the exact order of clicking I did above, it produced the same results. I can post the saves if someone wants to take a look at them. If anyone can set the record straight here, please let me know! Thanks in advance!
Sorry also for my long-winded explanation!!!
Only 2 civs you havent warred with at the start of the MA!
. 
. Now I becom a backwards civ and i didn't make any progress on the tech tree.
