Got a T164 CV as Babylon. 2-city NC into 4-city Tradition/Aesthetics/Rationalism/Futurism. Ahmad was my runaway AI with 14330 culture. Others didn't do too well and passive tourism + futurism was actually enough to become influential over them. Mongolia attacked me at some point but otherwise I had a peaceful game, stole just one worker from a CS.
Mistakes:
- Finishing Aesthetics after getting Secularism (had Aesthetics 2 pre-Renaissance). Should've taken Free Thought first at least.
- Losing control of World Congress very early; World's Fair got voted down and then I couldn't propose anything afterwards. I got lucky and Enrico proposed CHS later. It took long to find all the CS and it was hard to compete with the AI gold anyway. I had Mongolia, Austria and Venice in my game, hoping they'd kill some cultural CS, but that didn't really help - there were four cultural CSs and only one of them was captured by Mongolia. Enrico got Tyre and some other CS late in the game, and Maria Theresa didn't do anything.
Science benchmarks: Education T72 (w/ Engineering detour for a trade route), Radio T111. Not sure how good this is, science felt slow comparing to what I'd expect to have with Babylon by (turn number)*1.5 on Standard. AIs seemed to be a bit slow as well, I got Machu Picchu, LToP, GT, Sistine and Taj Mahal without any real competition.
I'll try Brazil next. Will likely invest some policies into Patronage now.
