Pertaining to the Ottoman game I posted earlier, after a few marathons sessions of play, I'm quite close to victory.
Right after I made the post, the empire was in disrray. I had overextended in expansion by overproducing settlers and workers to consolidate the land won by a relatively easy Egyptian war and my troops were both technologically inferior and stretched quite thin.
Naturally, the 'smart' Emperor Roman AI sought to gain some of my gain by attacking me and I was caught by surprise (usually I'm not used to the AI declaring on me before I'm ready). An exchanging of cities ensued and over time, I was able to gain more than I lost and also upgrade my Swordsmen to MDIs which helped immensely.
But by now, the war had taken it's toll on my vast, but stretched Ottoman and I also found myself an age behind in techs, once again. Basically I only had Feudalism, Monothesiem, Invention and Engineering whilst my non-Roman opponents had reached Physics. Naturally I panicked, but remembered one of the games posted on Civfanatics where a member (I think SirPleb) was playing on Sid and managed to gain a whole age of techs by capturing the Great Library before he had Education. So I went to the wonders page, to guess what? The city of Rome which was only a few cities away held this great treasure. This knowledge was enough to persuade me to fight on, capture the wonder, and tech all the way to just before the Industrial Age. But I kinda thought about it and got greedy, reloaded the save and played on deliberately not capturing Rome but all of the other Roman cities, so the other AIs could tech into the Industrial Age and then capture the Library. (Technically, I could have waited even longer, but then the gap in units would have started to show and I would've been a soft target).
Unfortunately I lost the save which I was going to take the screenies off
After the capture, things were pretty smooths sailing, just pumping out cannons and Siphahi, and mass irrigating to create specialist cities. That last part really helped get me out of a world of trouble as even after I got tech parity, I found IA techs to be really expensive and could only research them at 20-25 turns without specialists, but got it down to 8-9 turns with specialists. (Another thing I've learnt!). Fortunately I got a scientific great leader, researched down the path of Hoover Dam (a path which coincidentally the AI never goes down) pre-built the Theory of Evolution and instantly snagged the Dam making me a powerhouse.
Which brings us to the present; about 10% of world area away from a domination victory:
Late game I usually don't bother fully managing every single border city because I just can't be bothered, and it won't affect the outcome of the game.
I think in this game particularly I've learnt a lesson in persistence in seemingly bad situations, (yes even though it was nothing compared to many of the other worse situations the games posted here on harder levels) and also a lesson in mass irrigation to create specialist cities. Before I would always switch to Communism late game, but now I have choices.
It's also further cemented (in my head anyway) that hospitals are useless. Just space your cities closer, and they will yield the same number of specialists compared to that of higher 'quality' cities spaced further apart.
Thanks again for all your help everyone!
Still need to improve my game on archipelago map types though, where everything just doesn't flow as well and it's not smooth sailing.
