Space, 1828AD
Well mine was an 1828AD space victory. As I hinted at in the first spoiler, I completely screwed up science in the early game by founding most of my early cities in locations good more for production, so in the end I was quite relieved to get such a relatively good (by my standards) date. I realized I was in trouble with science when I finally limped to discovering Civil Service (which was crucially important to irrigate many of my cities) around 900 AD
The Power of Biology
Things only really got fixed when I discovered biology and communism around 1600AD. Wow, those two techs were incredibly powerful on this map. For ages afterwards, my workers were occupied converting farms to cottages on cities that had been struggling to grow but suddenly had way too much food. By the end of the game, I was generating over 6600bpt. (Over 8500bpt during my end-game golden age). It was amazing watching future techs like fusion, robotics, and future tech get researched in < 3 turns - on epic as well!
Early Wars
After 1AD, basically I expanded peacefully, protected by the Great Wall, until I think sometime around 500AD, when there were no more reasonable sites, so I declared on Shaka. Man, the barbs had really taken their toll. He had basically no improvements, no roads, and his only forces appeared to be 2 archers defending each of his three (!) cities. I don't think I've ever fought an easier war. The only problem was his cities were so widely spaced that it took ages to walk to them. And then I had to improve them all from scratch.
I then wiped out Louis, whose situation was similar (although he got longbows shortly into the war, which made things harder).
Then I attacked Persia, now with knights, maces and trebuchets - this was a lot harder because he had developed quite good infrastructure. Towards the end, he vassaled to Brennus, which just meant I got to take several of Brennus's cities before Brennus capitulated. That gave me a total of around 50% land, rising to 55% by the end of the game.
A New Bug?
I encountered a very unfortunate bug when Cyrus vassalled to Brennus: At that point I had a great merchant in Celtia, protected by two knights. When the vasalling happened, and Brennus thus declared war on me, the knights got teleported out (IIRC, into Hannibal's land),
but the merchant didn't. Ouch!
Those few seconds of '
So there are the knights. Uh? Where's the great merchant????' were practically heart-stopping! Definitely in the '
don't try this at home, folks!' category. Luckily the knights were only teleported a couple of tiles away, so the merchant was able to run back to them the same turn. Brennus did immediately attack the knights/merchant with a pikeman, but luckily, lost. Phew!
Wonders and Capitals
I used Rome as a wonder-production city rather than a capital, and moved the actual capital twice - first to a site where the river kinked Eastwards north of Rome that had 8 flood plains. And then later on to the captured uMungundlova (or however you spell it), which also had lots of flood plains but the added benefit of no desert.
A couple of unusual things in this game.
Engineers
Rome's wonder-spamming (plus first to Fusion) gave me a total of 7 great engineers! I don't think I've ever had so many. At one stage I was actually wonder what I could do with some of the spare ones lying around. In the end, 2 of them built the hanging gardens and -umm - chichen itza (I know. I was desperate for a great prophet to build a shrine at that point. It worked too - I got one). 4 of them built the three gorges dam and the space elevator. And the last one contributed to a final golden age.
Shrine
Talking of the shrine: Earlier I'd founded Confucianism with the Oracle. Then, because around 1AD I had so much production and so few good city sites, I ended up having one city just produce Confucian missionaries. This meant that almost every city I founded or captured, I had a missionary on hand to immediately 'educate' it. Can you imagine how powerful a shrine would be in that situation...? Mid game I was getting around 60 gpt from the shrine. By the end of the game: 50 of my cities, all but one with Confucianism, and quite a few AI cities too. Grocer, market, bank and wall street in the holy city. You can do the maths.... I think that's one of the few things in this game that went perfectly to plan.
Final Thoughts
I
really liked this map. It has some very unusual challenges - especially with the vast areas of open land, but so lacking in resources, forcing cities to be much more spaced out than normal. On the other hand, epic/large map really ate up real-life time. I don't think I could do maps like this very often!
. My attempt in buildind The Great Wall didn't work: I had one Warrior defendind the Capital. So started the invasion. After that, my two Warriors killed 28 Barbs (only Warriors) 
, but they destroyed all my improvements and my Worker ![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
. I finished GW with no improvement (14 turns with nothing to do, just watch my Warriors gain experience: both ended with 10/17) in 1120 BC and had to start all over again 
...
!
. Before this new attempt, a little break for a coffe and cool down ...
. On the contrary, in other games, I had to maintain three or four defenders per city. Also the center position of the city on large map (remembering the tip in the start spoiler), Barbs came from all directions, attacking and destroying improvements. Archers also increase the problem 
! I still don't know what to do in the next ragging games 
!
Even if you hole up in cities you lose all your improvements without the units to protect them. 
) I vassalized the Celts in 1706.
