Part 4: finishing off

The New Lands:

While I discover that Moscow still lacks a granary (I know, I know), the slaughter of the Americans continues with the capture of San Francisco, and the first cossack loss to a rifle. This means that, from now on, things will get much tougher for me. In 1818, I reach an all-important tech, which is railroad, and all of my workers magically pop out of the cities to build the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway! Hmm, this doesn't look quite like Siberia, but I'm sure it fits the theme. Hey, we are meant to do great things, right? So in 1826 I take Washington, featuring Pyramids and Chichen Itza. There were a whole lot of cats in there (8-9), which could have been greatly used bombarding my SoD, but they remained within the walls, and got slaughtered. Then I take Boston, which was very poorly defended, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta, eliminating the USA in 1870 AD. Now I'm rushing along the tech tree to grab Mass Media before Toku attacks...

May I say one thing? The Cossack is completely unstoppable in this game. The AI hasn't had the minimal chance of survival since the first of those units came in the battlefield. They couldn't even Defend properly, beelining to rifles and trying to pump out as many of them as possible. Instead, I kept seeing suicidal rifles, while the cats stayed inside the city. What on Earth happens to the AI, when it's fighting against strong units???

Now that the war is finally over, I make 4 civic switches, to representation, freedom of speech, caste system and free market. Then I concentrate on the economical build-up of the empire (shot above), prioritizing the food, as it always should be. This has probably been the worst mistake I've made in the game, keeping a low population in my cities has definitely not helped my economy. From the start of the food galore, my score and population has multiplied itself, with effects which you can see in the food graph screenshot I'll post later. Back to the game, my intention was to be elected with Hatty's vote to the UN, but obviously she is my contender, and Alex and Toku abstain, so I don't have enough votes to win. I have a Plan B, of course, but I hoped I could get away without it. I research Fission and start building some nukes, then I bomb Toku until the vote goal is low enough for me to achieve a Nuclear Backdoor Domination (NBD), which happens in 1964. The poor Japanese had about 95 pop point before I declared, and at the end of the game they had 29 . I use this technique a lot when I have a clear win, but don't want to research the whole tech tree to launch; however I think it's cheesy myself, so I don't like it.

Here, the usual endgam screenshots, featuring my economy, the statistic screen (watch the population ), the food graph (same smiley as before) and the city count. I have eight 20+ cities!

Summary:

Table of results