I was able to make peace with Alex again in 1958AD and got some money out of it as well. Peace with Rome (and 0% culture/max science again, finally!) came in 1972AD. In 1961AD, Alex had made peace with Victoria as well, so I paid her a meager 110 gold to declare war on Rome again, to keep her busy while I was building parts of the spaceship like mad. Both Victoria and I had built all 5 SS casings, 3 SS thrusters and the SS docking bay, but had taken different research paths. I was really excited now, sitting on the edge of my seat biting my nails - after an already turbulent and hard game, this finish was the closest I ever had!
In 1991AD, another list of largest civilizations was published, and Victoria was first, Mansa second, and myself third. I was still leading in score slightly ahead of Victoria, though.
In 1983AD, I discovered Ecology, the last tech I needed. This was the situation at that time:
We both completed the second last part on the same turn, and now I could only hope. Of course I had
micromanaged my best city to produce the last part as fast as possible, but every time I hit "end
turn", I stared anxiously at the screen, fearing to see the dreaded "Victoria has won a space victory!"
message - but this did not happen. Instead, I launched first in 1999AD! 
I'm really glad I managed to pull a win out of this game. The start had been very challenging: Low-food, and with obstacles to expansion everywhere. Here are some graphs from after the game:
I managed to compete in income throughout the game, in the beginning mainly because I could work the lake and built the colossus, later because I managed to take over Caesar's heavily cottaged lands.
Production, on the other hand, was below average throughout the whole game. In the beginning, I had only few cities which were located in horrible terrain, later I had to emphasize commerce to catch up with research. Note especially how I was weaker compared to Caesar to get an idea how difficult the war against him had been. Normally, the AIs are weaker in production than the human player because they tend to build so many cottages and windmills everywhere; but this game they were even better than me, giving my barren tundra lands. My few "green" cities south of the lake I had dedicated to research, building cottages and the Oxford University in Texcoco for example, so they were not able to dedicate much production as well.
Food was way below average in the beginning as well, as I was unable to irrigate anything and was forced to rely on lakes to grow my cities. For that reason, granaries had been a top priority, but still my cities had been quite small in the end.
It had been a very close finish, and I doubt I'll have the fastest victory - but I don't care, as I'm more than glad I managed to win at all! I don't know what I could have done differently anyway. I wouldn't have been able to attack anybody really with my jaguars, as the distances would have been too large (and Rome had praetorians...). Later, at the time of macemen and knights, the only targets that would have been sensible were Caesar and Mao; both had nice lands and were not too far away from my capital. But at that time, both were on par with me technologically, and far superior in production, so I had to wait. Later, when I had riflemen, Mao had rifles too (and again was superior in production to me), so attacking Caesar was the only real choice I had. At that time, he had been leading every statistics, so he had to be stopped somehow anyway.
That war had been hard and took a long time to win, so after consolidating my gains, another war would have come too late to make any further gains productive as well. And at that time, both Victoria and Mansa were ahead of me technologically and in number of units anyway. So all I could really do was to instigate some trouble, and sow hate and distrust among my competitors. I think I did that quite well, although dragging Victoria into war proved to be almost impossible...
Again, a big thank-you to Sirian for sponsoring that event! This scenario was a blast, the best game I've had so far
with Civ 4, and I'm looking forward to see what ideas others came up
with to manage this quite exceptional start. 
Previous Page