Ulvino, where are you?
Oh wow! That was a quick one! Congratulations or a sneaky win.
The losing move here was me, as the only one with a religion left, declaring friendship with you. I havenāt realised it would prevent me from killing your apostles (obviously). That was just dumb.
I wonder how many turns were left from our friendship. I was ready to declare war ASAP.
Wow, congratulations. I didnāt realize you had converted that many of my cities already; I thought I had more time.
Mind showing some of the other graphs? Religion aside, which I couldnāt do much about because I was Kongo and no one else gave me one, I think I was doing really well. And it turns out that the cities I took from England seemed to somehow have six slot Archaeological Museums, despite those museums not being built there when I took the cities. If I had managed to get all those made and filled up, it would have been absurd, especially if they got automatic theming and it boosted the Food, Production, and Gold bonuses further (though even the base +12 Food, +12 Production, and +24 Gold each per filled museum would have been ridiculous).
I didnāt get the museums that kitted out unfortunately; of the English cities I took, only London actually had a Theater Square when I took it, so it was the only one with a museum by the time the game ended, though I had two more on the way by that point. Had five artifacts in London, and a few in another city, and like three or four relics between goodie huts and me getting Markus to kill some Zoroastrian Martyr Apostles that spawned from my ability, in exchange for paintings from Great Artists I had no other use for because paintings donāt get that crazy ability boost.
My big lead mostly came from eating England so early. TipTow had a lot of cities and stuff, and some were pretty well-developed, so since I basically rolled over him with a massive Ngao Mbeba army backed by crossbows, Sun Tzu, and a siege tower, without losing much, I got a big lead. More than doubled the size of my empire.
Six slot Archaeological Museums getting filled out definitely would have helped further it though, particularly since the Terracotta Army let me march my archaeologists through peopleās borders without open borders agreements so I was going to be able to take them from basically anywhere in the world unimpeded. No one else was even bothering with the culture race, so Iād have had basically all of them available to me as long as I went and got them, too, and no one was putting up a fight against my tourism. I think Iād have had a really good shot at victory were it not for not being able to fight the religious war at all.
This could have been a lot different if Byzant had successfully got Judaism to my capital, come to think of it. It almost happened, but then, after getting a missionary all the way across the world and almost to me, TipTow killed it because it was in the way. Never got around to sending another one my way before you killed them.
If I had that, then Iād have used the Mbanza-spawned apostles to spread it to some of my other cities, and Iād have fought harder against you for Yerevan so I could have Apostles with the ability to purge your religion or be massively buffed for theological combat. But since I only had Zoroastrianism, I was entirely defenseless.
That one move by TipTow could have been what changed the course of the game, and at the time it was probably an afterthought. And if it had been after the religion patch it wouldnāt have happened due to religious units being in a separate layer.