This is the surprise: I really didn't want to play out this game any more, so brought it to an early ending.

I finally had access to tree farms, but building and using them was going to take a ton more micromanagement. My next two techs were disappointing too: a yellow bar that I hoped would yield Adv Ecological Engineering for soil enrichers but turned up Monopole Magnets instead, and then a red bar that could only yield some more military tech I didn't need. But tree farms weren't quite good enough; by now I had replaced many forests into farms and boreholes, so that most tree farms would only yield four or so food. I really wasn't looking forward to haphazardly booming on that spotty food supply until the blind research finally turned up orbital satellites or soil enrichers.

On the Council menu, I noticed the option for the diplomatic victory, Unite Behind Me As Supreme Leader. It comes available at Mind-Machine Interface, which the blind research had come to earlier than usual when it's not a target towards Biomachinery (Cloning Vats) or copter conquest. Remember I'd also turned up Superstring Theory for 8-power chaos weapons too. And MMI allows both helicopters and airdrop units. I decided to do what the blind research was telling me, and what Sparta should naturally be doing anyway, and use these components to just end it that way.

Gaia had built the Empath Guild (+50% council votes) within range where I could grab it with chop-and-drop conquest, 8-1-2*2 chaos fusion copters to kill every defender and a drop-pods rover to capture the base once emptied. I conquered a few more Gaian bases too the same way, plus one with a mind-control probe after selling my children's creches for money.

And on my northwest border where the Believers were fighting, I crunched over their jungle bases likewise, to keep accumulating more votes. I also had to conquer one nearby University base to put me over the top on this turn.

So I decided that if this game was the one that went in a different direction on pod scattering and blind research, it can also go a different way on the victory condition. I really couldn't see any more surprises to come through the rest of the tech tree; it would just be waiting until the blind research lurched to the breakpoints like Digital Sentience ten techs later than usual. And I didn't care at all about the date to reach transcendence, which from this point already would have been slower than any of the other games in this series besides the UN 5CC. I knew it would come sometime around the 2230s, and really didn't need to play through thirty more turns to see it. So the official result is a diplomatic victory in year 2203.

Here's a last overview for posterity, though not much of anything changed since the last one, mostly just more boreholes.

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So that completes a tour of a report for each of the seven factions, including my old original writeup with the University. Thanks once again for reading, and we'll see what more adventures are to come in the future.