Well, there really wasn't much more to report. Every tech was an easy research in 3 turns at a large surplus in Golden Age - but, amazingly, the AIs still kept pace! I had been wondering whether the minimum science time should be lowered to 2 turns - mathematically, half of the standard time would match the Accelerated Production ratio - but this actually made me decide to keep it at 3. With 3-turn researches, the player would likely not be able to convincingly pull ahead in the modern age, and the game would remain interesting and competitive right up until the end.
And my opponents were right behind me in the space race.
Well, except Korea; I reloaded the save afterward to investigate the cities, and it turned out that they'd wound up with Apollo being built in a city pulling only 14 shields per turn, and were still seven turns away from building it when I launched. I can't do a darn thing about that bit of AI weed, though.
Even faster than War Paint. I think this qualifies as a good snack-size Epic.
After the fact, I went back and reloaded a few of the saves, and experimented with declaring wars and alliances with the AIs. It did indeed seem that I'd gotten it right in making war impossible - I couldn't think of any way to attack them, and they never attacked me. Also, the AIs would talk to both me and each other for peace eventually, after about 8 turns of being at war. So I was satisfied that the game could handle it if a war did start up.
I then went into the scenario editor to correct some problems: disable privateers, fix a few spots that had been missing sea terrain between coastal and ocean, fix the fact that the French had two irons, and a couple others. I generated a new 4000 BC save, and playtested that one last time up to making contact to verify that nothing had screwed up. It hadn't, so I sent the game off to Sirian and Griselda, and that's where you, the Epics player, came in. Hope you enjoyed it!
