With Babylon eliminated, it was time to settle back into infrastructure mode, and get my new cities over here on the eastern continent up to speed. I completed that last turn of research on Radio to enter the modern age. Fueling my research as usual were some crazy monopoly tech payments:
New Vancouver, my new capital, is a bit of an interesting project. I want the Internet over on this continent (didn't pull a GL to do it in about the last 30 elite attacks of the war), and this was the best city to do it, of course, but it was starting from scratch.
On consecutive turns, after disbanding bombers to get shields in the box, I rushed a library, university (for cultural expansion to pull in the coal), the Iron Works and Palace with GLs, factory, coal plant, granary, marketplace for happiness, then had it start on the wonder in 1415 AD. New Vancouver hit growth every turn from size 3 to size 12, then leveled off producing 117 shields/turn, and finished the wonder in only 15 turns total.
I beelined Genetics and built Longevity back home with a prebuild right away; this wonder would of course greatly help all the Babylonian cities grow.
The eastern continent made peace for a while, but then blew up into war again with Rome, Russia, Arabia, and Spain all going at it. The war I most wanted to see started as well: Russia against Spain. Hopefully one of those civs will manage to conquer the other. More likely Russia, as Spain started these wars earlier and was gassed in previous wars - and also Russia's got Motorized Transport and Spain doesn't yet. I sold Oil to Russia for 110/turn.
Once the Internet expanded borders for every city in ex-Babylon, I took the time to check how I was doing against the 18 tile per city minimum. 56 cities, 1273 tiles; that's a healthy 22.7 average.
With the rest of the East at war, I continued researching, easily at 4 turns with a surplus. I researched up to Robotics first, in hopes scientific Russia would land Ecology or Rocketry and save me some time, but they got Computers instead. Doesn't help my research rate, but that could be what they need to roll over Spain (they've already captured a half-dozen ex-Babylon cities from Spain).
The ex-Babylonian cities built factories, nuclear plants, research buildings, hospitals, commercial docks, and cash buildings, in approximately that order. Most of the factories I rushed and then let the cities build their own buildings.
And the brain-dead AI is still up to its old tricks:
Look at where that tank army is on the world map. Russia's at war with Spain, the world leader after Canada and right on their border - but they send their armies chasing weak German targets a million miles away. Spain was doing the same thing, going after German riflemen rather than Russian infantry.
Here's pictures of my lands now; the last overview shots in this report.
It was right around this time (early September) that we learned about the city-rank corruption bug. I hadn't even known it, but I was benefitting from it quite significantly here. Not only is my Palace area significantly less densely built than the FP, I only had about 20 cities on the Palace continent, meaning that all my thirty-plus home continent cities are experiencing city rank corruption of no greater than 20. Of course I didn't mean to do this, and it would even out a bit in time as I got some more cities on the eastern continent.
