)Here's the land after killing off Pacal.
Babylon had only managed to capture that one Mayan city, Lakshma. Since it's within fourth-ring (500 culture) distance from two of my cities, I was hopeful I could apply enough pressure to flip it eventually. I even built Notre Dame in Den Bosch there in order to apply its +10 culture towards a flip. (I renamed 's-Hertogenbosch to its modern nickname. My brain can't cope with city names with two punctuation characters. )
Also, I unexpectedly grabbed the copper in the desert between myself and Ragnar. That copper square is in 4th-ring for both the Viking capital and my city there, and Nidaros expanded that far long before Haarlem did, so I more or less wrote it off. But a strong performance by Sistine-boosted cultural buildings, and Free Speech, glommed that tile for me. My construction crew on the Statue of Liberty partied long into that night. :D
On the Great People front, my capital produced an Artist to save for Civilized Jewelers, and the free Merchant from Economics to save for Sid's Sushi. Unfortunately, Rotterdam which had been groomed for an Engineer, with the Pyramids and Hanging Gardens, put out an Artist at under 25% odds. With that, I had to go for Assembly Line next to build a factory to run engineers in that town.
After Assembly Line, I just continued ripping along through the tech tree, at 3-5 turns per tech, through Astronomy - Sci Method - Biology in target of Medicine. With Dikes and Universal Suffrage to produce hammers, and Emancipation to speed growth, I cottaged over all my mined hills except at Rotterdam.
I'd sent out an East Indiaman to go for circumnavigation, and loaded a leftover knight and catapult on it on the off chance of finding huts to pop. That exploring crew happened across an island with a barbarian city:
OK, that would have to get razed, since it's in such a terrible location on the island (there's a fish resource under the dialog box, just out of reach of the city.) But I immediately started training another East Indiaman and two settlers from home to claim this nice little reef.
Conquering that last Mayan city got me Christianity, the religion of the Apostolic Palace, which India had built. And this election came up, scaring me pretty thoroughly for a moment:
He needs only 98 votes to win the game? He's got that much all by himself... wait, isn't there a rule that you can't win a diplomatic or religious victory if you have enough votes to do it yourself? I'm not sure what's going on here, but it wouldn't be the first time I got impaled by a sudden diplo loss.
Then the results came in and I finally realized that was just for the AP secretary, not the victory.
Ragnar and Joao were at war, and eventually Ragnar started seriously losing, with Joao taking his capital. Since I already had Assembly Line, infantry were one tech away at Rifling, and I upgraded a couple macemen in order to jump in and poach a few Viking cities.
Presently, my capital popped a third Great Artist. I'm saving two for potential Golden Ages, but the third is pretty much superfluous. However, this is a great time to fire a culture bomb at that Viking city I just captured. The big reason is that Nidaros is in the fourth ring from my city - and since the Vikings will be eliminated, their ex-capital with near-no Portuguese culture should be quite flippable by a powerful neighbor.
Actually, in hindsight, that culture bomb was probably wasted. The culture from the corporations would've zoomed Haithabu to fourth-ring soon enough anyway, and that Artist could have settled instead for more culture at the scoring date.
Anyway, after a few more city captures (using just the two infantry and leftover knights from the Mayan war), the Vikings went down as scheduled.
