This is the story of my game of Civilization IV Epic Seven from Realms Beyond Civilization. The scenario setup is a duel game against only one opposing civ, on Immortal difficulty. The variant rule is that we may never land any units on the enemy home continent, meaning that conquest victory is impossible.
At the end of my previous game, Adventure 10, I left a cryptic comment about having another reason for doing the cultural victory in that game. This is that reason, since I wanted a run through a cultural gameplan on low difficulty before doing the same here on Immortal.
Just like the original Civ 3 Epic Seven, this game presents a good opportunity for a cultural victory, for the same reasons: we can't win by conquest or diplomacy, and the global tech pace will be slow, but on Immortal difficulty without the ability to attack or pillage our rival's core, we may have trouble beating him to space.
In the original event, I guessed that culture would be an original game plan, but it turned out that more than half the players thought as I did and played for culture. This time, I'm fully expecting much of the player field to do the same. There hasn't been a recent Realms Beyond event that played well for a cultural game plan; the previous three Epics were all heavily oriented for combat, Adventures 7 and 8 didn't allow cultural victory, and 9 and 10 strongly encouraged other paths. So the player base should have some pent-up demand for culture, and I'm here to meet this challenge head-on.