I've been playing for a while now and I've begun to realize that the game must be coming to an end soon. And since I'm nowhere near conquering the world or being the most peaceful civilization or anything like that. I figure that the only way to finish on top is to be the most advanced civilization in the world. The only problem is I've been focusing so much on obtaining as much land as I can and building and improving my army, and not as much on things that would improve my civilization technologically. I started to reasearch oil, which in the longrun leads to more advanced units, buildings, and eventually to rocketry. I saw this as my best chance to get way ahead in the game. However, after reasearching oil, the only sources of oil nearby were in Japan, the civilization on the continent right next to mine. I've been getting really sick and tired of having to battle more empires endlessly, but it seems if I just took control of that continent I'd have a huge source of oil. There's also a lot of the world I haven't mapped yet, so it'd probably save more time to just fight Japan and gain it's land, than to roam around the world looking for sources of oil. This is a good example of the geographical advantage point that Diamond stresses so much in his book. Clearly, the Incans were not situated in a location that was ideal for technological advancement. It was fortunate that this game isn't biased to geographical locations and lets any civilization anywhere research anything. If it was more based on reality, I might not have ever found oil, which could have led to my empire potentially falling behind everyone else.

I'm probably not going to go to war with Japan any time soon. Aside from having an exhausted army from fighting like 3 empires, I have friendly relations with Japan and they provide me with goods that I don't have like cow and corn. It'll eventually have to happen though, and lucky for me, like the other ones I've fought they're the weakest and smallest civilization out of all the others that I've encountered. Next time I play I think I'm gonna work on trying to gain the coastal city of theirs thats the closest to the oil spots by trade. That way I don't have to face the heavy consequences of going to war with them, and it will also save a whole lot of time that I could use to work on other things.