I'm finally nearing the end of my game in Civ. In case I haven't mentioned it before, the reason why my game has been going on for so long is because I started my scenario in the ice age so that I'd have as much time as I needed to advance my civilization as much as I wanted, as well as accomplish any other tasks I wanted to in the process. As you can see from reading past blog posts, I managed to accomplish quite a bit and am now in the proccess of trying to win the space race. However, one thing I didn't realize all this time was the huge advantage I had at being a successful civilization during this age. For whatever reason it never occurred to how beneficial it was to conquer all the land that I did when it was all on the same continent, as opposed to the 7 different continents of the modern era. Practically every civilization was a neighbor and bordering me. But since that's not the case now, if I had played in a fairly recent time era I would have had to send settlers, workers, military units, and more to all new continents, some of which I might never have known about until many many years. In my game, there was the big continent I was on and the other little one that I started settlements in neighboring the Americans. Even though it was just one continent shortly separated by mine by a tiny gap of ocean, it really aggravated me when I had to send stuff over there. I can't even imagine how annoying it would be to have settlements on all 7 continents, not to mention how discouraging it would be to even want to expand. This brings to mind what Diamond talked about in Guns, Germs, and Steel about the disadvantages of being isolated from other civilizations. Since all of us were mostly on the same continent, diffusion was easy and happened quickly. However, with a geophraphical set-up like it is now, many different kinds of civilizations will miss out for quite a while and may not come into contact with an outside civilization until way later on in the game. This could greatly hurt any civilization that could have greatly benefitted from trade otherwise. Thinking about all this makes me wonder about how it'd be different to play Civ in a world with 7 continents and if I'd still be able to accomplish what I did in my first game. This presents a good possible scenario for my next game in Civ.