We were right.

We ended up deciding on the Incans for me, the Mayans for him. Both are fairly decent new C3C civs, though one has to realize that the Incans get screwed by the Chasqui scout, a scout with warrior stats that costs more. The Maya? The Maya get EVERYTHING. The Javelin Thrower is a 2/2/1 archer/spear, available from pretty much the start, and you've got a 1/3 chance to enslave your enemies, creating a worker. Plus their leader title is "Great Instigator," which is the coolest title in the game. Plus they have Eighteen Rabbit as a leadername.

I warn you now, we saw an awful lot of Eighteen Rabbit.

And lo, there we were. I'm pink, Cole's blue, orange is the Dutch, cyan is the Hittites, grey is India, turquoise is Sumer, purple is Portugul, and the other blue is Korea.

Cole, you'll understand, got massively screwed in the land lottery. Stuck on a penninsula, all of which was plains or desert. His one resource? Ivory. I've seen worse starts, but that one is pretty bad. What that meant was that Cole was very very behind for a very very long time.

I, on the other hand, started with some of the best land on the planet, had the scouts to get contact with the rest of the world, and was pretty much on top of the game, having decided to go for a non-OCC 20k win with Cuzco. I set about doing this, but was nevertheless denied the Colossus by Dutch Amsterdam, who didn't just have SOME of the best land on the planet, they DID have the best land on the planet. I might have had more, except the Hittites surged ahead on our continent, cutting both Cole and I off. Cole, meanwhile, was in the game essentially because I was feeding him tech.

This was in 1325 BC, whereupon the world looked like this:

Among other things, this started a 2500 year competition between Amsterdam and Cuzco for wonders and culture rating. It actually became a real race when I completed the Oracle in 950, followed up immediately by the Mausoleum of Mausolus in 650 BC.

Somewhere around 510 BC, a war began on the other continent between Korea and Sumer on the one hand, the Portugese on the other. About then, I made contact with the Sumerians, with my sole galley:

Odyessus would go on to play a major part in discovering the world, and would eventually end up being upgraded all the way to a transport, camping out in a city I renamed Ithaca for most of the game.

Of note, it was discovered that Ur was right next to a volcano. Given the random fluctuations in population we saw every so often, we think it got nailed by a couple of volcano hits. Poor Ur.

Cole, meanwhile, had that Ivory. For those of us who remember all the C3C wonders, we know about the Statue of Zeus. We know about the brutality of the ancient cavalry it spits out every five turns. Cole realized this too, and realized his path to greatness. Thus it was that in 390 BC he built the Statue of Zeus, kicking off a wonder cascade which gave the Great Lighthouse to Amsterdam, and took out the Temple of Artemis and the Hanging Gardens.

And the world looked thusly:

The Hittites and Dutch are running rampant on our side of the world, and Korea and Sumer are dominating the other. Portugul is on their way out, and would die by 330 AD.

Bu 70 AD, Cole was ready. Seizing upon the Hittites, who had been major, major dicks to everyone for the last thousand years, he began rampaging on them, taking down Hattusha, Hattusas, and Aleppo by 230 AD, whereupon sometime or another peace was made, and Aleppo was given to me for lack of a better idea. Amongst other things, he pulled his first leader and made an ancient cav army, which is a thing of surpassing brutality. Too, it was the Age of Bob.

If there was ever a Bob's unit, ancient cavalry is it.

I, meanwhile, built the Great Library, which was half for denial, half for culture, since I WAS the world tech leader, along with the Dutch.

Unfortunately for the poor Hittites, their trials weren't over. The Indians took Haran, and Cole once again seized the day, jumping in on the Hittite side, and rampaging across India. Among other things, this gave him Iron finally, and a lot of land. By 550 AD, the Indians were reduced to settler on a galley action for a few more hundred years, and Cole turned on the Hittites, seizing their Indian gains and more or less running down the remaining Hittites, who died in 730 AD, by the hands of the great leader Eighteen Rabbit at Tyrana.

Note the blue speck over on the other continent - Mayan Kadesh, gained in the first Hittite peace, and kept by Cole for quite some time after. My easternmost city is ex-Indian Calcutta, which Cole gave me for the hell of it.

I, meanwhile, was doing the wonder thing still, going for Sistine's. I missed the Knights Templar to Sumer, and Magellan's/Newton's in Amsterdam, and gave Copernicus to Cole, but

While we were all having our fun, around 1000 AD, Sumer and Korea got into it with each other, a titanic war which would go on for a very long while.

By 1380, Cole was ready for the Dutch, who it must be understood were still the 900 lb. gorilla of our continent, ancient cav or no ancient cav. By this time, however, Cole had real cavalry - armies of them no less. Thus it was that in 1415 the northernmost Dutch cities fell to Cole, and the Dutch colonies on the other continent went to Cole's ally, Sumer. And Cole kept going, and going, all the way to the gates of Amsterdam. By 1495, I was on a wonder roll, netting Smith's. We'd made it all the way to the Industrial Age by then, and I of course lacked Coal, but that could be dealt with...in the ruins of the southern other continent, I founded my coal colony, Vilcas.

And here's the world the turn before Vilcas' existence:

You'll note the re-emergance of the Indians on the little penninsula at the southern tip. Vilcas would exist right about there. Also note Cole's rampage on the Dutch.

By 1500, peace had broken out again, just in time for Amsterdam to net Universal Suffrage. Unfortunately for Cole, all of his gains flipped back to the Dutch, at the same time he was fighting a strange little war. In 1630, see, Sumer decided it wanted Kadesh, so it went down and took it. Cole dragged in the Netherlands to keep Sumer busy, and Sumer dragged in Korea to keep Cole busy. Other than some ship combat, this war never amounted to much, though it went on for a while.

Meanwhile, I was building the Theory of Evolution, Cole the Hoover Dam.

By 1760, I was getting bored. I was just sitting, hadn't been in any wars, and hadn't had a Golden Age yet. So what did I do? That's right. I built a bunch of Chasqui scouts, airlifted them over to Vilcas, used my artillery to blow up the spears defending Jaipur, and razed the place. With Chasquis. In 1760 AD.

The Sumerians were so impressed by this, they took down the Koreans in about the same amount of time it took me to get up and level Indian Hyerdabad - not long. By the 1770s, Korea and India were dead.

And thus was the world in 1770 AD. Sumer's about as impressive as they look, except they're about half an age behind in tech, and still have a bunch of jungle to clear. All that warring finally caught up with them.

The Netherlands, though. They were doing good. Keeping up in tech, decent army, you name it. Which didn't prevent Cole from running over half of their civilization with tanks in 1776, but Cole's civ had come a long way, after all. Instead of waiting for the flips, he gave me half of what he took, which I COULD garrison, and actually wanted, and he razed all the rest except Amsterdam and Haarlem. By 1786 the Dutch were exiled to their islands.

And then we sat down for some more wonders. By 1772, Cuzco picked up SETI, the Internet, and the United Nations. Unfortunately for any dreams of world peace I may have had, Cole decided to go take on Sumer. Mano a mano. Man to man. Just Gilgamesh, Cole, and Cole's 50 or so Modern Armor and 6 armies of various sorts. Cole took Lagash in 1846, and there was much slaughtering of suicidal Sumerian cavalry for quite some time. By the time I picked up the UN, he had made it pretty far into Sumer:

About this time, Cole decided to make Sumer glow in the dark, and launched enough ICBMs to hit every single Sumerian city multiple times. Every turn or so he'd get another couple, every turn or so he'd launch them.

In 1910, about the time Cuzco was discovering a Cure for Cancer, Cole declared peace with what was left of Sumer for all but three of Sumer's cities, then turned around the very next turn and took them all down. In 1916, Sumer was gone, and Cole declared on the Dutch by taking a single modern armor army he happened to have sitting on our continent, throwing it on a boat, and ferrying it from island to island. By 1934, there were an entire two Dutch cities left, and it was looking like Cole had about three turns until it was just me and him.

I, however, had been busy. I managed to get us all the way up to researching future tech 1, and in 1934, I built Longevity at the same time Cuzco reached 20k culture and won me the game.

For the curious, here's the score between Amsterdam and Cuzco, all told:

Owned.

And as for the world power graph: