>>3152281All right, computer crashed while I was typing but the gist of the scenario is that the world was engineered by some type of ancient precursor whose identity varies depending on who you believe, consisting of a massive, and I'm talking multi-continent sized steel and concrete structure known as the laybrinth which makes up roughly 1/6th of the world. In the center of this labyrinth is the city Core, said to contain the tools that whomever sculpted this world used to make it such the way it is to begin with, and whichever group controls core is automatically several technology levels ahead of the rest (Hackers).
This leads to some early game fuckery as apparently certain events are tied to whoever is at the highest era at the time, and since Core was in the industrial age while everyone else were literal cavemen or worse, this meant musketeer pirates spawning around 50000 BC and raping mostly early civs in the first 100 turns, with only my own civ (Fairies) and Core surviving this onslaught of the original civs. Luckily, to make the game less boring new industrial-age civs eventually spawned from the barbarian cities that were better equipped to survive the techno-barbarian horde, and since they lacked infrastructure to build advanced units early game they were more or less on par with a classical-era civ militarily, so I wasn't too heavily outclassed. But I've got to say surviving early game was a test of wits as I needed to fight off 20 strength Musketeers with 4 Strength Stone Spearmen and if I was lucky 8 Strength War Mammoths. Fun times.
Anyway, after the early game went through and everyone was established, I managed to climb up the ranks in spite of being always two eras behind everyone else by virtue of being the most politically stable civ: see, the AI isn't really intended to start in later eras in C2C, as it needs to start early in order to build guard units, who fight crime. Without guards, crime increases, leading to revolts.