Aluminum Co founded in 1420 AD. Now I had 8 turns left to spread it and the other three corps as far as possible. I stopped research - no tech I could reach would help any scoring before 1500 AD - and used the money for foreign expansion. This seemed a bit overkill - could I really spend 1000 gold per turn on corp expansion? - but the answer most definitely turned out to be yes. For Sid's Sushi to buy out Standard Ethanol cost over 400 per city.
So every city begain training nothing but executives. Once my domestic spread of Aluminum Co was complete, I gifted coal to Germany so the corp would have more markets. (Ignore the 100% espionage slider in that picture. I misclicked and would change it back.)
The official scoring at 1500 AD:
+300 : 50 x 6 corporate HQs controlled (all but Std Ethanol.)
+184 : 2 x 92 branches of owned corporations (see the picture, plus 2 Cereal Mills and 1 Mining Inc.)
+ 36 : 3 x 12 cities of size 5 or greater.
+150 : 30 x 5 culturally flipped cities.
+ 70 : 1 corporate HQ flipped (Cereal Mills.)
----
+740 points.
And, well, the end of the game is at hand. The overview picture also shows the state of my third cultural city - it's 10 turns away from victory. During that time I kept building more executives, but skipped the micromanagement and just used the auto-spread button. I also gifted coal to Ottomans so I could spread AlumCo there. (I didn't have any more coals - giving away my last one would've turned off my own AlumCo branches.)
Endgame score:
- 220 : -1 x 220 turns to achieve victory
+ 127 : 1 x 127 branches of owned corporations (see the picture, plus 2 Cereal Mills and 1 Mining Inc.)
+ 24 : 2 x 12 cities of size 10 or greater
----
- 69 points endgame
+ 440 points at 1 AD
+ 740 points at 1500 AD
----
1111 points. Four of a kind! :)
The stage for all that was set by a spectacularly successful land-grab. My Rome was double the size of every neighbor and tops in the world by a significant margin. As always, land is power.
From the previous snapshot to this one all by corporate culture flips.
The usual incredibly misleading GNP graph, where of course the bulk of my production is corporate culture, not economy. The 1500 AD shot shows 6000+ civ-wide culture and barely over 2000 units of real economy. Mr. Sid the Sushi Chef doesn't cook his fish, but he sure cooks the books.
The hammer graph, which tells more of the real story of this game.
The power graph, which shows that I trailed early, but not by nearly as much as sometimes, and caught up to the pack by midgame. No wars ever happened, but even if they had, a few whipped machine guns would have resisted it easily.