Peace is the answer

So I finally ended the war with Greece. We came to a peace treaty where I received more of the spoils. It was interesting to note how I kept waiting to completely annihilate them and rid the world of that empire, but it never happened. I was concerned for a while that I was not playing the game correctly. After some time I made the realization that equally advanced countries have never been entirely enslaved, they have been occupied and lost their rights to the victor but at the end of the war the victor left and they had to rebuild a rather decimated economy. For example France still is considered among the most developed countries but it was once occupied and had to rebuild. I also noticed that at the end we had become so advanced but I don’t feel like the economies were operating at their full potential. Resources were unclaimed and therefore our economies never really soared and we never really had an economically strong country. Some of these resources could be found in the Americas. The Americas were never colonized and therefore natives continued to live their lives but they did not reach the same level of advancement as the rest of the empires that began at around the same time which would not be the case in reality. The natives had such elaborate empires; the game completely ignores that and diminishes them to just violent people just waiting to be taken over. This is a very western and imperialistic view of the world, which I guess is what the view was at the time. But after everyone dominates everyone else the idea of peace and progression is what brings the nation together to improve things, like the economy.