852 AS

Lore follows below, after the mod announcement:

CivWorldPowers has now hit the Industrial Revolution, and starting in the next time range, we enter our penultimate era: the Industrial Era!

In this era, much we previously told you not to do becomes fair game. Constitutions! Armored Steamships! Trains! Agricultural Revolution! Population Booms! Colonial Revolutions! Globalization! Socialism! Nationalism!

Obviously, you'll have to work towards any of these things like any normal tech, but they're no longer as anachronistic to pursue. As players, you should aim to craft your nation into what you would want to fight a world war with by the end of the next 2 months. No pressure!

Coal has also been revealed on the map! Coal locations were determined before any civs were claimed, so there's not any bias here.

Previous

In 804 AS, when the first textile mill opened along the Haver River, no man predicted that it would be the beginning of a meteoric rise. Change was merely change, after all. And as more water-driven factories erupted across the Haver River region, producing textiles with a previously unseen speed, still no heads were turned. By the year 826 AS, factories were a ubiquitous sight in Rothovel, water wheels driving great looms.

Perhaps it was these factories, or perhaps it was the mines of Rothovel, but the fact is something inspired the mind of intellectual and inventor Jakues Gosner. By the year 822 AS, this man had finished his primitive heat-driven engine, powered by the mystical abilities of Igneus. Known as the Steam Jack, Gosner's engine began to see use in some Rothovellian mines, where its ability to quickly and efficiently raise materials along the length of a mineshaft increased local productivity.

Still, this engine was no more significant than the factories of the early 9th century. Neither wold hold great interest with a man not of Glimmer, despite their massive value within. It was a great synthesizer, Max Drusshart, who broke new ground in 851. He had heard of the Castrysian discovery of great deposits of coal beneath the Castrysian plains. He was of course familiar with the substance; many furnaces in Rothovel employed it as a fuel when charcoal was in short supply. Still, despite this familiarity, no industrialists of Opertin saw the promise. They had their Igneus Jack, and that was all they needed.

The truth was, Max Drusshart was not a wealthy man for his social standing. He was not poor; he owned a great deal of industrial sites across Rothovel, but he could not afford the Igneus to build a Steam Jack, even though he had himself deduced how one would work. It was Drusshart's mix of jealousy, desperation, and resourcefulness that led him to try coal. By the end of 852, the Drusshart Jack was running on three of the man's mines, black smoke filling the skies over each as his men shoveled coal into the boiler.

At first Drusshart was laughed at by his far richer contemporaries, but that was until they saw Drusshart's mines appear in areas known for their flooded undergrounds. They at first presumed him mad, but these mines, each with their own Drusshart Jack employed to pump liquid from the depths, boasted great output. When it was realized Drusshart had found a way to mine the un-minable, every former rival became a friend. Everyone in Rothovel needed a piece of this new technology, and it was not long before word would spread abroad. This was truly Drusshart's day.

The Industrial Revolution had begun in Rothovel.