This night I held a special event. A four player, full game of Through the Ages. We even started earlier than normal at 6:00pm. The game lasted 6 hours though. And, strangely enough, no one attacked or started a war during the game.
This game, while fun, suffers from two problems. The first is the down time. The only way to alleviate that is to bring a computer with an internet connection.
The second is randomness of the military cards. You need a well balanced draw (some tactics cards, some defense cards, some event cards, etc). It always seems that you can never draw what you need. I think that this game needs a card rack for military cards as well as civil cards.