Several turns before that, I'd set sail with my naval forces. 11 transports carrying an approximately equal mix of cavalry, riflemen, and artillery.
Yeah, riflemen; somehow I hadn't had rubber, and I certainly hadn't wanted to trade the tech to anyone else just so I could buy some rubber.
I landed my invasion force, then realized I'd made a very very stupid mistake: I'd forgotten to bring any settlers. Oooooops! It'd be ten turns of sailing to bring over any more, so I'll just have to capture a Babylonian city and rush an airport. Conveniently enough, the city of Adab is right there and has rubber. I wouldn't be able to capture the city of Lagash before Spain did, but I got Adab and rushed an airport there. Rubber was online, I rushed a barracks and upgraded all the invading rifles, and started building and airlifting gobs of tanks.
You can also see some Roman units there at Lagash. What are they up to?
Ah, I see.
Here's a shot of Babylon's lands, and some scribblings I was doing to plan out a dotmap for my own cities in the area.
The central dot by Babylon would be my new capital, as it's in the best Iron Works location I've ever seen. Eight hill or mountain tiles, about eight bonus grassland as well (just as good as hills), and one cattle as well.
It would actually turn out that I'd end up ignoring the dots, and just keeping all the Babylonian cities where they were. I had to do this because I'd forgotten to bring settlers; I had to keep the population in the Babylonian towns, to use for settlers, to fill empty space before Spain did.
I also had to run blockades with cavalry to block Spain from reaching Babylonian cities, until my tanks finally got there and were ready to roll. Spain would manage to grab the city of Kish, but I got all the rest.
And there's the Great Leader that I need to relocate the Palace.
Then Arabia decides to make things even more interesting:
