So now what? I'm obviously far ahead of the AIs and can trash this game any way I want. I'm not so hot on culture any more, mostly because the city choices for it are so awkward. Uruk doesn't want to be legendary since it's the Heroic Epic and devoted to unit production, plus has too much water to be a strong builder. Moscow is my single strongest city, four foods and several cottages. But Constantinople already got a Great Work which would be wasted if that's not a culture city, but it's also a waste to have two legendarys with that much overlap.
Another option might be to exit with a religious victory, but Ruff avoided that too by turning off vassal states. I've accumulated way too many "you declared war on our friend" to get any natural votes.
So the natural path is to get a window of tech advantage and continue conquering. But what window?
Not cannons. There is NO IRON anywhere on our continent. One of Ruff's nice little twist surprises, no doubt.
Not knights or cuirassiers. They also require iron.
Not muskets. The AIs have hefty stacks of units that will only get bigger. Muskets don't really overpower longbows.
Riflemen are a dozen techs away and scientists can't make any progress lightbulbing there. (Need to knock out Education before Printing Press can be bulbed.) And I've done a rifle crush thousands of times.
Trebuchets might be okay, and I've rushed to Engineering already. Although the problem here is that trebs pose the worst conflict by our variant rule. Catapults don't upgrade to trebs and we can't have both.
Best option: Grenadiers. Just five techs away since I have Engineering. In the meantime, just go ahead and burn my catapults so I can switch to trebs.
So I did raze Tenochtitlan, and once again pulled the trick of declaring and moving on another target before borders adjusted. India had gotten Feudalism, so this fight was against longbows.
And this spearman. Who brainlessly suicidally counterattacked against my stack. Except that he won seven straight rounds to beat my vulture. Folks, the odds of that were 0.001378 or 1 in 725. Gandhi, I'm going to have to ask you to step away from being the India turn player.
Anyway, here's an overview. As planned, all my catapults died at Delhi, and now I can replace the category with trebuchets instead.
Seoul had played the standard autopilot for Great People, the Great Library / National Epic combo. It put out some GPs pretty quickly now. #2 was a Scientist, who bulbed Philosophy, mostly in order to knock it out of the way for my planned bulb of Chemistry.
GP #3 came at tiny Artist odds from the Heroic Epic. He went for the 1-man Golden Age just now. It was perfectly timed to adopt Vassalage just before those trebuchets were produced, timed to adopt Mercantilism by the end of the GA, and also I pulled a temporary Pacifism switch during the GA itself in order to cash out two more GPs from Uruk and Constantinople. Those two GPs came as an unlucky Prophet and Artist, who just got saved for the 2-man GA later.
I'd avoided Hunting for a long time, but then the furs camp at Delhi made me trade for it. (A camp can't supply furs if you don't have Hunting.)
By the way, would somebody please explain to me and to the Persepolians what in the world logic is making that crazy border there? It adjusted after another turn or two, though.
Madrid flipped to Sitting Bull just before I was going to invade him. Oddly, even though he had Feudalism, the free flip defenders were only archers. I retook it, but of course 97% odds isn't enough for a trebuchet to attack without dying, and it even won only one round. Odds of that or worse were 2.4/(4.0+2.4) ^ 7 rounds won * 8 binomial combinations = 0.8%.
So it had been a dozen or so turns of clunky manuevering with the Madrid recapture, but now the mess is clean. There's a nice neat stack about to capture Cahokia. Just one type of mounted unit, one type of melee, one type of archery, and siege. Of course, two trebs and a vulture all lost at 80% attacking the city. And a horse archer at 97%.
That stack of units was overkill for Cahokia, but there's always something for extra units to do. I had enough horse archers to yet again pull the trick of jumping on attack before city borders adjusted, wiping out Pasargadae in a single turn with horses. With zero losses thanks to four straight 60% wins. The RNG shall ever swing.
And I continued with a split stack again to go faster, again using horse archers to beat Persian archers on flatland, while the siege stack worked on Native American longbows on a hill.
Killing Sitting Bull had the bonus effect of eradicating the knowledge of Feudalism from my continent! Babylon and Boudica still lack longbows.
