Middle Ages:
I entered the middle ages in 390 BC, having just taken one Russian city and made an unsuccessful attack on Moscow. The war continued in a rather sporadic manner, as I captured two more cities before making another larger attack on Moscow in 70 BC. This battle was similarly unsuccessful due to the truly huge number of Russian spearmen, and I lost a few more units before making peace in exchange for three Russian cities plus a few gpt, leaving Russia with Moscow and one outlying town. I spent the next 20 turns rebuilding my army and doing research, before refusing to extend peace in 300 AD. I traded and researched my way to Chivalry in 360 and finally took Moscow in 450 with the help of keshiks and medieval infantry. Upon taking the city, I discovered what Cat had been up to all those years instead of building military. The city contained the Great Wall, the Mausoleum of Mauselos, and the Colossus. Presumably she would also have built the Oracle if the Portugese hadnt beat her to it. Maybe losing most of her empire made her try for a 20k victory. The world will never know. The colossus at least would have been useful if the city hadnt been over 50% corrupt. The remaining city fell in 490, leaving me free to go onto bigger and better things. Of course, at this date many other players were already fighting Celts and Vikings.
Now that I had Keshiks, I was ready to conquer the world. Realizing that my rivals would eventually develop gunpowder, I decided to make a beeline for military tradition in order to have cavalry for later campaigns. My first real conquest was Korea, started in 500:
Because I wasnt keen to have expensive attack 4 keshiks going up against fortified pikes in cities, my first goal was to take out the iron near Pyongyang. My Keshiks, backed up by trebuchets to deal with the pikes, made their way to Pyongyang and pillaged the iron, then captured the city. From there, they met up with another incvasion force to take Inchon, then marched on Seoul. Once the capital had fallen, the army left behind the trebs and scattered in all directions to take out the small outlying cities. In 740, I had taken out all the continental cities and made peace in exchange for two island cities, leaving Korea with one island city, which I kept around in case I ever got to the IA.
Since this was the only campaign that saw extensive use of Keshiks, Ill give my evaluation of them here. They arent all that impressive. Now they arent useless, like the F-15 or ManOWar, but they arent one of the better units. Ignoring hills is neat, and it makes them good at pillaging and taking good defensive positions within enemy territory. But with a defense of 2, their survivability in enemy territory isnt that good. Leaving the defense at 3 would have made them quite formidable, since they could penetrate quite far into hilly terrain and be hard to dislodge, but as it was, I wasnt very excited.
Meanwhile, back home, I had been concentrating on settling the area north of the desert. By the end of the Korean war, I had managed to take most of this land, with a few scattered foreign cities, mostly Chinese, added to the mix. The emphasis was on high-shield cities with a combination of grasslands and hills/mountains, as well as connecting the luxuries that were hidden in the tundra. The Mongol homeland consisted mainly of the starting river valley, and the green valley to the east. With the addition of the former Russian lands, this made up most of the productive non-corrupt radius of the Mongol empire, and was thus all that was needed to take on the word. Technologically, I had focused on the military branch of the tree. I went all the way to mil. tradition and then went 0% science, 0% luxuries, in order to rake in lots of gold for rushing production and upgrading my Korean War veterans to cavalry and cannons. Finally, I spent my golden age building the Knights Templar in Karakorum. Since I never planned on getting steam power, it would never go obsolete. I ultimately ended up getting 18 crusaders from it over 90 turns. This was probably a waste, since I would have gotten more use out of more early keshiks.
The discovery of military tradition coincided with the end of the Korean war, so I quickly declared against China. China was a democracy with several cities encroaching on my territory, so my plan was to quickly take a bunch of small, accessible cities to give them a quick shot of war weariness. The main action of the war was centered around the small river valley with the floodplain wheat:
I initially moved a large force of Keshiks and cannons toward Macao from Ereen. China responded by taking Ereen with riders, so I had to take Macao, then turn around and face the Chinese invasion force. There were a few tense turns as I faced several waves of riders and ancient cavalry. When the dust cleared the Chinese army was in ruins and I was free to storm over their lands. The great wall was useless against my cannons, though I could see it slowing down a force of unaided keshiks if Id tried that. The war was also made easier by my enlistment of the Japanese, who attacked China from the rear and took several cities. This turned out to be a mistake in the long run, though, as I had overestimated China and underestimated Japan. About the only good it really did was to use up the Japanese golden age before I had to face them. They even chickened out of the war in exchange for Chinese technology (banking and democracy). Mao himself escaped with a single settler on a boat. Eventually I got a message that the Chinese were destroyed, so I suppose the boat sunk or encountered a barbarian galley.
Having taken out China, Japan was the next logical target. However, I had sold them tech for gpt during their golden age and could not attack for another 10 turns without a rep hit, so I rush-built a few caravels and sailed to Portugal. This war was short and sweet. Portugal was so small and primitive that they were no trouble at all, and I declared on Japan partway through the Portugese campaign, confident that I could handle both at once. This turned out to be partly true, as Japan posed the greatest challenge of any adversary I faced. While I had pretty much steamrollered Korea and China, Japan had reached military tradition and had built up a number of cavalry, which actually managed to take back several cities and fight my forces to a standstill until finally being overwhelmed in a war of attrition. What really turned the tide was my use of explorers to pillage the Japanese source of saltpeter, thus removing their ability to make more cavalry after the initial charge. If theyd been half-intelligent, they would have rebuilt the road on the saltpeter and guarded it more heavily, but AIs dont do that it seems. Even after the defeat of the Japanese cavalry, progress into Japanese territory was hindered by the constant risk of counterattack by Samurai, which could not be dealt with by resource denial because Japan had a source of iron deep within their lands. Because Japan was so far ahead in culture, I was forced to raze cities, further slowing my progress. The few small colonies I did keep (on islands or the other continent) flipped with alarming regularity. Japans many widely scattered colonies were the key to their survivability. Just when I was about to kill them off for good, there would always be a last-minute culture flip or a unit coming out of nowhere to take an undefended city. Finally, in 1285, 25 turns after the war began, I had wiped them off the face of the earth.
With Japan and Portugal dispatched, I was nearing domination. Only the Celts and Vikings remained. The choice was really a no-brainer. The Celts had cavalry, culture, and a large continent-spanning empire. The Vikings had berserks and a lot of frozen tundra. Since the Celts had only 20% of the land, I could get domination without having to fight them at all. I landed troops on two opposite shores of Scandinavia, with the southern forces engaging the Viking army while the northern invaders started taking cities. Cavalry and armies were the real heroes of this war, as the Vikings had apparently only recently discovered gunpowder and their cities were defended mostly by eminently blitzable spearmen. The huge stack of cannons that had served me so well against China and Japan was left without much to do at all. I was quite surprised, however, to see a stack of blue archers emerge from Celtic lands near the end of the war and attempt to take back their homeland. My theory is that they had trekked all the way north from two distant Viking tundra colonies, unaware that the war was pretty much over. This would explain why I found those colonies pretty much undefended. In any case, they had to predate the Viking discovery of Invention:
Despite the efforts of these brave, doomed archers. Scandinavia fell quickly and after plugging a few holes in my territory I had a domination win. The final stats were.
Win date 1360 AD (possibly my earliest civ3 win ever, which says something about my playing style)
Firaxis Score - 5030
Jason Score 7964
From looking at the other spoilers, this is an obscenely late domination win by the standards of any good player. From what I can tell, I did several things wrong:
- Founding my capital in a forest-less location, thus slowing my first granary.
- Wasting lots of troops on Moscow before I had any chance of taking it.
- Building too many cannons and infantry in a cav vs. musket game.
- Rushing lots of settlers and temples to fill gaps in my territory while wars were still ongoing.
- Choosing Monarchy over Republic.
- Not moving my palace.
The last one in particular interests me because I deliberately chose not to move the palace with a MGL because all the lands outside my core were primitive war-ravaged wastes that would take a while to build up enough to offset the loss of production in my core. Really, I think it was the cannons, and my own casualty-averse perfectionism that killed me. Simply rushing a horde of cavalry and throwing them at anything that moved would probably have led to a quicker (if messier) victory. How many of you used cannons/trebs? Were they worth slowing down your army for?
, getting domination in 800ad. 
