Round 8: to 1954 AD
The round began, once again, with a few rounds of peace during which I prepared for war. My 3-turn period of Anarchy ended, I resumed researching Combustion, and my economy was humming along, allowing me to research at 80% and be over 100 gold in the black. Nice.
Besides building units and researching military techs, I took a few precautions to reduce war weariness, as I did before the war with Cyrus. To wit:
I later built the Eiffel Tower in Tours as well, though I felt a twinge of guilt for not placing it in Paris.
C'est la vie.
I was mainly building Marines and Artillery but lusting after tanks. Finally, once Combustion was complete, I rushed some workers to the desert southwest of Edo and a few turns later I had oil:
Notice I didn't waste any time in starting to build tanks.
Now, I guess I could have just lowered the slider at this point and upgraded even more units, but I was looking at the tech tree and thinking what military techs would be great to have for this final push. Fighters and Bombers, I decided, would be useful. Besides, Huayna had researched Rocketry and had some SAM Infantry, and I didn't want the little guy to feel like he'd wasted his time on them, now did I?
Time was passing, and I decided that to avoid falling into the builder's trap of doing one thing after another before finally declaring war, I gave myself a deadline of 1940 AD, which seemed appropriate in some ways. It really helped--in the three turns before it, I started moving all my units into position, including moving workers away from the two main fronts and shoring up defenses.
This did have on unintended consequence, however. I moved most of my units out of Arbela to Rheims, and guess what happened:
Well,
nuts. There went the Sistine Chapel, Versailles, and the Hagia Sophia. Oh well, I knew I'd be getting them back, and this freed up over a half-dozen units for the attack and left me with one less city to defend. Yeah, I'm one of those the-glass-is-half-full kinda guys.
Ding! 1940 rolled around. Time's up.
Have you noticed in these games that I always seem to be declaring war on a civ that is "Pleased" or even "Friendly"? I guess it doesn't say much for my diplomacy...
I had a stack parked, conveniently, right next to Ollantyambo (the Taoist holy city), so it fell immediately:
I felt a little nervous hitting ENTER at the end of the turn. Huayna had lots of Cavalry in both halves of his empire. I wasn't worried about losing cities, but I was worried about pillaging.
It turns out that Huayna did very little pillaging. Most of his units remained in his cities. Instead, he sent Artillery to weaken my stacks. He also sent a stack of Cavalry from Vilcas--which we'd been a little worried about--to attack Samaria, the former Persian city on a hill in the desert northwest of Osaka:
The AI takes a lot of flack, but I have to say that Huayna acquitted himself as well as he could. Basically, he did pretty much what I would have done in the same situation. He preserved most of his units for city defense while attempting to weaken and slow down or even turn away my stacks. He took a stack of his best offensive units (Cavalry), which were not going to help much with city defense, and a seige weapon in an attempt to take the "low-hanging fruit"--my closest and least defended city. In his shoes, I would have tried to use the city capture to persuade my AI opponent to sign a peace treaty--maybe even using the city as a bargaining chip.
Unfortunately for Huayna, I had railroads and spies. My spy revealed the movement of his stack towards Samaria, and I moved a few Marines and Tanks from Kyoto and Osaka to meet them when they arrived. So his stack was destroyed and Samaria remained in my hands. He did pillage its incense plantation, which caused me a little happiness problems, but they were more annoying than actually troublesome.
Huayna's cities, in contrast, were falling like dominoes. After I took Ollantyambo, Machu Pichu, Arbela, and Cuzco in the east and Huamanga in the west, I checked the victory conditions:
Granted, several of those cities were still in revolt, but it appeared that I had a ways to go for a domination victory. Since Huayna was mounting an even less effective counter-attack than Cyrus or Isabella, I started pulling defensive units out of border cities to join the attack. I decided that I needed to take all of Huayna's eastern cities and as many of his western ones as were needed for the win, and the faster the better.
I had Fighters attacking to soak up the SAM fire, then bombers to weaken city defenses and cause collateral damage. Battleships were parked outside the coastal cities to strip away city defenses as well. I didn't really need to use seige weapons for anything but city attacks and collateral damage anymore; the city defenses were usually gone, thanks to the bombers and/or battleships, by the time the stack pulled up outside the city gates. I also had
several stacks moving through Incan territory now, weakening defenses and capturing cities, all trying to rush the victory as much as possible.
So Tiwanaku, Gordium, and Parsagdae fell, and the east was mine, all mine. (Yes, it does feel a little weird having to capture the same cities twice in the same game, especially from two different civs.) It still wasn't enough--or at least, wouldn't be until those cities emerged from revolt several turns later.
I started shifting units to the western front. I took Vilcas, then I took Magyar.
Then I checked the Victory Conditions screen:
Awesome. All I had to do now was hit ENTER to bring on the next turn.
Woo-hoo!
Les enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive...
Post-mortem comin' right up!
We could also try playing some of the remaining leaders that way. 
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