Round 3b
I stationed myself on the hill outside Banteay Kdei and Sury hit me with a few Cuirassiers. I lost some cannons and 2 Pikemen but not enough to slow me down. The good part was that he lost a lot of units there [his SoD had been far].
One turn after capturing the city, Sury is back with more troops!
Well well... here's a use for Protective: let him suicide his units. Instead of attacking I just healed for one more turn while he suicided everything and I lost absolutely nothing. The free CG promotion on Muskets was most welcome.
I made my way slowly along the east coast, where the big juicy cities were.
A secondary stack formed mainly of Rifles would hit the western cities.
So what was Sury so busy doing instead of researching Rifling?
In his defense, he did go for Military Science however... not that it helped him much against Cannons.
Julius had gone into war-mode a while ago back when he was Friendly to me. I was expecting him to jump on Sury at any moment but...
A typical Khmerian city garrison. Sury focused mainly on mounted troops...
...which suck at defending cities.
I finally made progress on the research front, finishing Biology.
While Sury was busy reinforcing his western cities, my secondary stack hit one of his cities via Roman lands.
Part of Sury's success lay in this city:
Actually, I can't really call it success anymore, can I? More like demise
His capital fared no better. It was surprisingly well garrisoned with him having only 3 cities on the landmass at this point.
Seeing Julius was researching Biology (wouldn't offer good gold/techs) I gave it to him which brought him back to Friendly... enabling this trade:
Sury finally started going after the military techs... getting Rifling, Artillery. It was too late and his last 2 mainland cities fell to cannon barrage.
Sury is now left with 4 island cities and I have no navy to speak of.
He's willing to capitulate - I will most likely accept it, he still has a good research capacity and several techs on me. That and someone else will get him if I don't.
I'll try getting better techs from him from Capitulation however. (Medicine?)
The game looks well in hand at this point. Julius is advanced but small (8 cities) and will be crushed once I get Bombers.
On the other continent, Mansa is pretty big and advanced and is my only competitor I feel. He vassaled Huayna Capac and joined the war on Brennus. I have a feeling he might be going for Culture however, which would mean I can stomp on him with a tech lead (or nukes hehe).
Lincoln is just waiting to be vassaled.
Tech overview
Diplomacy
I haven't decided how to handle the economy going forward. Mansa got The Kremlin so rush buy is a little bit less interesting. Watermills/Workshops/Windmills would help my initial cities where food is bad for several of them. With Electricity and Financial the commerce bonus is actually pretty good.