Talking Strategy: War with Mehmed
Let's assume that we'll go to war with Mehmed. How would we go about doing it? What steps would we need to take in order to maximize our effectiveness? Is it a feasible path to victory?
How does your plan change? What remains the same?
First Step
Well, the first step would be to do nothing. Okay, not really nothing, but our current turnset's plan will still work.
We want to build Military units to go after the Barb City and to defend our Cities from Zara. Both of those things should still happen. We won't be invading Mehmed by land anytime soon, thus we wouldn't really need to change our planned build orders or unit logistics plans.
Open Borders Resolution Passing before War; Still Closing Border with Zara after 10 turns
We'll still want the Open Borders amongst Confucian Members Resolution to pass, so we won't declare war immediately, either.
Where the plan changes is on the turn where we get Open Borders with the Confucianists. After we get the Open Borders, we should declare war on Mehmed.
We'll still aim to Close Borders with Zara 10 turns later, so no change there, but Toku and Zara will be "building up" partial Open Borders positive Diplo modifiers with each other, so things will be fine.
Getting Zara to Close Borders with Mehmed using Tech Trading with Zara and his Friendliness towards us to our advantage
Now, this situation can be dangerous if Zara keeps Open Borders with Mehmed for a long period of time, because Zara mostly has Confucianism, but also has a couple of "minor" Religions, any of which could spread to Mehmed, and any of which spreading to Mehmed would be A Bad Thing, as the more DIFFERENT Religions that Mehmed ends up, the greater the chance that he'll slip into Free Religion as soon as he gets the opportunity to do so.
So, as soon as Zara learns Machinery, we should aim to get Machinery and War with Mehmed out of Zara. Since Zara still lacks Literature and he doesn't really have anything to trade it with anyone for, he'll still need this tech plus Civil Service. Trading both of these plus as much Gold as we can collect between now and then will hopefully convince our Friendly Ally Zara to both give us Machinery and join the war with Mehmed.
Thus, if you were planning on switching to a 100% Science Rate soon, don't do so: we want to save up our Gold to give us the best chance of bribing Zara into a war with Mehmed.
How does Zara being our Attack Dog Help? Well, we will gain Flexibility in who will vote for us to win the game
This way, our "back is covered" in case Zara gets the bright idea of attacking us--now he'll be far less likely to do so.
In fact, Zara is a very easily-swappable AI:
1. He can eitiher become our UN opponent, by staying in Confucianism and having the other AIs hate him, OR
2. He can very quickly (4 Cities right next to our core Cities) get 4 Buddhist Missionaries from us and be converted to Buddhism, securing his votes for us should we choose to make Mehmed our UN opponent. Since we've been nice to Zara most of the game instead of declaring war on him early on, we have this flexibility that other SGOTM teams that decided to attack Zara might not have
Another task will be to bring Isabella into the war
We might as well just wait for a bit to see if Isabella will naturally join in on our war.
In the meantime, it would be nice to get Delhi to build a Hindu Missionary for Grt Person Farm. That way, we'll be flexible in terms of being able to run Hinduism while in Pacifism. Depending upon how quickly you can build a Hindu Missionary after Oxford and Hiring Scientist Specialists, you may have to start on a Hindu Monastary in Delhi first (which isn't a bad thing, since we plan to run a lot of Scientist Specialists there, so an extra 10% Flask bonus is nice to have).
During BLubz' turnset, if Isabella hasn't joined the war, we can consider dragging her into it by switching into Hinduism during one of our Pacifism Civic runs. While it would be NICE to get Pacifism's bonus GPP all across our empire, as long as we are AT LEAST getting it in both Dehli and Grt Person Farm, it's not the end of the world to miss out on it everywhere else for 5 turns, if it means creating an ally out of Isabella. We'd only need to get her to Pleased in order to get her to declare war on an AI that she is Cautious or worse with, and she is Annoyed with Mehmed. A Religion switch would be an instant +4 Relations with Isabella, which should be enough to get her to a Pleased status, as long as we are nice to her in the meantime.
Therefore, if she Demands anything in the meantime, GIVE IT TO HER. Since we'll be going to war with Mehmed, we no longer have to tip-toe around what he thinks of us trading things to Isabella.
Getting Toku in on the war action
Eventually, we'll want to bring Toku into the war, perhaps after one or both of our other war allies have "called it quits" and have decided to declare peace with Mehmed.
To do so, we simply need to get up to Pleased with Toku, which we could do with a simple switch into Buddhism. As long as he is not yet Pleased with Mehmed, Toku could be bribed into war with Mehmed.
If Toku is Pleased with Mehmed, then we'll have to work a bit harder by capturing whichever City or Cities of Mehmed's have Confucianism in them. After that, it will be simply a matter of waiting for the next Apostolic Palace vote and forcing Toku to join our war, whether he wants to do so or not.
Ideally, both Zara and Toku will be at war with Mehmed at the same time as each other, thus ending our issue of Toku hating Zara and resolving that Diplo conflict for us.
What if Mehmed wants to take on Vassals?
Well, that's the beauty of sticking with our plan of defending our border Cities next to Zara: in order for either Zara or Isabella to become Mehmed's vassal, as long as we remain at war with Mehmed, that AI would also have to be willing to GO TO WAR WITH US.
So, if we quit the war with Mehmed, then we might risk one of those two smaller AIs becoming his vassal. So, we will NOT give Mehmed peace. Doing so could just anger the Buddhists in the future should we need to redeclare on Mehmed, if Mehmed ends up sticking with Buddhism and starts currying their favour in order for them to be Pleased with him.
But, in the worst case, with Mehmed vassalizing either Zara or Isabella, we can:
a) Capture a couple more of Mehmed's Cities, as I do not think that he can become someone else's vassal while having a vassal of his own (please correct me if this assumption is wrong)
AND
b) Safely steal all but 2 of either Isabella's or Zara's Cities, whichever of them chooses to vassalize to Mehmed, since said AI will be "protected" by Mehmed and by first capturing a couple of Mehmed's Cities, we won't have to worry about said AI "growing out of the vassal-master relationship" and thus we won't have to worry about another AI killing said vassal. Essentially, we'll be abusing the fact that Mehmed vassaled one of them to the maximum extent possible.
I suggest leaving said AI with 2 Cities, instead of just 1 City, just in case a surprise attack from another AI manages to capture one of their Cities--we'll have options at that point, including forcing peace through Tech Gifts, to prevent said AI from being eliminated completely.
AIs can be effective at a surprise naval invasion, but being consistently effective with TWO SIMULTANEOUS naval invasions on different Cities? I wouldn't bet on it.
So, we'd be able to cherry-pick Isabella's or Zara's best City or two, all while not worrying too much about them dying, as Mehmed would be "protecting" them. Of course, we'd probably avoid dragging the western AIs into a war at that point, as we should hopefully already have Toku's Shared Mutual Military Struggle bonuses in our favour, while Saladin and Justinian look like they'd vote for us if we were Buddhist and none of the other western AIs were our competitors.
Might they vote for Mehmed instead of us? It's hard to say, since we don't know their relationship values yet, but we're not gonig to leave Mehmed a lot of options for pleasing them--he'll be behind in tech so he can't use tech, he'll be low on Resources so he can't get those bonuses (and if he does, we can pillage them), and since he won't have many techs to offer, he will be unable to get bonuses like "you gave us tribute" or "you gave us help."
What about Toku and Justinian--They are both planning wars of their own
Toku
Okay, well we don't have the "easy option" of forcing Toku into war with Mehmed using the Apostolic Palace, because Mehmed picked up Confucianism.
But it is my guess that BECAUSE Mehmed learned Confucianism, that is the reason why he met all of us Buddhists. I've read that the Apostolic Palace spreads CONTACT, so that must be what happened--Mehmed learned Confucianism and then instantly "got to know" the rest of us Confucianists.
Thats good, though, as it means that Toku will be bribable at some point, but only once he calls off his current war or declares it and is forced to stop.
Well, our CURRENT PLANS are good for a war with Toku. If Toku comes after us, he'll have to go through Crabs, which is where we're funneling most of our military units through, so we should be able to defend any attack that he makes until the Apostolic Palace can call a stop to the war.
If Toku declares war on Zara, the same thing--for all I care, Zara can lose a City--Toku, if he declares war, only really has one target available to him: Lalibela, since Zara's culture pretty much stops Toku's Galleys from getting teleported anywhere near Zara's capitol. If Zara loses that City, he can take it back with his reasonably-sized standing army.
Toku takes at least 10 turns to talk, 20 turns if he is the aggressor, and that amount of time will be more than enough time to call off the war using the Apostolic Palace.
Justinian
A similar deal for Justinian, but we'd probably have to lose a City to him before the Apostolic Palace could be used to call off the war. So, we'd either defend well or lose a City with Confucianism in it.
In the former case, where we can fight him off, no worries--he'll eventually want to talk peace with us.
If he captures Goldfish or Crabs, then instead of trying to recapture the City, we'll just try to keep him from capturing a second City. The Apostolic Palace can then be used not only to stop the war against us, but on the next vote, to give us our City back, too!
If Justinian goes after Zara, we have a couple of options: we can allow them to fight it out, weaking both of their armies. If Zara doesn't lose his capitol, he probably won't want to capitulate to an AI that he dislikes a lot.
If Zara is winning, we can sit back and eat our popcorn, laughing at Justinian's incompetence.
If Zara is losing, we can control the "flow" of the battle by Closing Borders with Justinian. They can be re-opened again later. Doing so would let Zara get the upper hand again and peace would be restored.
At worst case, Zara cannot retake Lalibela and the Apostolic Palace can be used to both stop the war and to gift Zara his City back. If Laliebela were halfway decent at all, we could take it culturally, but honestly, it's junk--we don't really want it, so we'd rather gift it back to Zara.
What could go wrong?
Mehmed could have a Navy
Mehmed might have a stack of boats that haven't been used in the war with Isabella but could be used to come after us. That situation is highly improbable, but at best, he'd temporarily capture Ivory Towers. We'd get our revenge (and our City back) in due time, so I'm not that worried.
Toku and Justinian could attack us both at once
Okay, it would suck if we were fighting all of Mehmed, Toku, and Justinian at once. But, with Zara and/or Isabella dragged into the war with Mehmed, we'd really only be worrying about the western front.
The same strategies would apply that I listed for fighting Toku or Justinian individually, we'd probably just put more of a focus on running the Military Civics and keeping both Crabs and Risaia well defended. It's not like these AIs have a big leg-up on us in tech or anything; probably the worst thing that would happen is having a few Fishing Boats pillaged, but in that case, we could use Police State to get the back online after the wars quickly enough.
If that's the worst that those AIs can do by taking out their frustration on us, then we'll be quite fine in the end analysis and we'll also soon-after be ready to run Buddhism, making them forget all about future wars with us.
What if Saladin gets bribed into a war against us?
Hahaha, that situation is the least likely of them all. Saladin must be Annoyed or worse with the war target in order to be successfully bribed.
As long as we start giving into his Demands again--even to switch Religion to Buddhism (we should be able to afford AFTER the Confucianists will have Open Borders with each other--don't switch before that resolution passes in the next turn or two, or else the Open Borders resolution will be CANCELLED)--then he won't become Annoyed at us, and we'll be invulnerable to this potential attack vector.
Overall
So, overall, I am liking this war with Mehmed idea. As long as we execute it at the right time--after the Open Borders with Confucianists Resolution passes--then we have a lot of methods to make it work to our advantage while also having methods of dealing with a changing Diplo situation if things "start to go wrong" in some way.
Compared to trying to please everyone and ending up pleasing no one, it's best to pick your Friends and your Enemies in a Diplo game. Mehmed seems like the best choice to be our Enemy, so let's "make it so, Number One."
