Endgame: 1685AD - 1896AD (Part2)
Our GM arrived at Cuzco down south, which offered 200 more gold for a trade mission than Bibracte:
Anyway, by now our military production was almost in full swing, with our core cities building at least 2 infantries out of 3 builds. I decided to make a civic change so that Hamburg could finally build level 3 units:
The switch would also benefit the other cities, although less directly.
And guess what? We got another GM:
Now we're rich
Take your 70 gold, Brennus. You can give it to the beggars.
Then Barcelona had a Spanish revolt
After all this time? I guess with the abandonment of Free Speech, the Spanish border had finally crept up to the city. Thankfully, the border shifted back soon after and the problem never occured again.
By the way, we researched Artillery after Industrialism. Brennus did build tons of SAM infantry, so artillery would be very important.
The little war against Louis was going well so far. We suffered little to no WW, but he must be having a horrendous problem with it, after losing so many units. However, he eventually came with a surprise:
We didn't have enough Panzers yet to counter that stack without suffering significant losses and infrastructural damage. I had to sue for peace:
He never dropped the claim on that stupid city. I had to give it to him, though. In any case, we were going to engage in a massive war soon and couldn't afford the distraction. Robber peace, but necessary.
After Artillery, we spent 2 turns researching Fascism, after we which we made the switch to Police State:
That would help us with our troop buildup and mitigate WW later. We also started on Mount Rushmore in Munich. The date for declaration of war would be on its completion 6 turns later. I considered waiting for nukes, but I decided that it would be too late. We had to get Fission and Rocketry and build the Manhattan Project and the ICBMs. And what's to stop Brennus from building his own nukes? Getting bombers would take too long as well. Better attack soon, while our enemy still didn't have mech infantry (which are very good at intercepting aircraft, I might add).
Anyway, as we might have expected, Louis didn't actually get a good end of the bargain:
He refused to garrison anything in the city for a long time. Maybe the AI knows when a city might flip anytime?
You can also see how many units we had accumulated by then. We had more on the way. A lot of the infantry units were drafted from our cities. Almost all our cities got the draft.
A few turns later, it was time:
I stationed the bulk of our army in New York, which commanded a central position along the common border with Brennus. The plan was to wage a low-WW war of attrition within our borders. When we had taken enough Celtic units down, we would then go on the offensive and hopefully mop the floor.
[to be continued]
Anyway, personally, I did set off with domination in mind. Perhaps I would have done some things differently from mid-game onwards if space was seriously on the cards.
