[continued from previous post]
The failure of the Arab invasion and fierce fighting with the Ottomans on their own continent soon brought the Arab Crusade to an end. Only the Arab navy remained active in Egpyt, continuing the blockade until 1794, when a peace treaty was signed between Arabia and Egypt in which the Arabs agreed to pay the Egyptians 190 pounds of gold and provide them with Arab maps. The war with the Ottomans, however, continued until peace was finally signed in 1796 under Egyptian auspices. Some historians have argued that it was not in Egypt's interest to let their wartime allies crush the Arabs and become stronger, and hence the Senate had decided to bribe the Ottomans to end the war. The latter only gained the Arab city of Kufah.
You lose, Saladin:
Through him, we could finally get a glimpse of the other continent.
On the next turn, we finished researching Assembly Line, the first in the world to do so
I decided to shop around with it:
This wasn't a very equal trade, but he wouldn't give us Astronomy or MT with it and the other two techs together aren't as good as Steel and 1280 gold. Astronomy would obsolette Colossus immediately and MT is of no great value to us. At least the gold would allow us to run 100% research for quite a while and make up for the turns of research lost raising money to rush buy or upgrade troops (a few pikes to riflemen).
Mehmed was not willing to give any tech for it, probably since he was close to researching it himself, but we made a deal out of it anyway:
At least that would stop him from conquering more Arab cities and becoming a rival too strong to compete against. The additional gold would allow us to run 100% research even longer.
Anyway, I haven't mentioned that we were at war against Mao too.
When Egypt invaded the Inca kingdom, the Inca emperor sought the help of the Chinese by pledging himself as vassal to the Chinese Consul. Although the Chinese declared war on the Egyptian Empire, it was not until 1782 that they sent troops to the the Egyptian continent. Before that, Chinese war efforts consisted of a small blockade on the tiny fishing town of Vitoria in the south of the continent. In 1782, however, Gaul found itself besieged once again.
I tried to get Gandhi to declare on Mao, but he was being a bastard again:
Our 'friend', the bald freak. Gandhi will be my no.1 enemy in subsequent games. He has earned his way there in my books.
Since Indian help was not forthcoming, I decided to switch back to Representation:
We needed to speed up our research again. We stayed in Nationalism, though, as the Chinese might land anytime and anywhere. And eventually they did:
The Chinese sent more cavalry than the Arabs did, as well as cannons. However, they did not send a single infantry battalion, which proved to be their grave mistake as the Egyptian Rifle Militia and a few regular battalions were able to destroy the Chinese cavalry as soon they landed. The Chinese could only bombard Gaul with their cannons, which were destroyed in the Egyptian counterattack. Subsequently, the Chinese, like the Arabs, could only maintain a naval blockade on the city. The blockade was the only instance of Arab-Chinese cooperation in the Crusades for, although the two Christian powers were traditionally allies, they had not assisted each other in these wars.
Fortunately, I kept a few riflemen waiting between Gaul and Thebes, in case Mao landed his troops near any of these two cities. He had been bombarding Vitoria with a frigate to the south, but I reckon we could lose afford to lose one or two small cities there if it came to it. Priority for protection went to our major cities, and fortunately that policy wasn't a mistake. When he landed, we were able to take out all his cavalry immediately and he was left with two cannons:
They died in the subsequent scuicide attacks on Gaul. By then, however, we could no longer delay the population of Gaul from starving to death due to the naval blockade.
Once it was evident that Arab and Chinese attempts at invasion had failed and peace between the Ottomans and the Arabs had been brokered, the Egyptian Empire reneged on its promises of religious freedom and announced that Confucianism was again its state religion, in the hopes of re-employing the vast Confucianist institutions to help in scientific research and industrialisation. Religious persecution, however, did not return in any significant form, and religious minorities effectively enjoyed the same status as the Buddhist half of the Egyptian population, although their numbers continued to be negligible.
We went back to using the twin religious wonders to help with research:
We adopted OR to help with infrastructure building, especially since we were starting on factories at this point.
The Crusades officially ended in 1806 when the Chinese, having lost their invasion force and failed in preventing the virtual destruction of the Inca kingdom (the Inca emperor renounced his vassal status when Egyptian forces were marching on the last Inca city on the Egyptian continent and offered to capitulate to the Egyptians), signed the Peace of Kolhapur with the Egyptians, in which they agreed to pay the latter 300 pounds of gold with a small bi-annual interest and provide the latter with Chinese maps.
Realising his end was nigh, HC, like Izzy before him, offered to capitulate:
This time, however, I've learned better and refused (Isabella had not played any significant role in the war). Anyway, we still had one more Inca city on the continent at that time.
HC had to renounce his vassal status to Mao before he could offer to capitulate, I think, so Mao, having nothing else to fight for, agreed to sign peace:
We've effectively won the war
After the last Inca city on the continent fell, I tried to extort techs from HC, who had the luxury of being given all these advanced techs as a vassal to Mao:
Unfortunately, he wouldn't give us any. And he had nothing else to offer. Oh, well.
The conclusion of the Crusades have often been viewed as a major victory for the Egpytians, despite the huge amount of money spent fighting the wars, more because of the conquest of the continental Inca lands than anything else. Close to 100,000 Egyptians were killed or maimed in the Gallic Peninsula alone during the Crusades, and they have remained a painful reminder of the brutality of war ever since (see: the Gallic War Memorial).
I stopped playing as soon as the wars ended. I hope we haven't fallen further behind Gandhi, who managed to stay out of the wars. Right now, we have to research the Astronomy and Scientific Method branch in the tech tree to get to Industrialism.
[to be continued in the next post...]