Round 10: 1819AD - 1887AD
At the beginning of the round, I held off the decision of whether we should go to war with Peter or not, but decided to research Artillery next. It leads to Rocketry, and if there was going to be war artillery might be useful.
A few turns into the round, Brennus came and asked for aid:
This could be the perfect opportunity to declare on Peter. However, it still carried a huge risk, since we didn't have Railroads yet. What tipped the scales was the fact that our latest GM was still in a galleon en route to the other continent. Declaring on Peter now would mean we lose that GM. It wasn't an attractive prospect so I declined. Yes, that meant our relationship with Brennus was now too far gone, and I stopped entertaining ideas of making him Pleased again to trade with.
And then something happened:
In case the letters are a little too small, they read: "Montezuma has declared war on Peter!" Yes, the same Montezuma who trembled at the might of the Russian military. Brennus offered to vassalize to him and suddenly he's not so afraid anymore. Weird AI.
Anyhow, this was a great development for us. We wanted Peter to be at war so badly, and suddenly we got it without even having to do anything
Perhaps we would jump on the bandwagon soon, after our GM had settled his business. It's certainly safer to do so now.
And it seemed that we might need the mutual struggle bonus soon:
No idea why he decided he had had enough, since relations did not change.
Anyway, I noticed that Bismark had finally hooked up his oil, so I immediately asked for it as tribute from him:
Those words are certainly gratifying. "Give me this or you'll get it!"
But is this tribute limited to only 10 turns? Later on, Bismark cancelled the deal and when I asked for it again, he refused. A while later, though, I could demand it from him as a compulsory tribute again. Weird.
Our GM finally reached his destination:
We cashed his goods at the usual rate of 4050 gold. This would again help with our research. I set a side about 2000 gold for emergency upgrades, though, especially since we were going to dogpile on Peter:
Of course we weren't really going to do anything. We were only in it to annoy Peter, hopefully hindering him further, and earn some brownie points from Monty and Brennus. Indeed, the latter was achieved immediately as both of them agreed to open borders.
I expected Peter to send plenty of destroyers to pillage our coastline, as the AI love to do, and even a boatload of units to try and invade us (in which case the spare cash would come in handy - suddenly those veteran Redcoats would turn into infantry). However, Isabella was the one who sent some destroyers, and not many of them. Peter did almost nothing. We managed to get by quite well without facing severe problems of unhealthiness and starvation like in the war against Bismark.
Since little actual fighting was done, WW wasn't a problem either. Our research went ahead at full steam, and after Artillery we researched Radio and Computers for the labs.
The only real action that took place was the capture of the Spanish city of Santiago on our continent:
Since it was pretty much worthless and the tile was covered by our culture by now anyway, I decided to raze it. Not worth the upkeep.
By now the war had gone on for a while. Before the capture of Santiago, Peter was already willing to sign peace for 200+ gold from us. Right after Santiago, Monty signed peace with Peter, and I decided to follow suit at a rate that had dropped:
Not a bad deal. We came out pretty unscathed. Peter managed to capture a few small cities from Monty and one Celtic city, but the war did seem to have slowed him down since he had no new techs to show for quite a while.
After Computers, the first tech we had on Peter in a long long time, we headed for Fibre Optics via Rocketry and Satellites, as planned.
Unfortunately, not long after the war was over, Brennus had already begun to forget our mutual struggle:
No matter. We should be able to get to Fibre Optics first and grab the Internet, so tech trading wasn't that important at this point.
Then Peter came and made a demand:
Of course I said no. Give him a tech that would unlock his powerful UB? That would be stupid. He grew furious, and I gave him a resource for free to try and mollify him. Don't know if that made a difference, but anything to prevent us from getting attacked alone.
Anyway, Ravenna, our Ironworks city was building the Rock and Roll, but I delayed it for some time until we got our GE. Once the Ironworks was complete, Ravenna had been running as many engineers as possible and had built the Heroic Epic in the hopes of generating a GE that would be handy for the Space Elevator. Rock and Roll would introduce more Great Artist points and I wanted to minimise our chances of missing the GE. As a result, we missed the wonder instead, but the returns were quite worth it:
That just meant we could afford to run 100% research for a while longer. And, more importantly, our plan worked:
Now we only needed to get to Fusion first to earn the free GE and we might just be able to build the Space Elevator before Peter.
[to be continued in the next post...]
. Initiating a phony war while just sitting back and waiting naval invasion absolutely did not. 
