Yeah, I suppose. I think it was funnier to me because of how long the story went without updating, and then you said things were going well, so I figured nothing overly unexpected happened.
I definitely was positioned in a defensive war with Russia when I gave up the game, and looking at the map again, York is not in an incredibly defensive position. A quick Japanese army definitely could have come out of nowhere with no warning with the vision we have. Japan is not an overly trustworthy civ, so maybe we can get a scout to look at Japanese lands and try to get a little bit more vision to see the next mobilization coming?
Looking back at it, I probably would have lost York if I were playing as well. Road to York regardless, if the Japanese army was huge, it could have easily taken a city before any adequate defenders could come over and defend it. The DoF with Japan was an interesting one though. On one hand, if we're going to continue conquests after Russia (and we should conquer Russia, though I recommend leaving them Rostov, let them know what it's like to be a city state for once), Japan would have been an excellent diplomatic option to conquest. The warmonger penalty for taking York was pretty big, and being pretty isolationist, Japan probably won't be overly popular this game.
On the other hand, Japan looks pretty hard to actually conquer, and Cumae looks so, so easy to just pick off. After our DoF with Rome expires, we may want to denounce them. Maybe we could trick them in to capturing Rostov through keeping it at 1 hp through longbows (and wiping out Russia) and get them hated through that. That maneuver would solve two problems at once, but would also rely on Rome making a real effort to catch the city, which is not necessarily going to happen. We would need to give them open borders at least if this plan was going to work, although we could always abandon it if it doesn't.
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only discovered succession games this last week or two but love them and the idea!
sorry about this.
