It all happened faster than we planned.
We leave off having secured a defensive pact with Roosevelt, ensuring our safety. We plan on building up our military and stabbing Mansa in the back. We use our scientist and prophet for a GA, planning on racing to infantry before he does and striking if the opportunity presents itself.
FDR's got moves
What we didn't expect is that Roosevelt had ambitions of his own. A few turns after we load the game, he takes more of Alexander's cities, vassalises Ramses (voluntarily it seems, after their relationship deepened from being in a joint war against Alexander, and shared religion), and cancels the defensive pact with us. We are confused. And out alone in the cold again. We are at pleased with him right? Right?
Phew. The war he declares is against Mansa. But that brings its own set of problems - he sweeps into Mansa's border cities (ie the ones that used to be Sitting Bull's) and takes them with no problems. Meanwhile, Rome finishes Alexander off, and declares war on Sitting Bull, again taking some land in short order. The strong are getting stronger.
On our side of the fence, we finish steam power, and find our only coal is at Uzbek. I did think it was a suspiciously large island without resources. We start on assembly line. We don't have long. If FDR sweeps through the Mali, he will certainly have enough land to challenge us and Rome militarily, and perhaps even scientifically. He was starting to prise our hands away from the victory trophy.
Time to get our hands dirty
Our barbarian towns are pacified, and we bring a ragtag team of rifles, maces and cannons over to Bantu first (remember Mansa's ex-barbarian city near the Egyptians that we may have been able to capture thousands of years ago?). On the same turn we were going to declare war, Roosevelt asks us to join him. Of course Frankie, anything for our dear friend!
Our city raider rifles capture it, but find the Egyptian culture overwhelming in the area, so we sell it to Ramses for 520 gold, which goes into upgrading more city raider maces into rifles and (shortly) infantry. Mansa's tech rate had slowed to a crawl, and he was off researching the irrelevant artillery and rocketry in any case. Our spy steals artillery from him, enjoying a massive 48% espionage discount for culture in his oil outpost that was choked by our culture.
Our airships and spies tell us that FDR has a stack of around ~25 cavalry, cannons and rifles pushing into Mali lands, while Mansa has around 4-5 cities each guarded by about 6 riflemen or SAMs, plus some wandering cavs and artillery. At this stage, we have something like 5 infantry, 5 rifles, 5 maces, 2 cannons and 8 airships (rendered almost useless by the SAMs). Fortunately it seemed like FDR had already wiped out Mansa's navy, so we didn't have to worry about that. With those infantry in place, Mansa couldn't realistically wipe out our army, it's just that we couldn't take his lands particularly quickly either.
What we did have going for us is our newest colonies ramping up and some of our old mediocre cities getting some degree of production via suffrage. They had all built the basic infrastructure built, and were ready to contribute what they could militarily. Most could only build an infantry or artillery every 6-10 turns, but when we had around 5 cities like that, plus the Ironworks town, the Moai Statues town and the capital building them every 2-3 turns, for the first time we felt capable of producing a sizeable and contemporary army.
In short, we started sieging Djenne, while FDR and Mansa traded units. FDR took two of Mansa's cities at great cost, while we took the jewel in the crown, Djenne the double holy city (here shown after pacification in its subjugated glory):
FDR peaced out at this point for military science, having exhausted much of his army taking four cities from Mansa. At the start of the war, he was around 3 times our military. Now, he was only about 1.5 times. In the same timeframe, Caesar had reduced from about 2.9 times to 2 times also over this timeframe. We feel great about the game again - our big fear at this point was that Mansa would capitulate to FDR, which would have been problematic in the long term. Instead, we could mop up Mansa at our leisure, and we still held a comfortable tech lead over both FDR and Caesar (albeit, both were only a few turns behind us on railroads research at this point).
Mansa provided some moderate resistance in the southern islands, even taking double oil town from us at some point. But with nowhere near our production and also without infantry, he was never a long-term chance.
Caesar's still here you know
Meanwhile, Caesar had reduced Sitting Bull to his final city, peacing out for economics. You may recall that Caesar had a lot of land, a lot of army, but was behind in techs. In this session, he started to catch up on that last front, and our spies reported that he was researching some pretty modern technologies like railroads and combustion by the end of it. Fortunately we also knew that he was still quite behind in other areas - no corporation (ie nowhere near infantry), physics, even liberalism. And he's certainly teching slower than us.
As we were slowly pushing towards Mali island cities and Timbuktu, Caesar seized his opportunity. FDR was weakened from the war, what was left of his offensive army was stuck in ex-Mali lands, behind broken roads that he had pillaged himself a few turns earlier. He declared on the weakened FDR/Ramses, taking Athens from him, and the jewel in FDR's crown, being New York, the holy city of Judaism.
At this point I contemplated stopping the session to get more advice from the brains trust here, as my options were to either ignore what was going on there and finish Mali off, or to go help my 'best friend'. If Caesar swept through FDR's lands, I would shortly have one massive gorilla to fight to the death.
After some deliberation, I decided that it was unlikely that Caesar would sweep FDR aside. They had both just finished railroads, and I figured machine guns would be able to hold some semblance of a line for FDR. At worst, even if Caesar made good progress against FDR, it might shake Ramses out of FDR's orbit, which may have allowed me to vassalise him instead. With Mansa and Ramses as my satellites, I should have still been fine in a defensive war.
And so we pushed on and took a few more Mansa cities, triggering his capitulation. We return most of his cities to him, but keep Timbuktu and Djenne as our base of future operations (and for that sweet sweet religious gold). We seem to be right on FDR's defensive grit - New York and a few other non-consequential towns swap hands a couple of times, both their relative military sizes reduce, and we feel more and more comfortable as the turns pass.
The final boss
To finish the session, we gather our troops from our random islands, and push them east. We are soon greeted by two Roman armies, one holding on to New York:
And another trying to go reinforce the first:
And here's about half our army, that's going to divide and conquer them:
Given his military ratio is 1.5 of mine, presumably he's got more somewhere. But with FDR, Mansa and Ramses on our side, he has no hope. We are moving the bulk of our navy (some freshly upgraded to destroyers) to the canary islands out west, just in case he tries to counterattack via the ocean, or if Joao (who is pretty small, but technologically relevant) gets any funny ideas. We still have another 20 infantry scattered around all the islands or on ships, waiting to join the frontline (if only we had airports already).
We're in good shape on the tech front. We traded some techs to our new vassal for Biology, and will trade him for rocketry in due course. We haven't made any other technology trades this session - it's no longer in our interest to speed others up. Here's where we stand:
And finally, a look at our cities, at long last showing some respectable numbers in that hammers column:
So here we are. I can't see any more potential surprises on the horizon now, and the final session should be a relaxing romp through a technologically inferior and diplomatically isolated foe, as we bring the world into the enlightened and benevolent rule of Chairman Montezuma.
per foreign city in your Headquarters, even if you're running State Property. However, you cannot make Execs while under State Property. You also don't get the 4 
, but it's really not that much.
), the Shrines still pull in income anyway.
UN victory on the cards? The scoreboard says that Roosevelt is still only Pleased. Given what you've done for him, he should at least be Very Pleased. But Caesar would have to be kept 2nd in population. 
Space victory is usually a drag. Domination is a different kind of drag. Not much land in your island empire.
One thing about that game was that I was in desperate need of 
due to the over-expansion. It was going to take 20 turns just to research Pottery. My economy was saved first by a single Silver mine in a small city, allowing me to research Masonry, and then by getting ~250 fail-gold 
, compared to only +50% in vanilla BtS. Maybe that will finally make it worth it, despite having to tech the usually unnecessary Robotics.
