The war on Genghis continues, and Beshbalik is a mighty fine city. Well, the shrine is nice, the rest maybe not so hot.
Remember the city I gifted away to Hannibal to prevent Ghengis from stealing it? Yeah, not so easy to take back now
Genghis is hurting a lot and is willing to give away a city + 4 techs, but the silly goat simply refuses to capitulate. Even when I take his capital + another big city, he won't budge.
War weariness has become brutal in the extreme. The counter is just shy of 1000. Don't think I've seen that before, except in the game where I tried 20+ nukes.
Sury is besieging Samarqand, with.. well... 1 CATAPULT!! He's grinding him down, one percent at the time. Per turn
It's a city I want, though, because it is the HE city, and since I haven't come across any GGs elsewhere, they must all be in there. Must be 5-6 settled. I've seen Combat4-Formation Pikes aplenty, so he's probably getting them out the gates like that.
However, as you can also see from that picture, it has become his new capital. Which means he will no longer give it away in a peace treaty
Instead he wanted to give away Old Sarai, which is culture squeezed by HC. It was probably a big mistake to accept that. It had no tiles. Then I gifted it back, thinking it would be more useful to Genghis. It probably is, but it has no tiles for him either. Because all culture was wiped when he gifted it to me. I should have taken a different city, or not taken any at all. Oh well, greed can have a price
Here is the peace deal, or most of it. We got four techs out of it, which was brilliant. I was starting to feel pretty darn backwards. This war took forever, and I didn't really have anything sensible to tech. Eventually I started on MilScience, but otherwise I could only research techs 'everybody' had, which always feels like a waste.
Almost the best thing is that he also has Communism, which I was able to trade next turn. Had to give him Steam power plus the rest of Military Tradition. Think he was almost done with that, but I ordered him to do something else when he capped.
The eastern front looks like this, so Genghis doesn't have much left.
Unfortunately HC is untouchable due to having infantry, and Hannibal is essentially the same with MGs. Monty got bribed on Sury a long time ago, but hasn't done anything as far as I can tell. This very turn, Zara declared on HC, on his own I think. Sury is still at war with HC from before he broke free of Genghis.
Sury will get RepParts this turn, so it will be a nailbiter to see if he goes Rifling next or not. He's the only person I can realistically take on at this point, so I hope he doesn't, and some idiot doesn't trade it to him either. It might then be possible to declare on him, wipe the cuir stacks that he has near the eastern front, and double back to invade his land. He looks surprisingly weak, but with a lot of cities.
The war has taken a pretty big toll on our numbers, though, and I stopped whipping so hard quite a while ago. The whip timers were mighty high all over the place, and coupled with absurd war weariness, it was impossible to sustain. And I had one eye on the transition to a hammer economy, so tried to grow the cities a little bit (while running 20% culture slider), and at least cool down on the whipping. 6-8
is a bit on the high side.
Techs (we just traded for Communism)
I've queued up Assembly Line for now, and have the gold to get through it. If I for example take a two-turn anarchy hit to change to Rep/SP/Caste, I can forget about climbing back to friendly with HC and possibly trading (he has HR as favourite civic). But it still seems like the best bet. Would be nice with slavery for whipping factories, but it's 9 turns away, and two civic swaps is already 2 turns anarchy due to high city count, so I may as well do all three right away. Then spam more workshops where feasible.
As I said, this has been a pretty bloody affair, with war weariness just shy of 1000. We've lost 32 cavs, and only have 40 left now (and some are currently on MP duty). They've killed a lot, however, and what is so nice with cavs vs cuirs, is that cavs get good odds vs even muskets, at least well-promoted cavs. I also lost 5-6 cavs in a nasty cannon+counter attack after we took Beshbalik. But I preferred that over getting a bunch of tough muskets back in that hill city.
Now about those strategic decisions.
As was seen in a picture above, I've queued up Assembly Line. I'm thinking that's my best bet, since this is likely to turn into a long-ass meatgrinder of a game. I'll need more hammers here, and can't really start to whip out a pile of cannons and try to smash into infantry, rifles or MGs. It will probably be overly costly, don't you think? So I was thinking that it's better to play the long game, get the economy back in order under state property. Hopefully it will be possible to take on Sury, but if he goes Rifling then we can't do all that much there either.
Also, I should really find location for NE + HE. The thinking was to put HE in Samarqand even if it was kinda iffy foodwise, but sadly that was impossible because it became his new capital. I love to take over cities with many settled GGs, but we got 0 out of Genghis
Haven't settled any myself either. Have used them for XP on units, and one medic (an old axeman). One or two heroes have died in combat, but I have several others. They are quite useful in combat, as long as they survive a little and get a decent chunk of promos.