Point of divergence: Battle of Smolensk
The French occupation of Smolensk, during the Great Patriotic War of 1812, was a longer battle, wherein the Russian army made a direct confrontation upon the conquest of the first suburb the French reached. After three weeks of nonstop fighting, the Grand Army was able to defeat the frenzied Russian forces. The majority of the Russian army withdrew to Smolensk, and cruelly quartered themselves in the homes of the urban peasants.
After another three days and nights of bombardment, during which hundreds of peasants were killed and the supply of food to the Russian army was cut off, de Tolly finally surrendered to Napoleon. Poland was ceded to Napoleon, as were some Baltic ports, and Napoleon established the République Baltique, centered in Warsaw. The monarch selected was a soldier who displayed personal bravery during the battle and took a bullet for Napoleon in the kneecap, the "Invalid King of Poland", Alfonse I.
Following the crippling Russian defeat, and the following establishment of a fortified border, the only enemy of Napoleon's France left in Europe was the Empire of Great Britain. As the British war against the fledgling United States of America was also in progress, a small portion of the Royal Navy was diverted to the West Atlantic. There was enough of a diversion, however, for Napoleon to pressure Britain into a strategic stalemate with the threat of the entire French navy, army, and military industry potentially trained on the isles.
In the rough year following the Treaty of the Strait (in a slight novelty, the treaty was signed on a ship in the Strait of Dover, where at least three British frigates were ordered to be present at all times), British saw an interesting unprecedented appropriation of manufacturing for military purposes. The industrialized nation saw itself focusing its massive production on the production of munitions, and of cannons. However, it was not alone in this; 1813-1814 also saw the federally sponsored industrialization of several German and Rhine states, notably Westphalia, as well as the Lowland region. Napoleon used the Baltic Republic as a trade foothold and imported several tons of iron from Russia, whose peace stipulations included an embargo on Britain.
Despite Britain's superior naval tradition and industrial infrastructure, the raw material and personnel available to Napoleon through the French Empire and her puppets proved to be a massive untapped potential. Britain quickly made peace with American leaders, following an influx of economic support by the French, the defection of Tecumseh's federation into a third party, and the re-employment of guerrilla tactics by the war hardened Americans. This, in tandem with the Strait Peace, provided Napoleon another advantage in the form of morale.
The British peoples' resolve was broken by humiliation at the hands of Napoleon, the loss of several key territories to the growing Tecumseh Federation, which now encompassed much of Atlantic North America, talks of French re-entry into India, and probably the most individually impactful factor: urban discontent. With the governmental appropriation of some factories, the wages in major centers plummeted as taxes went towards the upkeep of the military. The Coal War, as it would be known later, bankrupted the British, while simultaneously skyrocketing French, Belgian, and German industry.
As Napoleon set his sights on the Balkan region and the decaying Ottoman Empire, new strategists were put in charge of the British front, which had largely grown cold and had lost Napoleon's interest. A new strategy employed by Henri Ducard I, a young new man raised from a peasant Parisian family who never knew the Monarchy, involved discrete armament of urban socialist Radicals in Plymouth, London, Manchester, and Yorkshire, important English industrial and naval centers.
This plan, which came to be known as the Ducard Plan, was carried out in late 1814, with French sailors in disguise as merchant ships ferried massive amounts of German and Dutch made munitions to the revolutionaries. This distributive phase lasted through to early 1815, and with the burgeoning establishment of an American navy in the Atlantic, Ducard decided that France and her allies were ready to challenge British control of the sea and even threaten Great Britain herself. The first gunshots of the Great War of 1815 were fired by English revolutionaries during a seizure of an important British munitions factory in London. The Royal Navy's attention was diverted to the mainland, where the Radicals toppled city after city, and bombardment began of several key fortresses in England by the Royal Navy itself.
The French quickly began to engage, and soon both the United States and the Tecumseh Federation (now de facto encompassing most of Canada besides the St. Lawrence river) declared war on Great Britain as well. The Royal Navy was unable to focus on so many fronts, and the first front abandoned was North America; the Dominion of Canada was left to its own devices with the withdrawal of the Royal Navy to the East Atlantic front. With the French re invasion of British East India in March of 1815, both European armies found themselves subject to a great storm, which prevented fighting in South Asia until early May.
However, the French armies were able to cut off the lines supplying the Isles, and with internal insurgency followed eventually by the breakdown of the Royal Navy, the British Empire started falling to ruin. The inability of Great Britain to keep up with military production due to the seizure of many important industrial centers by the rebels led to a rapid decrease in its ability to withstand the French bombardment; in June of 1815, French armies sailed to the British Isles and were able to engage directly in the conflict along their revolutionary contemporaries.
The Loyalist British government fled to India, where the French hadn't yet deployed a large enough force to beat down the combined British and Indian armies in the region. Russian entry into the war, forcing the French to redirect reinforcements eastward, led to a peace treaty towards early 1816 with the new Raj. The French were able to hold the Baltic Republic, but with neither the French nor the Russians making any progress, a stalemate peace was signed by 1817.
However, the de facto collapse of the British Empire drastically changed the geopolitical stage. The great powers became the rapidly industrializing Russian Empire, the Japanese Empire (whose industrial reforms were much earlier due to the hegemonous French Empire), which started to expand through China to support the lucrative British opium trade in an unlikely alliance, the French Empire itself and her many vassals, and the United States, which had managed to enter a political union with Tecumseh's Federation, become the Great American Union, which quickly expanded across Canada and the Great Plains.
By 1825, there were three clear international power blocs: the Eastern, led by Japan, Russia, and the Raj; the Continental, consisting of most of Europe besides some of the Ottoman Balkans and Scandinavia, all gradually being divided and annexed by the growing French Imperial Republic; and the American, where industrialization was beginning to unlock the vast potential of a continent, assisted by an egalitarian model of relative equality between the races. Slavery was peacefully abolished in the South, where immigration by Amerindian and European workers was contributing to urbanization and industrialization.
Following Napoleon's retirement to a somewhat more honorary aristocratic position, Henri Ducard I slowly rose through the ranks and began to reform the Continental government into a more republican, bureaucratic system. It was clear the economy and the world were changing; in a letter written by a now aging Ducard to a young German philosopher in 1843 disclosed a shrinking faith in the imperial system and a growing faith in new industrialist republics like in Japan and the United States.
The year is now 1850, and conflicts in the Pacific between Japan, America, and France appear to be mounting. All three nations combat nationalist tensions internally, but all three have industry available to them in copious manufacturing amounts. Factories across China, Eastern Europe, and the American Midwest assure that, should conflict arise, it will be violent, bloody, and wholly industrial...
borders gain +5% Production 
toward your land-based units. Upon the capture 
of a city, gain points towards both a Great General 
and a Great Admiral 
costs. This unit deals +10% 
this unit gains +1 Movement 
.
) as well as the name of the Great Admiral Replacement (a towership is kind of... bs). Updated the name of the Civ as well!
Leader: Arthur WellesleyPuppeted Cities grant a portion of their
Food and
Unhappiness over time. Annexing a
Ranged Combat Strength against Cities (+150%, from +200%) but gains +25%
Gold maintenance, +2
Local Happiness, and +2
Culture. Builds twice as fast and is prioritized in
Capturing cities does not require a melee unit; reducing a city to 0 HP provides the option to 
global unhappiness to each enemy for every garrison the enemy has stationed.
I've never been that good in history at school... This could explain why 
