To 1600-something AD:
Strike first, strike hard
Plans were laid. We had decided that the only way we were going to tackle Shacal was to lay waste on the entire globe and simply wear them down like terrorists would wear down developed nations - by striking at their key points without notice and disrupt whatever they were doing at the most inconvenient times. Not the noblest of strategies, but it was ours.
I did not lean towards a full-on nuclear war easily because truth be told, I've never done it. I know, I know; Everyone nukes, but the truth really is that I despise global warming so much that I do everything in my power to keep nuclear wars from happening and you can see me in the front voting for a Nuke ban in the UN when it comes up. Well, this is no ordinary game as you've seen from the very start.
Started off with our plan coming to fruition as "Ville Sikari" was born in Dariush Kabir.
He founded Mining Inc. in Pasargadae - something that would actually land us 8 hammers per city and eventually push us over the MFG of the deities. It was meticulously spread everywhere as we were on a clock. Pacal was pursuing a cultural win and had already reached legendary in Mutal all the while they were once again WHEOOHRN. Furthermore, the window for "free" nuking was closing fast. They did not have SDI just yet but it was only a matter of turns before they got there and since we honestly do not have the resources to plow through SDI right now, we have to act fast, so we scrambled to set the first wave of terrorists in position:
How great is that cultural hole next to Mutal?
Shaka alone had some three "capital" stacks with more than 50 units in each and even one of those stacks would've been enough to severely cramp our style had they reached our mainland so we had to make sure all bases were covered. Here's one of Shaka's victory fleets:
...and here's another:
Another glance at Pacal, featuring the stack at Mutal:
Finally though, push came to shove and we manned up. We, who could not last a turn against Shaka alone in a face-to-face ground war, went all nuclear on their capital cities. My apologies for the lack of mushroom clouds; Game at this point is heavy as is so all eye-candy must go. Here, taking of Ulundi after a barrage of 3 nukes:
Burn them, burn them all:
Mutal suffers the same fate:
It had even more wonders... They all burned.
Victory fleet of Vandal?
Nuclear waste.
Raiders of Mutal had a few Nukes to spare and we had a couple of back-up Nukes back home so Calakmul also felt the blow:
And then, in an attempt to block them from having Nukes readily available, we laid some fallout on their Uranium:
In 1560 the world showed the first signs that it would rather sign out than take this kind of blatant disregard for it's wellbeing.
That is the first, but it sure won't be the last.
Like I said earlier on, the window before SDI was really small. In 1574 it had already closed and ICBMs rendered pretty much useless. Shacal rules the sea so we can't reliably take submarines there either as we have no idea of knowing where their Stealth Destroyers might be lurking.
We managed a peace for some 1500 gold in the early 1600's. What to do with the peace? Build up more nukes so we can wear them down even further. Istakhr was designated as a nuclear sub base and since we now had Mining Inc and Cereal Mills (I popped a Merchant at some point during the war in Dariush Kabir but it totally slipped my mind to take pictures... with the nuclear war and all, you know?)
Anyhow, you know what sucks? This is the first instance I see the AI blatantly cheating. I mean, in order to scrub fallout, one needs to have the technology of Ecology. Well, not Shacal. They don't have it, yet their workers are cleaning up all the waste we laid on their land and our nuclear prevention strategy backfired in that sense.
I have no idea of how many of these wars of terror we have to wage before we're strong enough to take on them but as it is now, the best plan of action seems to be that we strike on their coastal strongholds and wear down their invasion navies at port before they can strike at us and then hang of for dear life with the support of Cereal Mills and Mining Inc. Why Cereal Mills by the way? Well, even if our mainland suffers no casualty from the war itself, our fishing industry is gone on turn 2 of the war. They have ships all over the map and it's simply too unreliable to trust in Sushi.
We're some 20 hours in and this is the hardest game of civ I've played so far... It's so strenuous and so hard and there's no telling how it will end. I mean, usually you know when you're going to win and can just lay back and enjoy the game. This game? No, it's like work and you have a boss that's breathing down your neck at all times and you have a deadline for every single action. Pfft...
Atleast there's nukes.