As I entered the Middle Ages, the goal was to get to knights and finish Babylon off. This was accomplished and Egypt was kind enough to come help clear up some of the extra units. Unfortunately, they did capture 3 Bab cities and I was afraid of them leaving their army up in those cities and thus facing a two front war when the time came.
I continued pushing my tech path straight to Military Tradition with the idea of amassing a storm of cavalry and blitzing the continent before rifles. I was about 10 turns away from this when the Mongols decided to attack Egypt right after the Babylonians had been banished to an island. Egypt still had a good portion of it's military in the former Babylonian lands so they were definitely caught with their pants down. Mongolia was a bit of a monster and had previously destroyed Russia. It didn't take long for Egypt to start to crumble so I went to war earlier than I had anticipated and fought against muskets with knights. It wasn't entirely pretty, but I did manage to meet the Mongols about halfway through Egypt, thus preventing them from getting too huge.
By this point I had made it to MT and researched to Magnetism for Galleons and then shut off research. I used to cash to upgrade to cavs and decided to attack Mongolia sooner than later as they were already industrial. The initial war was very messy as I had to deal with Mongolian cavs reaching deep into my territory via all the roads in unclaimed space, but eventually I started to make progress. I had just gotten all of former Egypt when the rifles appeared....so much for my plan.
By this point I did have two cavalry armies and despite the slow going, eventually Mongolia was retired to the scrap heap. In the meantime, the other continent had been researching away, led by the Ottomans. I knew I had to to hurry the hell up if I wanted to finish this thing out. I loaded up my army and landed in former Rome, freshly conquered by the Greeks. The Greeks provided little effective resistance, but around this time the Ottomans went Modern and decided to enter the fray against the Greeks. The sheer might of their military between Sipahi, tanks, TOW, bombers, and just about everything else was quite site to behold. I knew if they changed their minds and came for me this game was done as I could not repel their force and catching up in tech would take too long.
With that in mind, I quickly conquered Sumeria and then moved down into Germany. The Ottomans declared on Germany as well and even though I had the choke point blocked, they still started carving the Germans up via landings with bomber support. It was a very terse ending that saw me trying to scrape together every spare tile and pop point I could to secure victory, but I finally did trigger domination in the late 1200s I think.
Overall I really enjoyed the game! Definitely a tougher challenge in that it never let up. Usually once you've subdued your own continent it is all over except for mop up, but this one was different. Thanks for the great game!
