Domination in 1906
What happened.
First turn paid off Zara to make peace with Charlemagne, then paid Charlemagne to make peace with Saladin (strange when Saladin was winning anyway). That calmed things down for a while.
Eventually Zara went after Gilgamesh and bought Churchill in on the action. I jumped in too as he pretty much beat me to the punch, after capturing 2 cities off Gil he vassalised to Churchill. Which dropped me down to furious with Churchill so I declared war on England. His redcoats were no match for Marines and tanks.
I managed to found Mining Inc and Sid's Sushi and spread that around my island.
I put up my Forbidden Palace in London to try and help some of the costs I was incurring because of my new lands but I think the mistake I made was to spread Mining Inc and Sid's Sushi over there with impunity, slowed my research down quite a lot.
After England was gone I built up a fleet of transports, carriers and battleships and started ferrying troops over to Celtia taking advantage of the lack of Celt/Ethiopian Open borders.
Declared war at 1892, captured on average 2-3 cities per turn using bombers/gunships/paratroopers and tanks. Zara had a defensive pact with Saladin which wasn't there a couple of turns before, didn't matter because Saladin kept his main stack on the HRE border to fend off Charlemagne.
Zara capitulated after about 8 turns, Saladin a couple of turns after. I embarassingly lost a city to saladin when I lost sight of his main stack which I was certain was destroyed by Zara, but with 20 tanks closeby I got the city back plus annihilated his stack.
Domination was triggered the next turn.
Thoughts.
Zara and Saladin we're the only 2 other civs really in it but both stagnated from 1650 onwards. I had many espionage points over them from security Bureaus and Intelligence Agencies which let me see everyone's research since 1600AD, at one stage Zara was researching Assembly line in about 15 turns then Fascism at about 12. Weird. For an AI with so much land he was doing terribly in the research department, I can only surmise that he was trying to match my espionage. He was possibly going cultural but I was always leagues ahead of him in all three of my best cities.
It was good to fight AIs without SAM infantry for a change though
I think I'm going to be a little more selective with spreading corporations from now on, learnt that the hard way.
I might play from 1650 and go down the space race route for fun, and found different corporations I was thinking about Creative contructions, Aluminum Company and maybe Standard Ethanol or Cereal mills.
