The first decision I had to make was who to war against. Pacal was the popular choice -- do the Mongols need friends? Warring against Qin was like trying to fight a land war in Asia -- massive fronts and long supply lines.
Wait a minute! We're the Mongols! Land wars in Asia are our speciality! So what if they're destructive? And, who are we? Napoleon? A land war in Asia? How can I resist? The fact that there's much better land in Qin's area and Qin has fewer troops and more wonders being built, our EP advantage against Qin, etc. are "complete non-factors". It's all about the long exposed front and flowing battles.
Of course, on the interturn, Ragnar comes asking me to declare on Pacal. Sigh. I just can't do it, though. My mind is made up. Put one more diplo demerit on our ledger.
It starts out very nicely, even without spies.
Knights are powerful. I do lose a couple -- one at >90% odds. The next set of cities have lots of culture and/or walls/castles, so they'll take a bit longer. And we need to heal.
Err...what?!?
I mean, seriously, WHAT?!?
Oh, I snapped the picture too soon. Qin, out of the blue, vassalized himself to De Gaulle (the Americans, BTW). And Peter is a vassal of De Gaulle, too. Quick check of the power graph shows De Gaulle as tops. LOVELY!
Map check? OK, Peter has a border just south of us -- between us and Ragnar. He might have all his troops there, if he captured the city recently. Could be little. I'll divert one knight south. De Gaulle is SE of Qin. Our newly-captured cities are in some danger, but at least our troops are in the right area.
I want an ally. I want more than one ally, but I'll settle for one. Pacal, of course, has too much on his hands. I wonder if I can change that.
But, now, he doesn't like us enough to declare on De Gaulle. $*@#()&$()*@& Nothing I'm trying is working out the way I want it to. We have a -4 from refusing to help during wartime. What about his refusing to help us during wartime?!? At least we have a very large front to defend.
Oh, but our "wise" men can't figure out how to engineer better roads, so we only move 4 along our insufficient road network. Our spy network claims that other nations know how to build such roads, but they're not able to claim such knowledge yet.
So our spies trudge east and knights heal and gather. Our three cities with barracks and gers should be building knights almost exclusively. I'm not sure why one was building a spy. Spies can come from other places.
Skirmishes erupt here and there with the stray American or .... what's Qin again? Something weird. Anyway, occasional troop from De Gaulle or Qin. Heal. Position.
I do get a spy around and move forces up to take another Qin city, because the action's not been TOO major elsewhere. It will mean a turn without the ability to quickly react to threats.
Of course, that causes....
I would've needed everybody together to deal with that anyway. And, remember what I said about moving 4 and poor road networks? Yeah, we can't deal with that right now. I do take ... a pic of taking another Qin city. But I don't have it. Sorry.
It was the one north of Patil... Aelibela or something like that.
I really wanted to play another 5 turns to get to 15. But I could only get 10 in. And there's no way I'll get more time for quite a while.
Situation:
- Adulis was abandoned and lost. We have many knights in the area. If/when De Gaulle moves out of the city, we should be able to crush most of that American stack, including flanking away the large catapult stack.
- Spies discovered Peter's city south of us. We could maybe raze it with a few forces diverted south. It's not an immediate threat area, at least.
- We have a couple spies in Qin's cities. Depending on how militaristic we're feeling and/or are able to be, they can incite revolts for captures/razes. Or they can sit a while and steal techs (Engineering would be hugely valuable).
- We're fairly close to Nationalism. We may want to try for Taj in Karakorum. A Golden Age would be pretty handy. Nationalism, purely for the EP boost, could/should be considered as well. I think I prefer the xp, but EPs might be our lifeblood soon.
- De Gaulle refuses to talk. Pacal won't declare. Sigh.
- We're unhealthy. We were getting some health resources from Qin. It's bad enough that I started an aqueduct and maybe we should build another. Saving 2 food (from an aqueduct) lets us run a specialist, which is worth 6 science. Hard to argue with that. Be a bit careful with it, though.
- I whipped some here and there. The bank in Delhi was pretty handy, once it came in. No military was whipped, though that may need to change. And we still need 15+ more workers.
Save file.
Roster:
Arathorn -- out 3/26 - 3/30
darrelljs -- UP NOW
Jabah -- on deck
Ozbenno
Kylearan
Arathorn
, but can be remedied quickly with their fast movements. And our spies have just arrived in Pacal's lands as well, so we lost no time, and we still have more than enough EPs with Qin from the bombing. Our borders would be ugly, though...not sure who the right target would be here. 
. You are right, staying in Vassalage was a no brainer (especially with us being Organized).
). After moving his stack out, Adulis was guarded with very little, and to boot he pulled the Pikeman out the next turn. That city was useless in the extreme, so I took the opportunity to raze it. Incidentally, someone has been giving our proud Knights some pretty odd names. I'm looking in your general direction, Ozbenno 
.
):
. In fact, I was on such an RNG high I decided to try my luck at Aksum. I almost lost our Medic III Chariot in the process 
