I started by massing cannons to take out Rag. Unfortunately, despite being backwards, he's huge and has a giant army. When I was ready to declare on him with a stack of ~100 advanced units, I was still behind him in power. By the time I was finished massing cannons I had teched rifling, so I got some rifles in my attack force as well. Rag took two barb cities to the right, so I had a marginal stack to take those out. Unfortunately his SoD that he was supposed to be fighting Roosevelt with was there as well, but since the AI doesn't know how to cross the blue stuff, it makes me fight a two front war.
Eventually I had ~50 CR2/3 cannons, and a ~50 stack mix of rifles/knights/elephants/keshiks. Overkill, but what are you going to do.
Rag put up a good fight when I declared, his SoD in the east had enough knights to really mess up my cannons with flanking damage, and that stalled me some more. He attacked with 3 or 4 different stacks from all directions, and landed a force of 8 units behind Karakorum and took a lightly defended city (I didn't even think the AI could attack from the sea if I was a land target?) I retook it easily since Karakorum was spitting out a rifle per turn, but losing all the buildings still sucks. As expected, I lost all of my seafood, which wrecked my GP farm, but still wasn't too bad overall. Eventually though, I repelled all of his attacks, and took the barb cities, and was ready to take the fight to Rag's land.
I steamrolled him like you would any backwards unit spammer. It took a long time, as all of his cities were heavily guarded, and then had to withstand a counter attack stack, but eventually I took all of his northern cities, including his capital, and his production seriously dropped off after that. The very slow process of taking a city, sitting there a turn to heal, and then moving one space at a time to the next city really made me miss keshiks. It took 200 years, but eventually I took Rag's last city. I was starting to get seriously hindered by WW. My big cities were ~45 unhappiness with a combination of emancipation and WW.
Here is Rag's lands, the north:
There's a good city in the unsettled jungle, everything else is pretty average. And the south:
More average land, but now I have a ton of cities to crank out rifles and cannons to take out the other continent.
The other continent is a huge lovefest. They have a 3 way defensive pact, that will make taking them out a little tougher. I had to turn up the gold slider for the Rag war, so the Buddhists passed me in tech:
Either way, I'm getting close to domination, taking out Hatty might be enough:
I waited to long to take out Rag, but it shouldn't matter much, hopefully it will be an easy war with Hatty, since I already have ~3X her power. I won't be getting a 1300AD win, but still should be an easy one.
. Ignored tech all together until i started getting lazy and wanted the building to stop bugging me and switched everything to research hehe.
