Napolean. Napolean apparently has an army even stronger than I do. but why? does he have some huge stack somewhere? I don't know. what I do know is that I need to find out! I send a few cavs out to the front lines, while my main stacks take some of Napolean's border cities.
and it finally appears!
it looks like he just recently got MT, and upgraded a big stack of knights. ugh. in any case, this stack is pretty big, but not too big to handle. the only problem is that I'm kinda spread out, so I'll need to retreat for now until I can consolidate my forces. it's really painful to retreat, but if you don't think you can overwhelm an enemy stack then it's a good idea to do it anyways because the AI will always pause for a few turns to consolidate, and often leave some of its stack behind to guard, giving you an easy method to divide and conquer it.
and it looks like he got too antsy!
he had almost no seige in his stack, which meant that he had to go HAM and suicide half of it before he even got odds to win a single battle. a great victory for me, although I do lose my super medic in the defense. this tragedy slows my conquest down quite a lot.
I mop him up this turn. his back is broken; its just a matter of time now.
here's the remanants of what Napolean has scrounged together. if he had brought those catapults with him before, his assault might have gone the other direction!
meanwhile, while all of my troops have been pooled towards dealing with Napolean, genghis shows up with a big stack of his own and starts reconquering cities. he must have some sort of formerly arabian city in the south where he had his stack parked.
I'm ready to take Paris, after so many turns dancing and healing.
GK takes 1 more city back and I finally get a look at his stack. It's actually not very big, and I can actually spare reinforcements now to deal with it.
I finally get another GG over to make another super Medic. I stick him on a unit that already has some banked XP so I can give him Morale for an extra movement point.
I can now start to take cities very quickly.
I finally beat up Napolean enough such that GK has quit his vassalage in disgust. He still won't capitulate to me, however. Napolean and Saladin won't either.
I also finally stop being lazy/cocky and set up a Galleon Chain. What is a Galleon Chain? well, units in a transport can actually load themselves into another transport on the same tile. So, if I set up a long string of Galleons, 2 spaces apart, then I can load units into the first Galleon, move two spaces to the next one, then load them onto that one, then move the first Galleon back to its original spot. I can do this all the way down the line, eventually terminating in a city that I control on the other side of the ocean, effectively teleporting 3 units a turn about 25 spaces. This trick doesn't actually speed up the total number of units per turn that I can transport for the same number of Galleons (I need 12 to do the chain), but I get new units to the front lines faster this way. The idea is similar to the idea of Pipelining in computer architecture, if anyone's familiar with that.
Some of my best cities are getting crushed by war weariness from fighting 3 cities at once. I'm in police state and have Jails in almost every single one of my cities, and I still have +7 WW. yuck. I'm teching to Fascism right now just so I can build Mount Rushmore, which gives another -25% to WW.
Here I meet Saladin's stack, and its pretty pathetic. He suicides it into mine for pathetic results.
Who needs the whip when you have production like this?
No matter how much I beat these guys up, they still won't give in.
Until, finally, he does.
All 3 do, on the same turn, in fact!
And that's a wrap!
Final map:
Final GNP; you can see that Joao kept up with, or surpassed, me all the way to the end despite having half my city count:
Final production (lol). I've been in the lead here for quite a long time, even back in the period where I was still whipping due to all the big multipliers I got for building lots of wonders in that era...
i also thought that spy points would reveal their cities for me, but it turns out they'll only reveal if you know where it is first. oh well.
