Close game on Emperor as Korea, the last one on a Continents map before I decided to (for a while anyway) jump to Immortal.
Started off on a continent with Arabia and Persia, and several city-states. The closest was Persia, and even then there was a large, snaky stretch of wilderness and beaches between our two civs. I remembered the killing lengths I had to go through to link up the cities I threw at Darius' direction, actually the amount of gold I was losing per turn before I could upgrade all my warriors to swords. i remembered having been able to upgrade only two, AND it would not have been possible if I didn't take away some of Persian Lunch Money before I DOWed (0 gold stack, -24 gpt). Meanwhile Arabia was way to the west, shielded by deserts and marshes and two and a half city-states, and he had all the space he needed to expand into a runaway.
Taking Darius' capital was easy enough. It pushed Harun into a thousand year war with the Persian remnants, who was also kind enough to build Himeji and Chichen Itza (IIRC) in his second capital (just west of his original). So I decided to turtle up, blast tech to Renaissance through HS+PT combo and GS spawns, get some RAs going with everyone else on the other continent when I discovered them, and only when I started getting me some nice Longswords did I renew my push onto Persian capital no.2
Good thing too, because the Arabs had Longswords too, and it was a good thing I had gotten Rifling by then and was working my way to Dynamite. And the Arabs had some of the largest armies on the planet - the kind that your adviser would say "could literally wipe our civilization off the planet"
The other continent was a mixed bag of Pachacuti, Oda Nobunaga, Ram Khamhaeng... and Napoleon. Napoleon with the Great Wall, surprisingly little else on wonders other than that, but still its Napoleon. I dunno what gave him the idea that we were meant to be enemies, probably because I eventually took the same SP tree as he did when entering the Industrial era, but I digress for now. The Siamese were conquered pretty quickly by French GW blitzkrieg, and for a time I figured the Japanese would hold off and eventually go on the roll with Samurais... but then Pachacuti was at war with him too and before you knew it the
La Marseillaise was blaring over the wooden streets of vanquished Kyoto.
But back to our own continent. Right after I hammered Darius for the second time, gaining Himeji in the process, I saw that me and the Arabs were close to sharing borders. Not only that, but he had a lot of men and a CS ally to the immediate west of me, and then I spotted him fielding cannons. Any vestige of possible coexistence was thrown out of the window entirely - I simply DOWed him and charged into the fray with Riflemen and my own cannons. Took his first two cities easily enough, and I was planning to burn down the rather seemingly useless second city I acquired from him. But then as I continued pushing towards Mecca, his armies began numbering in the dozens, all pushing northwards against my advance at all costs. Sometimes they would split across the great marshes and desert between us to immediately attack my Persian holdings and stymie whatever reinforcements I had to hardbuild and send west. Meanwhile I was repeatedly losing riflemen and cannons. The decision to burn that second city down was stopped in favor of turning it into a rushbuying center. I took a third city and just as I pushed down to his fourth, my riflemen encountered a horde of positioned cannons and Longswords and they just died. Worse, he began spamming his Camel Archers to wreak havoc on my front lines, to lure unsuspecting Korean units into firetraps designed for attrition warfare, a battle I was sure to lose if I had played by his rules.
Eventually I got myself artillery, and even that was not enough to continue the push. Oh yes, the unhappiness penalties racked by my conquests. They were massive killers, and one of the things I had to do for a while to try break the stalemate was to bring the French into conflict with Arabia. You see, France had bought off most of the city-states on my continent. As previously hinted, he was also rather... guarded towards me. Well,
hostile. "Ah, the puny one makes an appearance," he would chide each time I grace his poppy fields for dialogue. And he was Napoleon the Terrible of France, who was perhaps the first massive runaway I've ever seen in any game to fully flesh out the Autocracy tree.
So I had to bargain with him to get him cooking into my little stalemated war with Arabia. He wanted all my luxuries, the ones precious to keeping my happiness afloat, and I gave it to him so I may have some pressure laid off from my immediate runaway tormentors. Napoleon had FFL by then, so his city-state lackeys were coming in with artillery and Infantry, and they even gifted him some "French Infantry" which he used to smash the legions of Arab longswords and cannons. With Harun immensely distracted by this so-called second front, I hurriedly worked on bringing my happiness back to order by whatever costs, and began a renewed offensive towards Mecca.
Now with my own Infantry.
Still kept getting bombarded by Camel archers, hidden cannons, and now some pieces of artillery as well, but the push had me taking Medina and then Mecca. And with it, I had the Forbidden Palace to boost my happiness back to proper order.
Now it took another war or two to fully "cleanse" my continent of anything that wasn't Korean, and they all involved city-state allies of my own burning down the last Arabian and Persian cities. This was long after I gotten bombers, atomics and was hurriedly pushing through Modern into Future.
The other continent was now one giant stalemated battlefield between the Incans and France. The Incans were doing remarkably well against their autocratic foe, and they certainly had enough CS allies to help them out. Both of them were immensely hostile towards me, but I didn't really care. I had completed Apollo by then, working on my first series of SS Boosters.
Well, actually, I had completed all the parts by the time we reached to the point when France started lobbing atomics at the defenseless Incans and broke their century-long stalemate. The Incans you see had built the UN and were gathering up as many city-state allies as they could, and France was trying his hardest to smash through Cusco and prevent that from coming to pass...
Well, he did take an irradiated Cusco. Three turns before the UN Vote.
I had plans for the both of them however. In that same turn, I finished up my SS Boosters and Cockpit. There were several carrier groups lurking in the Southern Atlantic, close to the French capital. The signal for them to start giving the finger was given, and the next turn they began moving into position around the eastern coastlines of France.
Then I bought off all the CS allies that France and the Incans ever had.
Then the signal to go nuke happy on France was given, and Paris, Tours, Orleans and Troyes burnt in the glare of a billion suns.
At the same time I declared war on the Incans. "You are an uncivilized brute," Pachacuti said.
Then on the turn where you had to vote, I completed all my spaceship parts.
edit: one of the rare games where I used a couple of Turtle Ships
and Ironclads to help bombard and take out a hostile CS.
