This wasn't an exactly succesful round, all things considered.
On the Viking front, Ragnar gave me a start by landing this stack next to Nidaros.
That berserker had already killed our crossbow in the city. I began moving every unit in the area towards the city, fearing for the worst. Next turn, Ragnar kills our Numidian with the 5/8 berserker and then kills our fortified, combat 2 pike with a city garrison longbow! Sometimes the RNG gods just turn their backs...
Despite his successes, Ragnar, showing typical AI weedness, failed to take the city, guarded at that point only by a badly wounded mace. Next turn, reinforcements arrived and the threat was sorted out. Unfortunately, that front stagnated further when Ragnar sent a similiar stack a few turns later and I was forced to hunker down. Success was only met in the north, where our mace/pike pair managed to raze a newly founded city guarded by a couple of swords.
Here is the current situation.
Our stack is moving out, but beware of that berserker. I left the stack unmoved so the city can be reinforced if felt necessary.
On the Arabian front, things went little better. Our stack managed to raze Anjar, the little iceball city, but when I saw this, my heart sank.
Yep, that's a city garrison 3 musket. I pressed on nevertheless. After a couple of turns bombing Baghdad, I started to withdraw because of this.
But it was probably five turns too late. Our stack there got annihilated by a wave of catapults and camel archers. The situation now looks like this.
Saladin has a settler there with a mace and a camel. We have nothing to corral them with, since all our pikes in that front are pushing up daisies. I suggest that we try to sneak our stack into the Viking front, where they'd do more good, and let our cavalry handle Saladin.
Ah, yes, the cavalry. When MT finished, I traded nationalism to Roosevelt for Guilds, his map and a couple hundred gold. That shaved a turn off of Gunpowder and when it finished, I went forth to earn myself the moniker "bloody hand." Thousands of people died to put men on horseback and equip them with boom-sticks. So much for building up our economy, but at least soooo will have a nice stack of toys ready. In Utica the NE was whipped as well.
Research is set into printing press, as I figured that it would be a good tech to have in any situation.
That's it,
this is for soooo.