Nothing much happened, since our armies were far away, there was a peace treaty with the English recently negotiated, and taking on Toku in his Samurai age seemed unwise. I dropped out of OR/Hinduism, as it weren't making us any friends, but Toku still wouldn't negotiate Open Borders, even though he was at +4 relations.
I built the Forbidden Palace in Timbuktu, as FP only helps with distance costs, and building it in Thebes, so close to our capital, would not have helped much.
The rest of the turn involved just building units. I've also got two new cities founded, one on the lake - it should get to building galleys soon. This will help with the transporting armies.
Overall, I must confess I am filled with ennui at the state of this game. An army of elephants, swordsmen and catapults will likely go obsolete and get slaughtered by anyone we choose to oppose, and the logistics of sending troops halfway around the world mean we can't just pile on reinforcements. This is no short victorious war here - this is a messy affair.
A few tech leaders - Huayna and Gandhi - were able to sell me their World Maps at the beginning of my turn, so they have Paper. Gandhi built Spiral Minaret, so he's had Divine Right for a while.
I remind you that we have no Civil Service, nor Machinery, nor Engineering. What we have is less than 200 turns before the end of the game. Situation looks vaguely bleak - our numerical superiority deters the AI from attacking us, but neither can we do much damage to them.
What has gone wrong? Well, we did make a few blunders, both tactical and strategical.
Taking on Mansa may have been unwise, as we have stretched ourselves across the whole world after finishing him off. What made it only worse was that we took him on in the skirmisher age, and suffered painful losses - this was not my first turnset spent simply moving units to the front. This delayed us significantly, enough to lose our window of opportunity.
What really set the odds against us from the very beginning? It was the map, I believe. The large distances between the civilizations, the difficult terrain, the raging barbarians meant that it was hard to go on the offensive - in fact, the raging barbarians alone meant trouble for us and free experience for the AI.
Is this variant doable? Indeed it is, although the requirement to wage war in the ancient age, pre-swordsmen, catapults and courthouses may be too strict (the first two are needed to take cities without the huge losses we suffered, the last are necessary to keep the economy from going down the drain, as ours did). It will also be beneficial to play a more crammed map, where the AI are closer to both each other and the player. Finally, Epic speed would allow us more turns to get our units to the front, which seems a painful necessity now.
So, what's going to happen to us now? Well, chances are we'll declare war on Lizzy soon (before my next turn), take a city or two, and then either her advanced units or simple attrition will dwindle our forces to nothing. We'll stumble about for a while, maybe get a second expeditionary force going, even take her out if we are lucky.
After that, the rest of the AIs would be so far ahead we wouldn't be able to do much against them. We might get sneak attacked by Toku who'll take a few cities in our western core and will limp to the finish line.
So, what am I missing? Who's got a brilliant plan that will save us all?
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