Session XV: 1844 AD – 1856 AD
This session began with the destruction of the Native American empire. Bismarck captured the city of Chaco Canyon in 1845 (with just a
slightly more powerful army), eliminating Sitting Bull from the game.
Meanwhile, my war against Saladin continued, with the capture of Baghdad.
Next turn, Sis generated a Great Prophet – about our third in the space of only a dozen or so turns! A new source of Copper appeared near the Persian city of Gronigen, which was nice - although it had little impact given the late stage of the game.
My troops continued their advance into Arabian lands, and took Saladin’s capital city of Mecca.
Sis and I were now at 55.06% of the world’s population, and 43.62% of the world’s land area – only 7.38% away from winning.
The final vote of the game for Secretary-General came around, which we (of course) won just on our own 55% share of the world votes. Strangely though, Pericles and Roosevelt voted for us. (This was odd because we’d never exactly been overly friendly with them, refusing their demands on a regular basis. I guess you can never completely predict the AI.)
I continued my rampage of Saladin’s lands, capturing Damascus...
Najran…
…and Medina, this latter city marking the end of the Arabian empire.
Next turn, Sis generated yet another Great Prophet – our fourth one (at least) in a row! Apparently, these last years of our game coincided with the age of prophecy.
With the Arabs gone, Sis and I loaded up a large number of transports with hordes of troops and headed west to destroy Saladin’s team mate, Ragnar. The first stop for my amphibious army was the island to the north of the Viking homeland. Tonsberg was the first city to fall…
…quickly followed by Oslo. Roskilde followed next turn.
Even with half a dozen transports operating, it was still taking a while to cart the backlog of tanks from Arabian lands over to Viking lands! (There were very few Airports around - in fact only two on the whole island - so airlifting was a fairly slow process too.)
Fortunately this didn’t really matter much, since Ragnar was so weak that even 20 or so Tanks could quite easily crush his nation. (Incidentally, at this point in time, both Sis and I had such an excessive number of troops that it was taking us a very long time to complete turns. We could probably each have deleted half of our armies and still won easily in a shorter time. Of course, that would have been against our philosophy!)
In 1851, I generated yet another a Great Person, this time in Tarsus. Can you guess what it was? Yes, that’s right…
The Great Prophet went to work as a specialist in Ectabana, since there was nothing much else he could do at this late stage of the game.
The same turn, the first mainland Viking city (Birka) fell to an amphibious Persian force.
Next turn, we discovered Superconductors, and began work on Genetics for the health benefits to our cities.
The carnage continued on the Viking mainland. The capital city of Nidaros didn’t stand a chance against multiple City Raider III Modern Armor units.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not), even with our colossal military and technological advantage, AI civs near the bottom of the score table were still making arrogant demands of us. We refused them, of course.
Sis’s forces finally arrived at the Viking mainland in 1853, and in their first battle in many years, the Romans easily took the city of Haithabu.
Meanwhile, I conquered the island city of Sigtuna.
Bismarck managed to get two events within a few turns which increased his and Boudica’s tech progress. Luckily, we were far enough ahead that this slightly biased turn of events didn’t really matter for us.
With our recent gains in land, we were now only 3.2% away from winning via domination. (Incidentally, it was very clear by now that Pericles was going for a cultural win, but luckily he was far too far away to have any chance of gaining victory before us. If he’d been closer to victory, we would have just crushed his island next after Saladin.)
Sis continued inland, and captured the city of Ribe.
Meanwhile, Bismarck generated a Great Prophet and used him to start a final Golden Age (of course, too late to have any impact on the game’s outcome). The Greeks were being struck by several pestilence events (we had no sympathy for them). Boudica’s city of Awdaghost (formerly Mansa’s) went into revolt for the first time due to the cultural pressure of surrounding Persian cities with Sid’s Sushi.
Sis and I finished Genetics, and began researching the Laser. Back on the war front, I captured the city of Bjorgvin, while Sis captured Jelling.
We finished up the session at this point. Our gold and production graphs were still continuing to grow, dwarfing our nearest rivals:
We were now only 2.43% away from winning a domination victory in land area:
Our combined military at this point consisted of over 200 ground-based units, over 100 naval units and over 50 air units, as you can see in the next two screenshots.
The state of diplomatic relations as at 1856 AD:
Stay tuned for the thrilling (if somewhat predictable) conclusion!
Cheers,
- Lord Parkin