I managed to get the Hanging Gardens, which is always really nice. I get the Herbalist event as well, which I haven't seen this late before. Moscow even gets the medicine event to generate three more healthiness.
I kind of mull around, unsure what to really do. I move my troops from Boudica's border to Gilgamesh's, then back. My indecision may cost me the game here, but luckily the AI decides to make it a lot easier for me when Boudica attacks Willem and Willem immediately sics both Mehmed and me on her.
Two Archers and a Spearman are pitiful defenses and my War Elephants (which I was actually a bit disappointed with) easily break through. I take Tolosa and gear up to take Bibracte...when Boudica decides to build the Mausoleum of Maussollos there. Well, thanks for giving me an extra incentive, I guess. Bibracte is pretty well-defended, but massive cat suicides and a couple of lucky RNG-rolls (3 consecutive 50-60% victories, even though I lost a couple at 80-90% later on) later I manage to take the city with my last Longbowman. Boudica will likely be able to retake the city, however, and with my stack exhausted and damaged (I don't have a Super Healer yet and all my siege is gone) I take peace, further gearing up for war by rebuilding my siege stack. In the meantime, I've brought Gilgamesh into the Buddhist fold as part of a tech trade, in an attempt to prevent him from vassalising Boudica and opening up a new front to my nigh-undefended east. I'm kind of unhappy I can't just take Boudica down but that's life when you don't have a killer stack. Boudica, apparently having noticed my War Elephants, takes a rather peculiar tech path and gets Pikemen before Longbowmen or Macemen. Well, the era of Elephants is officially over. While I'm still preparing to to take the last few Celtic cities, the following happens:
Well, you really must hate the Dutch, I guess. No offense taken though. I'll just roleplay a good Catherine and stab you in the back at this most inopportune of times. I mean, I wait for Willem to ask me to do so, but I then take up the challenge enthusiastically. I take the holy city of Vienne and the southern city of Verlamion (which has furs, always nice), but when I'm healing to go north, Boudica caps to Willem (surprising, given the fact that he only took one of her cities and I took two, including her fancy holy city, including an even fancier shrine). I rebuild and finish the National Sports League quest I had gotten (Creative Colosseums make that one pretty easy) for the +1 happiness, since João sadly built the Statue of Zeus.
That leaves me with the following situation:
Remember when I thought there was a paucity of production cities? Well, I overcompensated. Yaroslavl' is a great HE city, I kept all the forests around Rostov up to make that one able to produce stuff, and Yekaterinburg has a lot of farms to work a couple of hills. Hell, even St. Petersburg has a surprising amount of production available. I came just a couple of turns short of being able to whip out the Great Library there and I didn't even try to get it until really late. I actually really like how the city came together, almost accidentally: it can work all the towns for massive commerce or it can work all the forests for pretty good production. In the later game I'll probably cottage up the rest as well but until then there's fun to be had there. With all of this in mind, I'm really trying to get my Celtic conquests to be commerce cities, but Vienne is simply too good as a production city and will never be good at commerce. Sad, for a holy city.
The next thoughts are about win conditions. This is where I'm pretty annoyed that I made Gilgamesh become Buddhist. Otherwise, he'd be much more of a pariah and much easier to dislodge. Then there's Wang Kon, the pariah and backwards civilization on this particular map, but he's on the other side of the world and he's protective. I've honestly never seen him in this bad a shape, but that also makes him worthless. I can't take his lands because I can't pay the maintenance costs and it would make any future war basically impossible because of the quadruple front it'd open, and I don't want him as a vassal because he just won't be useful for research. There are two paths I can take now:
-Beeline Mass Media, gift it to Wang Kon, sit back and get an extremely easy victory.
-Waaaaaaar! Kill them all, friends or not!
Usually, I'd probably go for #1 because it's pretty darn reliable, but there are a couple of reasons against that. For one, Willem just built the Sistine Chapel and will put a lot of pressure on my very recent and thus culture-poor Celtic cities. He also tends to be a tech beast and he founded the world's largest religion, which tends to be a huge advantage for the AI. He also has a relatively small army. I can take him in power, so that's going to be easy. On the other hand, he is not really pulling ahead, in no small part because he lacks the Great Prophet to build that amazing shrine. For two, with Notre Dame and Sports League Colosseums, the unhappiness that will follow from warring with fellow Buddhists or even from defying an AP resolution or high war weariness won't be too bad. It's actually the reason I went for the quest despite not having the Statue. Also, while I usually dislike warring people that are friendly with me for roleplaying purposes, we're playing Catherine now...which makes backstabbing the only right way to roleplay. Additionally, the nice thing about Willem is that you pretty much know for sure that he's going to go Free Religion at some point, which might break up his diplomacy. I'm not sure if he's going to do that in this game since he actually founded Buddhism, but it would certainly make things a lot easier. Finally, I always really kind of want to use the UU and UB of whatever civilization I'm playing as, because it just feels silly not to go for them, and if I go the diplomatic route they'll be totally worthless. Cossacks may not be as brutal as they used to be, but they can still be fun to mess around with, and I've got a bunch of War Elephants lying around already.
And, actually finally, since I restarted playing Civ IV and went back up to Monarch, I've played 5 games, winning 2 Space Race and 3 Diplos. And only one of those Diplos was a warring game. I kind of feel like something different.
Looks like an easy wrap up now. 
