And so the epic tale of the keepers of civilization in their quest to rid the world of barbarism continues with the assault on the lowlife tribesmen that call themselves the Mongols. The army takes the luxury of stopping for a minute to bombard city defenses but then enters the city before burning it down.
And onward they march and make short work of Beshbalik.
Genghis sees the futility of it all and accedes to our reasonable proposal.
As rolo mentioned the nation rejoices at the thought of war elephants, only to find out we do not have ivory.
In a fine display of unilateral decision making, Shimonseiki is founded near the ruins of Karakorum. 2 sheep and visions of windmills and bio farms seem to make it worthwhile enough. In that distant future it will be able to spit out tanks at a reasonable rate. Besides it cuts the Mongols access to horses, which can't be bad and to me it looks like a good northern frontier town. Besides it complied with the rule "if a city by building wealth at its growth cap gives a positive contribution, then the city is worth founding" which I'm not sure whether it exists but it makes some sense.

Built a monument asap while working the horses. It can start growing now as I hand it over (maybe it should build a gran now instead of the rax I queued).
The Japanese then looked to secure the rest of the northern frontier by first eliminating the BarbBarbarian dwelling of Cuman, picking up a worker in the process.
The only remaining thorn in our northern side was the Chinese city at this point. Qin was actually at war now with Hatty and Mansa, so it was time to blow the horns, despite not being really ready yet in the south, though by now sufficient units were in place in case of an unlikely counter attack by Qin.
Hangzhou is taken and burnt to the ground with special pleasure, as the RNG wasn't particularly friendly to us here (lost 2 cats and 2 axes over it

(wait a minute, the screenshot says 2 spearmen?


Did the game choose them over the axes in the same stack?

)).
We settle the place that was marked.
And our north thus looks like this, which means we can now fully concentrate on SE Asia.
By now we start to get units in place near Xian, but it's pretty well defended, at least given the losses we incurred at Hangzhou which had only 2 archers.
And I hand it over here. Meanwhile we have finished CS and started on Machinery which will take 10-ish turns or less if we can fuel our research by razing cities. With Samurai at hand likely SE Asia will fall fairly rapidly in our hands.
In other news, the great general made his academy in Nara. We also popped a great merchant which is left unused in our former cap. It would bulb paper.
There are quite some skirmishes going on among the barbarian tribes of the world. By the way, we met English and Spanish lady barbs. Barbarella?
International relations:
And technologically we're here.
Cyrus and Saladin are doing rather well. I guess our success will depend on how fast we can cripple them both into oblivion after the Indians.