Domination on turn 247.
A good start got a bit bogged down by a slightly unwieldy empire. As discussed in the first spoiler, I probably had 1-2 homegrown towns too many.
T149 - Met Alexander
T150 - discovered Astronomy
T152 - Met Shoshone. The rest came quickly of course. As is often the case, Greece were the City State "favourite", but thanks to Patronage policies I could maintain CS dominance on my own continent and gain a little influence on the other one.
At this time, Ottomans are gone and we advance towards Gao, mainly with longbowmen. Apparently I researched Machinery before Astronomy, perhaps having a little extra respect for the difficulty level immortal+continents.
The main conquest unit would be artillery, its 3 tile range being OP (bordering on tedious sometimes).
T197 - Captured Madrid. Subsequently sacked Seville to eliminate Spain. I started with Spain because there were a lot of neutral tiles to land on north of Antwerp.
T210, cirka - Athens and Sparta taken. Sparta had both Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza and shared borders with Sweden.
T230, cirka - Captured Stockholm and Mason Kahni. Army had started to divide after Athens,
T247 - Constantinople.
So, the capitals on the other continent took 50 turns to capture, plus the preceding travel arrangements. I think the comparatively slow finish date was due to slow growth rather than slow military. Warsaw never got bigger than size 20 and the expos levelled out at around 10-11, which seems meagre, especially on Monarchy. Edit: I now realized it took 47 turns between finding the other continent and capturing its first capital. This appears slow and maybe Songhai should have been wiped out before the beginning of this intervall.
- Who was the toughest foe?
Greece had so many CS alliances that could not be overthrown, but no foes were difficult. As I was preparing to attack Constantinople, there was a pretty intimidating view in the home area:
But the AI used this advantage very poorly. They didn't send their whole fleet of frigates and galleasses; they didn't protect their land troops; the boats scattered rather than attacking in formation - apparently they were headed for a small Greek settlement (being already at war with Greece) and were utterly unable to regroup and adapt.
- How many armies did you have, and what was their composition? Did you have a strong navy?
See above, not much to add. Quite an overkill compared to fiddlesticks.
- Did you get an ideology? Which one?
By entering the modern age I got Freedom, which helped with happiness, but I was penalized -15 as Byzantium chose Order the very next turn.
- How useful were Polish uniques to you? Did you use Winged Hussars?
Moderately useful. The extra movement was good but the "force enemy to retreat ability" stank, because on several occasions it drove the hussar too far into enemy territory and within range of city bombardment, in effect killing it. I mean, a common tactic is to injure enemies with melee troops and kill them with ranged units, so as to avoid counter-attacks. This piece of tactic is so fundamental that I found it hard to adapt it to the hussar's "abilities".
Congratulations on some fine results!
