As I stated on the previous page, Rome had been killed off in 330BC by the Aztecs and had been critically weak for a long time before that. This meant that there was a large amount of open space in what I expect was the center of Rome's core cities in other games. The Aztecs and English had razed every Roman city other than Rome itself, adding to the goldrush-like settling atmosphere that followed in the wake of Rome's destruction. Here's a picture of all that unclaimed territory from 330BC, the turn that Rome died.
This image has been lost.
Can you imagine there being that much open land so close to AI civs as late as 330BC? I certainly had never seen the like in other Deity games, but it shows how much AI expansion can be slowed down when they focus entirely on warfare. I had whipped out a galley from Isandhlwana the previous turn and just moved units across for the first time when I took this shot. Notice all the English units there which had just razed the last few Roman cities. The minimap also tells a good story of what was going on in the game. I had filled up my penninsula with cities, but not surprisingly had nothing beyond that. Azteca was a bloated mass of cities, swollen from absorbing southern Rome and from pumping settlers while in their Golden Age. England was still weak and just emerging from their starting position. France and the Iroquois were too far away to matter, but from what I could tell had lived together completely peacefully on their island the whole time. And the massive unoccupied space in the center was where Rome should have been located, had the other AI civs not turned on it and destroyed the civ.
Now that Zimbabwe was off of archer production, it went back onto producing settlers again. I switched Bapedi, the only other city with any kind of decent food production, onto settlers as well. I wanted to grab as much land as I could before Azteca and England gobbled it up for themselves. And there was iron over there as well... You can see the first settler en route to the other continent in the above shot, just northeast of Isandhlwana. He popped over to the other side of the bay and founded Ngome, my first city there, in 270BC. More settlers were to follow. Over the next dozen turns, I produced four more settlers and sent them over to the other side of the bay via my one galley to found new cities. The second city went up in 110BC, the following in 30BC, and so on. I had the surviving archers from my Roman war over there trying to run blockades (which failed miserably, by the way - too much land) and one of them actually got the chance to destroy a barb camp. This was with Aztec and English units running around on all sides of me. I found it amusing, and to be honest I could certainly use the 25g.
My 40-turn Republic tech came due in 90AD, and I revolted immediately. I had nowhere near the infrastructure needed to support a Republic, but I needed the lowered corruption to get any shields at all over across the sea in former Rome and thus start building a Forbidden Palace. I kept my people happy by trading for some foreign luxuries and increasing the lux rate a lot (to 20 or 30%). So my income temporarily decreased by going to a republic, but the increase in production across the board was well worth it. By 250AD, I had settled all of land I was going to get over on the other side of the bay, and it seemed I had done fairly well. Here was the map:
A few notes for this map (sorry that it's a full screen one, but I wanted to show the full extent of my territory at the time.) I had avoided building more fishing towns on my home penninsula due to the overlap between Intombe and Neapolis, as well as that between Swazi and Tugela. I didn't want to increase the corruption in my existing cities by putting new almost useless ones so close to my capital (having more cities increases the corruption in all of your cities). Maybe it was foolish, but I was delaying infrastructure in Zimbabwe for too long anyway, so I stuck with that decision. Neapolis and Intombe shared tiles like crazy, but could both get a couple of shields and be productive. Ngome was my planned Forbidden Palace city; it was already getting 2 shields/turn without a courthouse and also contained both horses and iron. Definitely a valuable site. Swazi and Tugela were founded where they were to minimize overlap with the English cities and share the numerous good tiles around them. I also set Swazi to become a worker factory, which helped to minimize overlap. Umtata was of course another fishing town. And Umfolozi, which is almost obscured by Aztec units moving by, was founded to get a few more tiles close to the Forbidden Palace city and to rush a harbor. I rushed one there to keep the cities across the bay happy with the luxuries that my core cities had. Naturally all my cities are on a bigtime infrastructure push at the moment. Things were going pretty nicely.
But look more closely at the picture. There really ARE a lot of Aztec units outside Umfolozi, and that means trouble. I took this picture at the end of a play session, so imagine my shock when I opened up the game the next time I sat down to play and got this message between turns:
Uh oh. This was serious trouble. The title for this picture was "Oh shit" and that's exactly what I said when I got the pop-up message. Notice that it's just a zoomed in picture of the 250AD one, so you can see what I was building at the time of the attack. Hmmm, granaries and temples, and a harbor or two... I don't see too much military being built there, do you? And remember that any change of production meant wasting shields. I had a total of 6 or 7 units over on the other side of the bay, no more than the Aztecs had just in that screenshot. And they had swords too... Yeah, I'm in bigtime trouble here.
Here's where some luck came in. I had only one impi in Umfolozi, but two archers there to reduce the likelihood of a culture flip to the Aztecs. When the Aztecs attacked, my impi defended successfully against the first two archers, then the sword attacked and killed one of the defending archers. And that was it - I survived the first round of attacks. Of course the victory of my impi had triggered a golden age at a time that I really didn't want one, but that was unavoidable. At least I was in a republic and not in despotism.
So Umfolozi survived the first turn, but you can see from the picture what was coming up against it. There was no chance to hold the city. So I made the hard choice to abandon the city and pull back to Ngome with my surviving units, which I would have to defend to the death. My core cities that were not engaged in lengthy infrastructure builds went over to military: impis and (sigh) archers, which remained my top offensive unit. No horses could be built because I had lost my harbor connection to my new cities when I abandoned Umfolozi (and I had just rushed that harbor too! Grrr...) I signed England to a military alliance versus the Aztecs for the hefty sum of 90g and 17gpt and sat back to wait it out. Save me Liz!
All those units that had come after Umfolozi just disappeared. They never showed up at Ngome, which was a good thing because I wouldn't have had a prayer if they had. I assume that Elizabeth was giving them closer targets to deal with, and we all know how well the targeting of the AI works. Thankfully my paper cutout defenders in my second core were not challenged at all, and aside from the city I had to abandon I was able to escape unscathed there. Meanwhile, in my core cities I was building lots of archers as part of an ambitious plan to try and get Tlacopan and Rome from Monty's hands. That would allow me to link up all my territory together, and since I wasn't being threatened, why not think big? I also entered the Middle Ages in 330AD, long after the AI civs had done so.
Around 350AD though Aztec units started popping up near Intombe. A couple of knights and a few more swords appeared out of nowhere and started advancing into my core. I threw my archers against them... and took major losses. It took 3 archers to kill each knight and 2 to kill each sword, which were numbers I could not afford to lose. Just when it looked dire though, the Aztec reinforcements that were coming turned around and headed west. The faulty AI targeting system saved me again. Whew! Surely I couldn't be that lucky all the time, right? Well apparently I could; I marched a group of 4 or 5 archers down to Tlacopan in 430AD and attacked the next turn. The first one killed a defending spear... and the second one did too, giving me the city (!) How lucky is that? All those times that my knights have died to spears, and here archers had no trouble with them? Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
In 460AD my alliance with England could be canceled honorably, so I did so. I would have continued to push forward, except that England had just taken Rome and there was no chance I could get anything in Monty's core. So I made peace, getting nothing in return, but I already had taken Tlacopan and its treasure trove of dyes. I had survived! And, if anything, I was even stronger as a result of this war. It was a miracle, to say the least. Now that I was back at peace, I could go back onto my too-long delayed infrastructure push and hopefully develop my cities into a position to win the game.
