This was a map of the world in 1590AD, after I had destroyed the first Japanese city and replaced it with one of my own:
By this time, the Japanese navy was non-existent and I had complete control of the seas near my borders. It took me 165 years, or 33 turns to take the first city from Japan, but the pace sped up rapidly after that. The techinique was the same in each case: I would raze a Japanese city, replace it with one of my own, rush a temple and library in the city to get the cultural border to expand, and then use the new borders to move my artillery and cavalry into an easy range to attack. I had some good luck too in this war; one of the few cases that stands out in my memory as having good combat luck. My cavalry were routinely able to take out conscript infantry, which is definitely not the way the odds go. In any case, things moved along rapidly.
The larger cities had to face a savage bombardment from the artillery SOD; there was no other way to capture them. Tokugawa was certainly paying the price now for starting a war of conquest with me. I used my spy to investigate the capital of Kyoto to see what defenders still remained there, but the city was in such sad shape, I decided to take a picture of it. This city is in worse shape than any I've ever seen in Civ3:
Kyoto was one of the greatest cities in the world, boasting two wonders and a size of 24 before the war started. Now look at it: every city improvement destroyed, the population so whipped and drafted into the ground that every worker has to be changed into an entertainer, starving to death even as we speak. What a sad sight to behold. I couldn't help but think of a real-world comparison to Berlin in the final days of WWII, a city literally falling apart under the stress of war. Well, in any case, I took the city on the same turn in 1665AD:
Kyoto had far too much unhappiness to keep, and like all other Japanese cities, it was razed to the ground. This was a campaign of vengeance after all. And it wasn't going to end until I had broken Japan's power for all time. Even after taking Kyoto and 10 other Japanese cities, Tokugawa still refused to give me a straight-up peace deal; he wanted ME to pay HIM for peace! That was the kind of arrogance that needed to be humbled. This was my progress up to 1665AD, just after Kyoto was razed:
It didn't take much longer for the end to come. By this time, the back of the Japanese army was broken, and there was clearly nothing left.I continued pushing onward all the way to the end of the Japanese island, taking the last city in 1700AD:
At this point, I now controlled all of the Japanese island, and Tokugawa was banished to the icy recesses of the same tundra island that Catherine lived on. This was punishment enough, so I made peace with them. Tokugawa thus joined Catherine in exile, having gone from world superpower to nonentity. The numbers for the war are interesting: 33 turns to take the first city, then 23 to take every other city on the Japanese mainland. It just goes to show that when the AI collapses, they are truly finished. I was weary of war by this time - no, my people weren't suffering from war weariness, I was physically tired of it. Therefore I shifted direction again, and began yet another era of the Indian people: the start of the Great Literacy Campaign.
