I'll get to what the title refers to a bit later. First, here's the map from 130AD:
I had already taken the Russian city in the tundra; can't remember its name at the moment. It was auto-razed upon capture, and I replaced it with one of my own cities in a better position. Odessa was similarly exposed, and shortly thereafter fell to my swordsmen. So I was making good progress in the early stages of the war. There was no reason not to suspect that I would just keep going and overrun Russia in short order. But then my "allies" the Japanese made peace with the Russians in 210AD. And, having no place to go, two Japanese warriors in Russian territory picked the worst possible spot to fortify:
Grrrrrrrrrr..... AAARRRGGGHHH! The AI couldn't have crippled me better if it had tried to do so. The worst part is that I couldn't even try to kick them out, as they were in neutral and Russian territory. Why wouldn't Catherine just kick them out? Why? WHY??? This caused no end of problems. So to assault Kiev, I had to land swordsmen by GALLEY on the other side of the city, where they could be attacked on the turn they landed by Russian forces. It was a nightmarish situation. It also slowed my advance down to a crawl; when I finish my description of the whole campaign it will become clear just how much time those Japanese warriors cost me.
Meanwhile, the Zulus were causing problems on a colony of mine on a tiny island off the coast of Zululand. If you played the game you know where it is; it was a two-tile island with a fish in its range. I wanted this island for my own badly, as it had a fish resource (+1 score) and was its own continent (+3 score). The Zulus had been landing small forces each turn attacking it, and each turn my guys would beat them back with no losses. I was waiting for a leader to emerge from the conflict, which was bound to happen sooner or later. In 270AD, it did happen, but the same turn saw the Zulus land 8 different forces on my tiny island, which I couldn't hold out against. I had 5 or 6 turns left on my alliance, and no way to get the leader out of my city. Was it worthwhile to break the alliance and sign peace with the Zulus to keep my scenario-scoring city and leader alive? I decided it was. How bad could the effects of one broken deal be after all? They couldn't be that bad, right?
Right?
Well, I was wrong. No one else ever trusted anything else I said for the whole game, although I traded incessantly and never broke any other deals. This is an area where Civ3's trading system is completely broken. The penalty for breaking one deal, EVER, through the whole game is almost exactly the same as violating deals all the time, for the whole game. This is laughably bad, as breaking an alliance that lasts 5 more turns is equivalent to repeatedly using ROP rapes on one civ after another. My game was "dastardly", but the Civ3 diplomacy system treated me with excessive harshness for that. Or, if that is to be the penalty, then something far more severe needs to be implemented for exploits like ROP rape, declaring wars to break trade deals, etc. As it stands now, the system doesn't accurately represent your reputation AT ALL, although it is otherwise quite good. OK, now back to my narrative.
In any case, events marched on. My assualt on Kiev stalled until I could put a large contigent of swords and galleys together for a freakin' naval assualt on the city. The AI civs had researched Republic some time earlier (I was buying for techs, as usual at this point) but it wasn't until 340AD that they researched Monarchy. I traded with them, and the next turn the Indian Monarchy began. As soon as I came out of my one turn anarchy, I used my leader that I had gotten from fighting the Zulus on a wonder:
The Hanging Gardens completed on the next turn, giving me some additional (but mostly useless) happiness and more importantly 3 scenario points. I wanted to use the leader so I would have the chance of generating another one in battle. The next notable event was the building of my Forbidden Palace in the center of my continent in Bangalore (490AD):
Around this time I was able to take Kiev from the Russians, with their stationary Japanese allies still stubbornly preventing my advance. I still had to supply the city by sea though, as the road was still blocked. Since the Japanese were "Furious" with me, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea to ask them to leave. Going back to an old save confirmed this after the game - they immediately declared war on me when this happened. Now the next target was Moscow, which was the bulwark of the Russian defense. But a nice thing popped up in 510AD:
Shivaji was saved for use on another wonder... namely Shakespeare in my captial for a bigtime 8 points. At this point, a series of struggles began for the control of Moscow, which proved amazingly resilient to my attacks.
