250AD     The First Cautious Advance

Up to this point, I had been focused only on defending the territory that I had grabbed with no interest in offensive manuevering of my own. This was a good plan to allow my cities to grow to larger sizes and for my new cities to catch up on city improvements; for that matter, I was in no position to advance with my resources badly strained just to hold what I had! But as my old cities began to max out at size 12 and my backline cities finished their acqueducts/marketplaces/libraries, it was time to begin a cautious push forward to deprive the AI civs of land and resources. The idea was to act cautiously at all times, never to overextend myself but never to be pushed back either. From now on, I was push forward slowly but systematically until every enemy civilization was dead, crushed under the relentless heel of the Chinese. Before getting into that though, take a look at the map from 250AD:

In terms of territory, this map is almost exactly identical to the one from 25 turns earlier in 250BC, the only difference being the presence of my last two cities of Chinan and Shangtung. However, despite the lack of territorial increase, the cities that I do have are considerably larger and stronger than they had been in the past. I had put the golden age production to good effect and was in a vastly stronger position than I had been 25 turns before, when the cities on my south coast had been able to contribute next to nothing to the overall civ. The other big difference is the great increase in tile improvements laid down by my workers, particularly roads close to the front. The expansion of cultural borders on my frontline cities also helped out quite a bit, depriving enemy units of the chance to heal. I would need to hole up just a few more turns to finish up the current builds you see here, and then go on the offensive with Riders.

I noted in 280AD that after floundering around for a dozen or so turns, the Babylonian and American boats you can see in the above picture landed their units on the same turn. Heh, go figure. Of course since I was prepared, I was able to kill both units as soon as they disembarked; that was also the first Babylonian unit I killed. On the next turn in 290AD I founded Kaifeng on the coast to the northwest of Canton, one tile SE of the grasslands wheat. This was my first settlement pushing the lines forward, seeking to claim the no man's land to the north of my civ for the Chinese. My golden age ran out in 310AD, as I had known it would and planned for, sadly dropping my productivity and commerce across the board. To make up for it though, I also popped my fifth leader on the same turn:

With no wonders currently available, it was an easy choice to use this leader to form a horse army. I put the elite* unit who created the leader and two other vets into it, and promptly won a battle to enable the Heroic Epic. That army held the eastern front against the Mongols almost by itself for a long time to come.

Looking at the map at the top of the page, you can see the borders of an Iroquois city intruding upon those of Tsingtao and Tientsin in the extreme northwest of the shot. By 330AD, my forces were strong enough to reach out to that city and replace it with my own. That date marked a banner year for my forces, as I captured and razed my second city, Kahnawake:

I razed the city because I didn't quite have the forces to hold it if captured - just look at all those units the AI civs are packing in the area! I also wanted to move the city and found a new one close by, in a more easily defended position. I had a settler on hand ready to do just that, and Ningpo was founded in 340AD one tile directly due east (a "6" move on the keypad) of where Kahnawake had been. For the next few turns, I was busy mopping up all the units you can see in the above picture and keeping Ningpo from being captured. Rushed city walls immediately brought the defense of my pikes inside the city to 6.75, and that served as a pretty good deterrant to AI aggression. In all that fighting, I popped leader #6 in 330AD (which I didn't even get a picture of) who was used for the Heroic Epic, and leader #7, used on a cathedral when I had nothing better to rush. I do have a picture of the second coming of Sun Tzu:

Get used to the Chinese leader names; there are only 5 of them, so I would be seeing each of them a lot throughout the game. Even with the non-Western spellings, I can name them by heart now: K'uang-yin, Sun Tzu, Qianlong, Jin Qiu, General Tso... at least Ghengis Khan is no longer a Chinese leader in PTW! That picture also gives a pretty good view of how I've managed to push the front forward a tiny bit against the Iroquois. Also note that Riders are now on the scene, which I had started to produce in large numbers. Once I built up an attack force of about 10 Riders, I could begin to move forward much more rapidly.

Then completely out of the blue in 460AD, the long-awaited Gandhi showed up and contacted me. Yes! This is very good news! He was pathetically backwards in tech, only about 2/3 of the way through the ancient age, and had only 4 or 5 cities to his civ. It was clear that India was the whipping boy of the planet, and certainly wasn't going to increase the burden on my northern front very much at all. But most importantly Gandhi brought me map information that I desperately needed, as he had either the territory map or world map of every other civ in the game. This was a gold mine of information; with the way that contacts get traded now in PTW it's entirely possible that some players will go through this game without getting to trade for any map info. Contacting India at this point let me see the shape of the entire continent, and formulate a master plan of conquest (more on that in a minute). In short, the fact that other AI civs had crippled India in the very early game and thus delayed my contact with Gandhi was an enormously beneficial stroke of luck for me. I happily took the other guy's map for some outdated techs and then declared eternal war upon his puny civilization. We're in business now; I can actually see where I'm going!

In celebration of contacting India, my armed forces attacked and captured Allegheny from the Iroquois:

This picture has been lost.

Now that I had a fully revealed minimap, I knew where the other civs were and could plan out a strategy correspondingly. The geography of the continent formed a natural chokepoint to the north of the Chinese starting position; if I could just grab a few more cities, I could cut off the western civs from the northern ones. In particular, once I could grab Seattle and run a secure road up there, I would have secured a solid, defendable front against AI aggression. With six civs to the west and three civs to the north, I came up with a simple plan of conquest: I would concentrate on grinding forward slowly in the west while committing as many forces as I could to the north to knock Mongolia, Japan, and India out of the game. Once they were disposed of, I could wheel all my forces to the west and knock out the western civs one by one until I had control of the entire continent. For a very, very long time to come, I would divert all my forces to either the northern or western fronts, and I will refer to them as such in my report.

By 500AD I had begun my push forward; it was not particularly fast or flashy, but I had made significant progress and nearly cut the continent in two. As more and more of my cities at home reached size 12 and finished their city improvements, the number of Riders coming up to the front would increase and the pace of conquest would become more rapid. But for now, I had a solid start and an overall strategy in place on how to proceed for the rest of the game. At the least, I had survived the end of my golden age without being run over and was even expanding at the cost of the AI civs.

There's nothing really that noteworthy about this combat table; both my losses and the losses of the AI civs have gone up rather sharply as the war of attrition continued. Over the course of this 25-turn period, I lost 22 units to their combined 154 - a ratio of exactly 7:1. As badly outnumbered as I was, I had to maintain a kill ratio of about this amount in order to advance forward. Combined arms are truly devastating in the right hands; I never could have achieved such good results without them.