Japan was dead. Babylon was dead (though not at my hands). China was dead. And now Rome had been killed as well. The F4 diplomatic screen was getting awfully lonely! But now I needed to have it all, needed to control the whole world to end this game. Hey wait, am I the hero or the villain bent on world domination? I guess a little of both at the point. Subsequent actions would prove that I was in fact in the right though. Here was my map snapped in 650AD showing the conquests in former Rome:
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If you look closely at the map, you can see my knights moving across the map from Rome to the east. When they got over to the border with Zululand, I would attack them and keep going until I hit the domination limit. Simple and rather brutal (not my normal style of play at all) but why drag it out? The game was OVER. I had much more land, a well placed FP, and far better infrastructure than the AI civs. I could have gotten far, far ahead in the tech race if I had desired, but I tend to adjust my play to that of the game. Whatever my thoughts were going into the game, it had turned into a violent game of conquest, so I would play it out to the finish that way.
Look at the tech I'm currently "researching" with no income into it. Astronomy. Astronomy! In 650AD, no less! The 1.29f patch combined with the lack of any scientific civs (Babylon was killed so early) and constant warfare had turned the tech pace into a Regent game. Soooo very slow if you played your previous game on 1.21f Deity. Sirian had a UN Diplomatic victory in 730AD under those conditions. See what I mean by slow? Using knights still after so long was bizarre to me, but I was willing to play along. It would only take a few turns to move across the map to Zululand anyway...
680AD was one of the craziest turns I've ever played. Between 670 and 680AD, the Zulus appeared on the diplomatic screen and "demanded" Astronomy. This has got to be the worst timing I've ever seen on a demand; here I have my forces set up to attack Zululand on that very turn, and Shaka comes and demands a tech from me?! You gotta love Shaka sometimes. I told him where he could shove those telescopes and the Zulus declared war on me. No one can say you didn't have this one coming to you Shaka; it was a case of the big bully finally meeting someone who stood up to him. And I could hit a lot harder than his blustering civ ever could.
That in and of itself would have been rather interesting, but I also noted the Americans making rather "fishy" moves between those turns. Here's the picture of where they had their units:
Hmmmm, tell me now Abe, what is that archer doing next to Canton? And why did you just move a knight and several swords out of the fog directly towards my cities? Not to mention the fact that abe is now "annoyed" with me whereas he was polite a minute ago. The AI is just horrible at concealing sneak attacks. But I might as well get something out of this, right? The Americans had made some small progress in research while I had been off killing the Romans, and they had the techs Gunpowder and Music Theory that I lacked. So I decided to trade for both of them at 200gpt; I could afford it since I was pulling in over 300gpt. If I was wrong, I would just make due with less income for a while. But I was sure that Abe was pulling a fast one here, so I made the deal and asked him to leave my territory. Sure enough, he declared war on me! No exploit here, Abe broke that deal not me. I would have honored it (seriously). So now I was at war with both the Zulus and Americans - a prospect that promised to make the game more interesting.
Well, I wasn't going to go at it alone in this game, so I turned to my trusty ally Egypt for help. They were already at war with the Zulus, so I paid them a tech or two to declare war on America. It would be a two on two matchup, with the English footing most of the overall strength. But any forces the Egyptians could tie down for me would be worth the effort.
Getting Gunpowder for free had made me look more closely at the tech tree. America was sure to have muskets in their cities, which made assaulting them with knights a daunting task. Military Tradition and cavs were only 3 techs away from Gunpowder, so I decided I would research them myself (whaaaaat?!) and then upgrade all my knights into cavalry. It was an unusual goal for me, but in this case the altered tech costs in 1.29f had made doing my own research profitable. I fired up the rusty old science slider once again and began running research at a small deficit. Meanwhile, my knights began advancing on Zululand.
I went through their cities somewhat slowly but always methodically, as is my style. I would capture each city one at a time, quell the resistance, then rush a temple there and move onto the next city in line. I took a city about every other turn, which was a pretty decent rate. In 750AD I finally got my first leader after umpteen elite victories:
I also got to use the rename feature for the first time; the elite unit that had produced the unit had the honor of being renamed "Sir Knight". As for the leader... well, I didn't see much point to building an army with the game almost over; it was unlikely I would get another leader even with the Heroic Epic. My FP was also already built and in a good location. So I decided to rush a wonder, and what better to make the people happy than a nice wonder like Bach's Cathedral? I had picked up Music Theory half-heartedly from the Amercians only because it was free; I had harbored no thoughts of actually building the darn thing. So I was as shocked as anyone when I completed the Cathedral in 770AD and it kicked off a golden age! Talk about luck... errr, good planning. Yes, it was good planning; that was it. Needless to say, if it wasn't already, the game was OVER at this point.
In 850AD I discovered Military Tradition and upgraded all my knights to cavs. At this point, I controlled about half of Zululand and none of America. The pace... quickened very rapidly after getting my cavs. They first demonstrated their abilities by capturing Zimbabwe in 870AD, and went on to capture at least one, and sometimes two, cities every single turn for the rest of the game. You could see my progress over the last 6 turns just like marching in a line: city just taken in resistance, city with a temple rushed, city with 2 culture, city with 4 culture, etc. Try and look at that in this picture, taken in 910AD:
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I had just taken the last Zulu city on the map, which (ironically enough) was Babylon itself! It is off the top right corner of the screen though. Then Mpondo was taken the turn before that (rushing a temple now), Isandlwahna has 2 culture, Bapedi has 4 culture, etc. The Zulus had just been killed, dying in 910AD. I was at this moment rushing a few settlers to cover the holes in territory that had opened up. Note the pace of conquest: it took 17 turns with knight to capture the Zulu cities up to Hlobane (7 cities). With cavs, it took 6 turns to take 6 cities (one was autorazed in the desert). That's... a lot faster. I love cavalry. :)
So now I was engaged in a fight against just the Americans. The Zulus had not discovered Gunpowder, so I had been up against pikes, by the Americans had large numbers of muskets. Although they had Sun Tzu's, most of their muskets were regulars (?) I was able to keep the same rapid pace, but was taking much higher losses, so I began rushing cavs in cities with barracks near the front to keep pushing onward. It's another good use of money to help speed a conquest forward. I was really pushing for a pre-1000AD finish; that would be something special. In 960AD, I managed to captured Washington from Lincoln:
Washington turned into a springboard for capturing two more cities on the next turn. But my golden age also ended in 970AD, and frankly I was starting to run out of forces at the breakneck pace. Sooner or later, I would have to go a turn without capturing a city just to let my reinforcements catch up to me. I was running out of time to get my pre-1000AD victory. Didn't I have enough territory yet? America was all but dead, and I really didn't want to have to go after my faithful ally Egypt. At the beginning of each turn I eagerly awaited the domination victory popup. Could I control enough of the world before my self-imposed victory target?
