With the iron that I forced Cathy to send me, I was now able to field sporty new frigates. The AI caravels started going down in a hurry after that:
Now THAT's a major upgrade from galleons! 
I quickly swept the southern channel free of ships and began preparing an invasion fleet. In the meantime, Mecca finished the Kremlin (in case I ever need to rush something with Universal Suffrage) and Medina completed Scotland Yard. Yes it IS good to research Communism before anyone else! I order up the full complement of four spies - there's plenty of work for them to do.
Arabian soldiers land on the southern continent for the first time in 1580!
My original plan was to land over at Coventry to the east, but Vicky was moving a lot of units around there, so I sent the first wave over here to York instead. It certainly helped having Hinduism in both cities for spying purposes! With cannon against longbows, it was no contest. I bombed the defenses down to zero on the first turn, and sent in the troops after that:
Chalk up our first non-barbarian victory of the game! 
Oh and look, spices, mmm. A happy resource that is not gold/silver/gems/dyes. There were only 4 luxuries on the whole northern continent, so anything extra was greatly appreciated.
If you go back and check the earlier screenshots, you'll see that I was researching Rifling. Well, that tech finished in 1585, at which point in time I revolted to Nationhood and began drafting. Time to pull a magic army out of thin air once again! (As longtime readers will know, I am a huge fan of the draft in this game.) Drafting is most productive right when you first discover Rifling; rifles only cost one population to draft, and they are an expensive unit to train at the time. By the time you get infantry from Assembly Line tech, drafting is no longer such a sweet deal, since they cost two population and a city with factory + power plant can build infantry in just 2 or 3 turns. (Yeah, those things shouldn't all be enabled by one tech, but that's just the way it is.) But here in the pre-factory age, drafted rifles are a great way to go. With this many cities, I plan to draft quite a few of them and overrun the Financial civs.
Of course - war weariness and draft anger will be crippling, but you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. 
I finished my first round of drafting by 1600AD, and paused to take stock. I ended up popping 11 rifles in the first wave. Along with the forces I already had on hand (grenadiers and cannon), I felt comfortable dividing my forces into two main stacks, in order to get the attack moving faster. One group would go west and put London under siege, while the other group would push into the blackness in the east. I say "the blackness" because there had been no way to trade for a world map and see what was on the inside of the southern continent! My spies began working to fix that immediately:
You see the lovely lady circled in white, clearing the fog of war for me and preparing to drive deeping into the unrevealed tiles. The first wave of units has nearly reached London, while my drafted reinforcements are landing outside Coventry (where my frigates have bombed down the defenses, hooray for combined arms!)
Coventry quickly fell to the large invasion force, but London put up more of a fight. Vicky kept throwing large numbers of catapults at my attackers in the area; she didn't have quite enough forces to destroy my units, but I was too hurt to press the attack on her capital. London thus sat under siege for a half-dozen turns until more reinforcements could trek their way through the sea of English culture. But once they made it there, Vicky's palace was going down:
London's capture opened up a nice little gap in the English culture, allowing me to push units to the south much more rapidly. At the same time, as the 10-turn drafting penalty wore off, I began skimming another round of conscripts out of all my cities. Here's what they looked like funneling down to the south:
Lot of units heading down those supply lines, and that was bad news for Vicky and Huayna. 
I had two galleons ferrying the units over to the southern continent, and they had plenty of work to do every turn. It was exactly four tiles in the channel between north and south, so I could load and unload the units with just one turn's worth of transit time. Perfect!
Vicky really had no answer for the rifles and cannon I was using against her, since her best units were muskets and maces. In addition to London (1645), I also took Canterbury (1645), Hastings (1660), Vitcos (the first Incan city in 1660), and finally Nottingham:
Capture of Nottingham gave me complete control of the southern continent north of the central lake. Yes - the Custom Continents map produced another strange feature here, with a small saltwater sea inside the southern continent. The AIs even had ships on it! (I nearly got caught off guard by a galley invasion from across the little sea.) However, for all my success, note the 20% luxuries and the huge deficit research. War weariness and draft anger is absolutely KILLING me back at home. I've ranted enough about that, so I won't do more of it here, but I really do feel that war weariness as currently implemented is simply broken. I was running Police State (thanks, Pyramids!) and it was still crazy high. Bah.
My plan was to fight until I got Assembly Line, at which time I would pause to build factories and consolidate. Still some more cities to grab before that takes place, however. 1675 is a relatively quiet turn, as I take only the junk Incan city of Vilcas in the east. Wait a minute, what's this?
Wtf is Liverpool doing here? It's not like the AI can defend it with a single longbow, and it's not even that great of a location. Man, what is Vicky smoking? 
I burn it to the ground instantly, but every city you capture increases your war weariness further. Oh joy. (Argh!)
So if you want to know what this war was like in a nutshell, here's a good picture:
There's something fiendishly delightful about gunning down elephants with cannon. 
Anyway, so I capture Warwick with ease and decide to stop here. Vicky/Huayna are putting up almost no resistance at all, but there are no more cities in close range, and I'd like to get factories started ASAP. I figure I can come back and finish them off soon enough anyway. I even got a sweet peace deal in the process:
Confirmed: I was able to get a city from the AI in a peace deal. That wouldn't seem to be noteworthy, but this is the first time I have EVER gotten that to happen in the release version. Does anyone else think Soren has the screws on a little too tightly in this area? 
If I can speculate here for a minute, I think that the damage threshold for the AI giving you a city is set extremely high, and so in most cases you actually kill the civ before it is reached. Only here, with the AIs playing in teams, can you inflict enough damage to get a city without actually killing the AI in question! So maybe things aren't as broken as I thought, but some of the numbers certainly need tweaking here.
Here were the trench lines when the peace treaty was inked:
The campaign neatly bisected the southern continent, leaving me in control of the north and the AIs still keeping a tenuous grip on the south. I actually had the best land now, as most of what was down there contained desert or tundra/ice. Vicky was almost completely finished, hanging on with one core city (Newcastle) and some late colonies (Oxford and the captured Vladivostok). Notice that I have no plans to give Yakutsk, the city I got in the peace deal, back to Cathy. It will fit with my borders much better if I retain possession (and since it was gifted to me in the treaty, it's actually 100% Arabian now!) I do plan to give her back Vladivostok if I can recapture it, however. Huayna is in better shape than Vicky, but still not very good. He also has some offshore islands to the east, which are not pictured. Mansa is off doing his own thing on his island, totally ignoring the plight of his AI brethren. You should have checked out the name of this game, Mansa! ("Divided we fall")
I ran Hereditary Rule civic right up until I signed a Permanent Alliance with Cathy, after which I was free to go to Representation. I spent some time in Police State during the war, but now I was free to return to Representation once more. With all these cities down in the extreme south, it was also time to make the permanent swap to State Property:
With my compact island, there had been no need for State Property before the war, but from this point on I will never swap to another Economic civic again. I would go on to set up quite a lot of watermills and workshops down on the southern continent when I redid the AI tile improvements. (Built a lot of cottages down there too, which grew very quickly in the post-Emancipation world.)
Assembly Line research finished in 1690AD, and so I triggered a Golden Age to help speed along factory contruction:
Why yes, it IS good to be Philosophical and store up those Great People! 
This was a particularly good time for a golden age.
Meanwhile, if you look closely at the minimap, you'll see some tiny pinpricks of light moving around on the eastern continent. Those are my spies of course, the only way I'll ever get a chance to see what the terrain looks like (since I refuse to sign Open Borders and they refuse to trade me their world map). As my spies wander around down there, peeking into the AI cities, I got the chance to snap a picture of some extremely weedy city management:
Look at the top left corner. Despite having a huge income, Bismarck spent a turn on STRIKE for some reason?! Don't know what's going on here, don't WANT to know what the poor AI is thinking. On the plus side, these AIs are still only researching Astronomy, a good way behind me in tech. On the negative side, they've finally finished settling their continent and are really starting to kick into high gear on the tech front. I still have time for now, but I'm going to have to reckon with the eastern giants sooner or later before this game is over.
Yeah, that's right - the whole reason I need to attack Team Financial right now is so that I'll have a CHANCE to stop the eastern bloc later on when they really get their research machine going. If this stuff were easy, it wouldn't be called an "Extreme Adventure!" 
Halfway through my golden age, look what the AIs go and do over on the southern continent:
Seriously, wtf is so great about this location?! Are they THAT desperate for spices? I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Guess what's going to be the FIRST target when war breaks out again?
The Democracy research you see above was to adopt Emancipation, which Vicky's team had already taken. I had enough unhappiness already without that piling on top, so my slaving days came to an end here. During the boring period between wars, my soldiers amused themselves by taking out a large barbarian city off the west coast:
At size 8, Carib was more of a barb metropolis than your usual barb camp, but infantry against longbows wasn't much of a fight. I quickly captured it and added yet another city to my growing empire in the south.
The treaty ensured ten turns of peace with Vicky's team, but I made no promises after that. Once I finished my factories and repositioned my forces, it would be lights out for Vicky and Huayna. You see, appeasement just doesn't work against some leaders - and I don't like to leave things unfinished!
