280AD     No Mercy, No Quarter, No Surrender


From the start, the Third Babylonian War was going to be different than the prior two. Unlike the others, when I was concerned mainly with settling and had no desire to fight, this time I was ready for an all-out total war with no quarter taken. This would be a battle to the death, as it was clear there could never be peace between myself and Babylon. With that in mind, take a look at the prewar map: (this is from 210AD)

I was preparing to build my Forbidden Palace in Bensancon, but the war changed all that. My income was over 100g/turn, and tech was moving at a snail's pace, so I could rush buildings and troops as need dictated. Gunpowder was discovered a few turns into the war, which allowed me to upgrade my pikes into the French UU Musketeers. I was clearly ready. Was Hammurabi?

As it turns out, he was at the start of the war. His knights and my knights fought it out again for several turns in the deserts outside Chartres. But after the first 5 turns, Babylonian forces stopped streaming into my territory, and I knew his offensive had petered out. I took up the offensive myself and captured Amiens back, where the people greeted me by resisting my occupation. I *REALLY* wanted to abandon that city, but refrained from doing so. It took until 350AD to capture Amiens, but after that the progress of the war picked up notably. This was the front in 380AD:

Notice all those idiot settler/spearman pairs? Those were the other civs trying to reach the open land beyond Babylon to settle there. They got in my way on the roads and mucked up my offensives. I would have kicked them out, but was afraid of starting another war by demanding that they leave. This did not endear me to the AI civs though, and I resolved to get them for ignoring my territorial sovereignty later.

My offensive really began to pick up speed once I took Nineveh from Babylon around 450AD. It was helped by a Golden Age that I triggered by having a musketeer win a battle in 440AD:

Things went from bad to worse for Babylon, as I captured their capitol city in 520AD. I knew I could never quell its 11 resisters, so I kept one defender in the city and waited for it to flip back. I would have razed it under normal conditions, of course. Sure enough, it flipped back to them in 580AD but was quickly recaptured. By 600AD, Babylon was in bad shape, its largest cities captured and its economy in ruins. I had already captured the capitol 3 times at that point as it jumped around. Here is the map from that date:

The attack was relentless, and by this point there was no doubt as to the outcome. It was a matter of mopping up the rest of Babylonian cities off of the map, as I was not going to let them survive and be a risk for my cities to culture flip. My golden age ensured a neverending supply of knights, which was good because I continued to have horrid luck on the combat rolls and routinely lost vet knights to regular spearmen. Probably about 15 knights died to spearmen in this fashion throughout the campaign, an unacceptibly high number. But it did not stop the French juggernaut from rolling over the rest of Babylon. Finally, it was all over in 780AD:

My purpose had been achieved in the 500 year war, and now the French empire dominated the world in every measurable category. But with tech crawling by at an extremely slow pace, and the year only 780AD, it was time to rethink my strategy and plan what to do next. The Babylonian Wars had changed the direction in which my game was going from peaceful builder to nonstop warmonger, and it was time for some serious thinking on how best to achieve a victory (which of course was no longer in doubt at this time).