The destruction of the Babylonians fulfilled my entire goal for the game at that point. But now a pressing question remained: where should I go from here? Practically the whole game had been spent at war with Babylon at this point, and though I had conducted the war honorably at all times (no razing, abandoning, starving cities; one or two were razed by my English allies though), I was somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. The game's tech progression had crawled along at an unbearably slow pace; it was moving at Regent speed since the two strongest civs had been at war for much of the game and none of the others were scientific. The only way for me to end the game in a reasonable time (which I wanted badly to do, since the game was clearly over) was to win a domination victory. But how to do that while remaining an Honorable Civ? That was the tough question. Here is the post-Babylon world map from 780AD:
The minimap shows that I was clearly in control of the game, and with my Forbidden Palace soon to be completed in Nineveh, I would have a production and economic base that no one else could possibly compete with. I decided at this point that rather than wait around forever for a diplomatic or spaceship victory (which would take until 1900, probably) I would go for a domination victory. This meant a settler push to the little useless islands out in the sea, but it also meant that a war would be needed to get more territory. I couldn't start the war and remain honorable, so the other civ would have to initiate it, something not likely with my civ dominating the power graph so completely. The way out was incredibly simple: ask the AI civs to leave my territory, which they continued to infiltrate with reckless abandon.
I simply asked England every turn to remove their forces from territory or declare war. On the 5th turn of this, in 830AD, I received this result:
This is where the rules issue comes up. According to the actual text, I was within the honorable category by demanding their withrawal: "Asking those without right of passage to depart your lands is always honorable." And again later on, the rules state that "If you demand that the AI forces withdraw, they may say OK and then ignore you; however, if you demand on two consecutive turns that AI forces withdraw or declare war, on the second turn they are forced to choose. If they then declare war on you, they are the aggressor." This is exactly what happened. So I was within the rules as an Honorable civ, right? Well, I see it this way: I was within the text of the rule but not within the spirit of it. By asking England to leave or declare war each turn, I was pretty sure they would declare war eventually, and this is manipulation of the AI which is NOT allowed. Ultimately though, I did not declare war; they did, so their lands and cities became fair game. I'm really kind of not sure where this should stand, and I will be interested to see what others think. I believe we should make it a dastardly action if it's not already though, since it's pretty easy to fool the AI into starting a war against you this way. Please remember though that the main reason I did this was to win a game that I did NOT want to be playing for a long time. I wanted to end a game that was already "won", not abuse another civ to run up my score. That was the only reason I went to war again.
The war against England was short and to the point. England was the weakest civ in the game, and had the misfortune to be sitting right next to me. They never had a chance. Their cities didn't even resist me when I captured them, which shows how badly I was ahead of them. It was all mercifully over by 1000AD, when I got this message:
I was about 3/4 of the way to a domination victory at this point, which I would only be able to trigger by removing another civ from the game. They began behaving as model neighbors at this point though, which delayed my game and made the ending all the more difficult.
