America had started a war that I was more than happy to fight. I needed only some 200 tiles at this point to trigger a domination victory, and that was going to come straight out of American soil. The American colonies on offshore islands and in the far northwest of my continent were going to provide most of that territory. Making progress against their core of 9 cities was going to be far more difficult, as Replaceable Parts was discovered literally on the same turn that the war started (no joke!) The Americans had a source of rubber deep in their territory, so I was going to have to deal with lots of infantry. The Americans also had built Sun Tzu earlier in their game, so all of their forces were veteran. This made the upcoming operations very difficult indeed.
I've circled on this map the main areas where I made territorial gains in the early years of the war. They consist of American colonies that were lightly defended and taken out with small detachments of Cavalry.
The main front between America and France was a different story however. In this area, I had to deal with tons of veteran infantry pouring out of the main cities of America and moving towards my cities. They had many more forces than I had expected, almost too many to handle. Without artillery, I would never have had a chance, but my stack of some 25 of them kept the situation under control. Here's a picture of what the front looked like in 1315AD, when the conflict there was finally swinging in my favor:
My artillery is sitting in London at the moment. That little row of mountains caused me no end of problems in this war, as the American infantry poured over the border and stopped on them. I SHOULD have stationed infantry on them immediately to prevent this, but didn't have the foresight to do so. Well I won't make this mistake again; I'm sure I will pay more attention to geography in the future. It has thus taken me 9 turns of really horrendous fighting (many, many forces dying each turn) to dislodge the American infantry from their mountain posts and occpy them myself. The fighting was bad enough to cause my civ to go through 3 bouts of war weariness, while 1) in a republic 2) with all 8 luxuries and 3) with Women's Suffrage under my control! The American democracy lasted only two turns before changing to a Monarchy (no communism invented yet). It was very violent. Note the gains I had made on the minimap in the corner, with all of the northwest corner of the main continent now belonging to France.
1315AD was a turning point in the American War, partly because I now controlled the mountains and it was relatively easy to kill infantry on grassland with artillery, but also partly because the Americans were out of gas. Their offensive was spent, and now it was a matter of taking their cities. For this task, it was necessary to bring artillery into bombardment range, and then use cavalry to take the city, with infantry guarding the artillery. Why cavs? Well, since artillery can bombard from 2 tiles away, it would take another turn to move infantry into range to attack, which I didn't want. Cavalry can also retreat, which saved some of them. But it was still a slaughterhouse; I began to feel sorry for sending all those horses to the glue factory. Even though artillery would bombard the defending infantry down to 1hp, getting even one hit on a fortified infantry in a size 12 city (which has 17.5 defense) is hard for a 6 attack cavalry.
Nevertheless, my superior industrial and economic power ensured that I would continue to advance. First Atlanta, then New York, Seattle, and finally Washington itself fell to my armies. Another 9 turns later in 1350AD saw a distinctly different picture of the American front:
I had founded a couple of extra cities in here, New Cherbourg to get the coal resource, New Bayonne to get the rubber, and New Toulouse to claim 4 more tiles to go over the domination limit. Also note the total world dominance on the minimap. I fully expected to win on the next turn, since I was 1 tile over the domination limit... but I didn't! What? This was strange. So I piled up more territory in 1355AD to go 4 tiles over the limit (MapStat showed me at -4 tiles needed for domination). But again I didn't win! This was wacky. So I pushed on and captured another American city, bringing 9 more tiles under my control. If this didn't do it, I was going to see if domination had been turned off for the game. With a mixture of anger and frustration I ended my 1360AD turn.
