I stood atop the world in 1300AD. Perhaps I didn't have the largest territory or the best developed cities, but I was confident that given time I would out-produce the AI civs and win the game. I wasn't sure how I would win, but either spaceship or domination seemed the most likely options. Here was my map (full-screen) from that date:
Most of my core cities were building factories, with some others working on libraries both for culture and in preparation for switching over to doing research again sometime later in the industrial age. Cempoala was using that grassland wheat as a worker factory, producing one every 3 turns while staying at the same size. My railnet was under construction and I had about half my cities connected together when the photo was taken. If you look at the minimap, you'll see I have a tiny city down in the south. That was my "supercolony", which had a dyes luxury, coal, iron, and saltpeter all within its cultural radius! It was unfortunately not on the coast, so I was sending another settler down there to found a city and build a harbor so I could have a native supply of coal and get those dyes connected to my cities. Everything was proceeding along smoothly.
Then disaster struck:
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Oh shit! Not again! England absolutely declared war out of nowhere in 1315AD; no units in my territory, no indication of Liz going to annoyed beforehand, nothing. At the time I was buying a luxury from England, was supplying them with a luxury, and was paying them gpt for Industrialization, which I had bought about 10 turns earlier. Liz had been polite or gracious to me the entire game. I have absolutely no idea where this came from; my reputation in the game was spotless and I had no history of bad relations with England. We had been freaking allies for the last thousand years! I was blindsided completely - and with no one else on my continent to divert the English, I was in deep trouble here.
I immediately signed the French and Iroquois into an alliance against the English. But now what could I do? I didn't have Nationalism to use the draft or go into wartime mobilization, and with the ridiculous price that everyone charges for it in 1.29f I couldn't afford it. Not enough money even to try to steal it. I have impis defending almost all of my cities - impis that I cannot upgrade, mind you - and most of my cities stuck in the middle of long infrastructure builds. To switch off them is to lose hundreds of shields and start from scratch on military. Just look at the 1300AD picture; I've been caught at a horrible time here by the AI and in no position to fight anyone. What can I do? I pulled back my forces as best I could and prepared for the onslaught, abandoning Cempoala (ouch) to better defend Ngome. And... the English go through my defenses like they're paper. Cav after cav after cav pounds right through the impis and pikes defending my Forbidden Palace city and take it with ease. They were frighteningly efficient at it, doing almost as good of a job as I could have. So on the next turn in 1325AD, I abandoned all of my cities remaining across the bay in my second core *wince* since I had no chance to defend them, and pulled back to my penninsula, intending to defend it to the death.
I planned to mass my defenders in Tlacopan and prevent the cavs from reaching my core cities. If I could produce enough longbows, maybe I could kill enough cavs to get a peace treaty with England. It would ruin my reputation, but I would still survive. So I moved all my defenders in my homeland cities into Tlacopan to help it hold out better. And... it didn't matter at all. A dozen cavs poured across the border using England's rails and killed my defenders one by one. In fact, no fewer than three cav ARMIES attacked me during this war. They smashed the city, then used the territory gained to capture some workers that I thought were safe. All this in just 2 turns after declaring war! With every defender dead, the game was clearly over for me. This was the situation in 1325AD just after Tlacopan was taken:
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Everything had fallen apart so fast, and there was nothing I could do about it. Look at all those cavs, including the two armies that are on the screen. My cities went into crazy city disorder both from losing the wines of Tlacopan and from massive war weariness. What could I do? There was nothing that could be done; it was all over for me. Rather than trying to survive OCC style in my supercolony, I decided to accept what fate had dealt me and therefore gifted it to the Iroquois. I tried to make a second stand at Neapolis with the remaining units I had, but it similarly fell with ease to those cav armies in 1330AD. After that point, I had no more units left to stop the English and no money to rush more. This was the sad remnants of my great empire in 1340AD (remember, the English started the war in 1315AD):
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And it was all over in 1345AD:
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I have a lot of different thoughts on the game that I wanted to share here, now that you know that my attempt to win resulted in failure. This game was all about gambling; I had to reach out and take some risks to stand a chance at winning the game. If I had sat back on my penninsula and just tried to build cities there, I would have been safer but I don't think I would ever have been in a position to win the game. I clearly was in position to dominate the other civs here - had I been given enough time to do so. England eviscerated me before that point was reached though, in one of the slimiest AI backstabbing cases I've ever seen. This whole game was dominated by warfare; it started with the Aztecs going after Rome so early in the game and continued virtually non-stop after that. The only aggressive move I ever made was to attack one crippled Roman city that was in the middle of my territory, but I wonder if that act made it more likely for the AI civs to attack me. Did that one move cause the multiple sneak attacks I suffered in the game? I'll never know, but it was an interesting question.
I'm really proud of my results here. While the date of the loss doesn't look impressive, I had to fight off no fewer than two assaults from the Aztecs just to survive this long. And if England hadn't attacked, I easily could have won this one. That's what really hurts, because if I had had just 50 more turns, up until 1500AD, I would have made myself strong enough to resist their attack. By then I would have had numerous factories up all over my core cities, a fully developed network of rails, and I had planned to pump artillery and infantry all over the place once my factories were completed. I would have been strong enough to fight off the attack and possibly even go over to the offensive. But unfortunately I was struck at the worst possible time, when England had a ton of cavs but before I had the units and technology needed to stop them. And if you think I just did a poor job of fighting the last war and someone else could have survived... well, I've replayed the last war twice now, ignoring the rules against upgrading units and switching production, and I've still been slaughtered each time. Once England declared war I was toast. It's just the fact that they declared war at all which is so sad.
I'm proud of what I accomplished in this game, and I really, REALLY wanted to see how this game would have gone if I had been left alone to finish my development. I'm confident I could have won a domination victory by conquering England with tanks and armor in the modern age had I been given the opportunity to do so. That's the only thing I regret about this game - not having the chance to try that. I'm eagerly awaiting how others fared in this game; what will it be like in games where Rome wasn't killed so early? Will others be able to grab as much land? I tend to doubt it, as events went very much in my favor in the early game here. Despite all of the obstacles against the player here, I'm confident that someone out there, possibly even multiple someones, managed to win this game. Maybe with a leader-rushed UN victory, maybe by building the spaceship, but I'm sure someone did it. Well I gambled in this game by pushing hard for more land and England called my bluff. I hope some of the rest of you had more luck and were not sneak-attacked at every turn like I was.
