Egypt was on the warpath, swallowing up everything in sight, and Alex was helping Cleo do so. Persia had just been killed and the situation that I was in was not the best. My world looked like this in 1000AD:
This image has been lost.
The minimap as usual tells the story of what was going on in the rest of the world. Entirely too much yellow on that map for my liking. My expectation that Rome would quickly be eliminated turned out not to come true, as they somehow managed to conclude a peace with everyone else and survive while doing some OCC action on that offshore island. Oddly enough, their only surviving city was named Jerusalem; draw what conclusions you will from that. :) Ur was working on Battlefield Medicine as a prebuild for TOE; I would keep switching back and forth between that and a palace every turn to ensure a 400-shield prebuild at all times. Now all I needed was for someone to research Electricity and then Scientific Method (no way was I going to get burned on researching a tech myself again).
The next significant event took place in 1060AD. Greece and India went to war with Egypt, Alex declaring and Gandhi pulled in via MPP. This was a dangerous situation, since if Alex went down Cleo would almost certainly win the game. But in the short term at least it opened up some interesting brokering opportunities since the warring parties could not trade with one another. I traded for Steel from Greece for 4552g + 161gpt at an expensive 2nd civ price. Then I sent Steel + saltpeter + 6gpt to India for Refining. That's your standard 2 for 1 deal, but I could go one better since Egypt had Electricity and no one else did. Electricity from Egypt for Steel + Refining + 130gpt. I then turned around and sold Electricity to Greece for Espionage + 1450g. Four techs in one turn isn't bad, even when you pay out several hundred gpt to other civs. And I could expect to make that money back very shortly when Scientific Method was researched next and I would build Theory of Evolution. All in all, a nice round of deals.
Greece collapsed into anarchy going to communism in 1100AD, which was not a good sign for me. Egypt had been there for some time now, which actually didn't hurt Cleo too much because it let her get some decent production out of every one of her massive cities. After grabbing a number of colonies and one or two real border cities, Egypt made peace with both Greece and India in 1160AD. I breathed a sigh of relief that the game wasn't about to end immediately. A few more quiet turns passed. And then in 1190AD the game started to get crazy:
This image has been lost.
Completely out of the blue Greece declares war on me. No warning, no indication whatsoever that Alex was going to do this. We had been polite for centuries and had several trade deals going on to the time. In fact, Alex was getting a luxury for FREE that he had demanded from me earlier. What kind of idiotic thinking went into that decision anyway? His "attack" was one cavalry that suicided against a rifle in a size 13+ metropolis. What an idiot. Standard procedure for Deity would have been to sign a military alliance with Egypt against Greece for defense. But Cleo was dangerously close to the domination limit, so the last thing I wanted was her fighting anyone. And Alex was not a danger to me; he had cut off his own supply of saltpeter by declaring war on me (yep, I was selling that to him too) so the only units he would be attacking with would be slow-moving rifles. I was not afraid of Greece, and I decided I could use the war to grab those irritating cities Greece had in the tundra to my east. This was a bad event, but nothing I could not handle.
I didn't just sit around on my hands though. I shifted my defenders around to cover the cities on the border with Greece and instituted the draft in every city to create a bunch of cheap rifles. After ages of sitting around with no tech progress, Egypt had also discovered Replaceable Parts this turn - sweet! I traded for it with 2528g + 40gpt. I then sent Replaceable Parts to India for Iron + 70g + 32gpt. Unfortunately I had no rubber, but there was an unclaimed source in former Persia so I set one city to produce a settler to go claim it and signed a ROP with Cleo to go through her territory and get it. Artillery was set into production in many of my cities. Oh yeah, I was ready to rumble with Alex. You started this jerk, so you'd better be prepared to finish it. Things weren't going to go so badly after all.
Or maybe they were:
Cleo committed the most dastadly act I've ever seen and stabbed me in the back on the very next turn in 1200AD. She used the ROP we had in place to attack Nineveh, defended only by a conscript rifle, which fortunately survived. Then she moved an enormous mass of cavalry out of the fog and razed Lagash to the ground (capturing a number of workers in the process). I have never seen a more despicable act by the Civ3 AI; here I had played peacefully and honorably the entire game with everyone, only to be invaded simultaneously from both sides by my neighbors and allies of thousands of years. They broke numerous deals, including a ROP, and refused to conclude a peace treaty with me no matter what. Poland, 1939 all over again. Two human players couldn't have scripted it better themselves. Disgusted with the behavior of the AI civs, I saved the game and resigned.
.................................
That could have been the end of the story right there. But it wasn't. After witnessing the heroics of the RBE2 succession game team in a hopeless position play their way out to victory, I picked up this game again resolved to win or die - but to do it honorably either way. If Alex and Cleo wanted to knock me out of the game, I wasn't going to go down without one hell of a fight first. You want me? Come get me assholes. I had no prayer to defeat them or even hold my own cities, but this was now personal and I wasn't going to give up until every last unit was gone.
