And so the big push starts with an early war declaration by Hannibal on turn 187. I fight him until turn 200 and then accept peace for 120 gold, world map and a tech (Optics). 10 turns later, I am back to settle the score and he is no more by turn 215. The majority of my forces are in the West so they just kept on rolling and started a war with Stalin. I also diverted my Eastern city built units to start a war with Brennus - thus I was fighting on two fronts ... East v Brennus and West v Stalin.
This dynamic is sustained for quite a while until Russia is eliminated in 1625AD (turn 235) via a spy dropping the cultural defenses and my units basically walking all over the defenders. Mansa is the next cab off the rank and my Western army just rolls right on. I start to position my desired end game - a land locked city totally surrounded by my culture. That would mean that the last AI only had that one city and no chance of building more. Thus it would be easier to kill him on the penultimate turn.
I capture Mansa's capital and get this peace deal ...
Meanwhile, on my Eastern Front, I have my army marching from Celtic city to Celtic city, bombard defences down, collateral damage, kill units, raze, continue. At one stage, my army consists of 3 Grenadier, 1 Maceman, 10 Cannons, 1 Knight and 1 Janissary. I did have some crossbows and pikes around but they were slightly behind the leading bunch healing. Brennus throws his army at this stack (3 Cuirassier, 7 catapults, 3 trebuchet, 6 maceman, 1 musketman, 2 grossbow, 1 longbow and a chariot) in that order. All of his cats and trebs get killed but they did their job. My stack was crushed and my advance stopped. The ground surely did run red that day.
I play with 'fast combat' turned on, so all of this action was over in an eye blink. My turn came around and I thought - time to raze another Celtic city ... errr ... where did my army go? I had to go back to the log to get the bad news. You can see the drop in my power from this one event (pic from a few turns later) ...
Meanwhile, the war with Mansa had started again and he was down to his last city - LAND LOCKED - that I had given him during the last peace deal. We settled on peace and I started to concentrate on killing off Isabella and Brennus. This time I had a much more defensive stack compisition and so that war was going well. However, my old Mali holdings were in revolt due to huge cultural pressure from Mansa's single city ... look at this ...
What is going on here? This cannot be right. Hmmn - it is probably just piggy backing off the culture from the ex-Mali cities. Also, he got this event ...
Guess that plan on landlocking him isn't going to work too well. I had to kill him off to releave pressure on my other Mali holdings. Mali is gone, the Celtis are suffering a very bad case of TANK outbreak and will be gone shortly. Time to position myself for finishing the ship and selecting my 3 cultural cities.