The year 2263 dawned and my gold per turn was down to +26. It was time to remove the Chinese from my island. I selected them to take out first because their land had Uranium in it (as well as Aluminium and Oil). Also, of the 16 cities on my island, 9 were on the coast and 2 were right on my borders. If things went well, I could capture 11 of his 16 cities before he could fight back. Here are my units ...
Mech Inf (18), Artillery (118), Modern Armour (123), Gunships (23), transports (42), battleships (48), Explorers (44).
I had 44 explorers deployed as medics and also stationed all through Qin's land acting as spotters. I know exactly how many troops he had on my island ...
Mech Inf (323), Artillery (78), Stealth Bombers (22), Fighters (36), Modern Armour (50), Gunships (52)
Well, that seems like a fairly good match. It does ignore the 2 or 3 units that Qin has on the island he is sharing with Gandhi. The source of my intelligence ...
You can see here my explorer medics are stationed through-out Qin's land. I will automatically get these back when I declare war. Also, I have various battle groups lined up to attack each city.
Now, for the battle plan, the cities that are on my borders will just get bombarded with Artillery with a splash of collateral damage and some modern armour. One has 7 land units and the other has about 15. The coastal cities are a little bit different. I had hoped to be able to bombard with artillery from transports but (after checking) you cannot do that. This is where the battle ships come in, 5 steam up to the city, reduce its defenses to 0% (1 battleship bombards at 20%) and then suicide a few artillery from the lurking transports before taking the city with my modern armour.
The first attack goes to one of my 5000 year old units ...
Then it is on with the main action. The big question, after looking though most of Qin's cities is "Where are the 300 or so Mech Inf based?" I had a good count on most cities and units outside city walls thanks to the Explorers but in some cities, the units icons ran off the page. This is where the spy I mentioned earlier comes into play. She visited most of these well garrisoned cities and found (according to my notes) "lots and lots" of units in Loyang.
And another of his cities caught a few too ...
That was 12 Nukes on Loyang with 5 going off (I used the other 5 Nukes on another prime target). The draw back was that I didn't have enough units to follow those strikes up with (another one of the things that I would do differently if I had a second chance). The other battle groups worked well and I captured 9 cities on the first turn. Things were going well.
What followed was 8 or so rounds of typical modern warfare - he bombed my infrastructure, I took his cities and killed his units. My cities went into mega-anger (something about Nukes). I had hoped that this phase would be very quick and clinical and I could control all of his cities in 5 or so turns. It didn't turn out that way with Qin slowly taking back the cities I took on the first turn of warfare. At that stage, I had given him enough time to bring some units down from his main island ...
As you can see from the above picture, he had also reclaimed most of his cities. Then Qin started to land units on my land and start to take my cities ...
Qin was flooding my lands with Mech Inf and he was also flooding my waterways with Battleships and Carriers. Luckly I had build a huge stack of transports. Yes, transports - these units seem to be the CIV 4 spearman v tank unit.
I ended up with some very promoted tranports. Unfortunately, transports cannot hold cities against land based units. Here is a shot with my last two cities, and the result of pressing 'enter' ...
It didn't take long once Qin had landed his units on my lands but I did put a significant dent in his power graph ... unfortunately, he put a bigger dent in mine.
Units killed ...
Barbs: warriors (137), axes (4), macemen (25), riflemen (30), Archers (111), Horse Archers (123) Qin: Mech Inf (219), Modern Armour (47), Gunships (46), Artillery (86), Destroyers (31), Battleships (26), Carriers (10)