I finish the Taj Mahal and my finances go from +17 @ 0% to +104 @ 0% - cooking with gas!!! I finally notice that I have never build my Heroic Epic. This goes in my second production city and that city just builds cavalry for the balance of the game. Has anyone actually used this units against riflemen? I attacked an Arab city late in the game defended by 3 riflemen and I lost 10 cavalry in a row. It didn't really matter as I was just looking for a few loose tiles for my domination limit at that stage and I had a stack of infantry 1 tile behind that would have eaten those riflemen for breakkie. Anyway, I ended up with too many cavalry and swapped that city to infantry. I also (finally) popped a Great Priest and build my Jewish shrine in 1610AD (+19 gold per turn and set city to build market, grocer, bank, stock exchange). Well, that didn't take long. Of the 18 great people I popped (is that right - next Great Person @ 2800), I got 1 priest, 1 artist, 1 (or maybe 2) engineer and the balance were scientists. I also got the free Artist for Music, the free Merchant for Economics. I am still looking for the Free Priest!
At this time, I am cleaning up TNW and Monty is getting upitty with Victoria. He took and razed two cities. TOW was pumping settlers who were usually heading towards my galleon shuttle. I diverted a few to the English front and took some city sites. I thought Monty had razed the third city, sent in my settler to find that he hadn't so I just settled on some ice to the north.
Yup - two artists, 1 free from Mercantism and 1 free from the Statue of Liberty - didn't I mention that wonder! Meanwhile, in TNW, my spammed settlers had finally made it to their assigned positions and just in time to bounce a Japanese settler from settling. I really didn't want any AI cities in TNW and would have resorted to war to bring that about. Luckily, here, I didn't need to resort to that.
I had settled all of TNW but my land area was only up to 52% ... some 12% short of domination. I looked at the F8 screen to find that Japan was second in size with `12%. I need 12%. Japan has 12%. Hmm - I'm sure that there is a solution in there somewhere. War on Japan. Cavalry, Infantry and cannons against pikes, samari (later Grenadier). It was pretty straight forward ... and I signed a peace deal with Japan after taking all of his TOW cities from him. I even picked up a small two tile city in the peace deal.
Unfortunately, the old Japanese borders didn't stick, my new land was gobbled up by Arab culture. Oh well, I get as close to his borders (before taking the final Japanese cities so that I can travel thru Japan's lands), declare war on Saladin (I felt bad about this at the time, but not once I realized that he had actually declared war on my many years ago) and took 4 or 5 cities to get me over the domination limit. This was another fairly straight forward battle, infantry against riflemen. However, I hadn't really been paying much attention to the tech position and he sunk a few of my galleons with destroyers (oops). He also landed a goodly sized stack (8 riflemen, 3 grenadier and 1 cannon) on TNW (my city defense there was archer, mace or Cho-Ko-Nu). Unfortunately, his pre-landing intelligence was spectacularly bad as he just happened to land 3 railroaded tiles away from my TNW troop marshelling tile. That tile had 4 or 5 infantry on it. He also landed right next to the city that contained 4 galleon loads of cannons (they had just scurried back to a city after the destroyer attack). One turn later, no Arab units on TNW.
After all the Arab city captures, I was at 63.7% (or so - about 1, maybe 2 tiles) and I had a few cities that were popping borders next turn ... DOMINATION. I signed a peace deal with Saladin, pressed enter and celebra .... errr ... no domination. Checked F8 ... 63.3% ... it had gone down. I checked the log to see if I could see anything there ...
That little ice town that I put in while Monty was taking apart the English had selected this round to flip to England ... robbing me of 5 or 6 tiles. Oh for goodness sake. I just Shift-Entered a few more times, waiting for ex-Japan cities to come out of revolt and ...
