Epic 2: Part 4

More Macemen, more Longbowmen, and a Great Engineer is born. Now that was a pleasant surprise (I'd not being paying enough attention to what specialists were being run in the cities). I switched research to Nationalism, then once that was discovered Delhi had just finished a run of Macemen so was switched over to the Taj Mahal. One Great Engineer, 1 whip and 1 turn later:

Another 5 points :)

While I was busy researching all the techs needed for Gunpowder I declared war on the Khan again and shipped some Macemen over. Unfortunately Turfan had been reinforced:

And I definitely need more troops before I can take the city:

I left my Macemen there, and let the Khan build Keshiks to suicide against them, while I waited for my first Musketmen. And finally in 1679AD Turfan is ours!

So I promptly announce peace (he wasn't getting much choice):

Economics was discovered shortly after this in 1694AD and I promptly switched to Free Market as required:

1712AD was the high point of my game:

Yes, that's right - Turfan's borders popped and I'd hooked up the 6th and final Gem source :) The ~~Sucker~~Khan bought his own Gems back that turn, too:

So that was all hooked up, and gems sold to everybody:

After that success I took a break. I started the next session with some vague plans - expansion should be the order of the day, and that whilst I didn't think I'd hook up all the gold and silver very quickly I wasn't going to give up on it quite yet. I didn't really have a plan though - no idea of how to get from here to a winning position, and I think it shows. It was also taking longer than I'd anticipated which meant that I was getting twitchy about finishing on time, and in fact could only fit in another couple of short sessions before I went away for the weekend. As a result my notes get scrappier, and whilst I have some screenshots it'll be hard to write anything more interesting than a list of cities founded and times that Turfan revolted.

Turfan revolting is an important point though - it happened three times, and each time one of my gem deals was screwed up, but relations were good enough with Ceasar & Cyrus (the only ones it happened to) that I could easily sell back the Gems once I'd got past the revolt. The final revolt was in 1831AD, and I sorted out the last Gem sale again in 1834AD:

I'm unlikely to be going back to finish this game - while I was enjoying it up to about 1712AD I lost direction after that, and I don't think I can turn it round to win from where I am. And without the incentive of reporting it & getting variant points I'm not really keen on just hanging about trying not to lose too badly. It's still my best Monarch game so far - and has given me some definite ideas to try out for other games (maybe I'll play another Tiny Islands map & see how it goes without the variant rules :) ).