| abstract
| - Too easy to be taken seriously? These two screenshots show most of the map. Notice how I pinched some good fish-based city sites from other nations and seriously restricted the Spanish with a friendly militia at their west end and a tactical city-build (...W4) at their east end. The reason for building W4 close to the fish site W5 was twofold: 1.
* build near Spain as soon as possible in case they plan to build very soon - as it turned out, they seem to have been far from ready to do that 2.
* so as to get the W5 site in my territory without risking building there first - being right on the border it would therefore be at risk because nothing could blockade it before a declaration of war, and at that time my strongest defensive unit was a Town Guard. W4 was not too close to be a real nuisance; it has several good tiles all to itself without needing any that W5 would ultimately need. Not surprisingly, the Spanish ended the friendship just a couple of turns later, thinking that the knowledge of gunpowder would give them a good chance when they declared war after the mandatory interval. No such luck. Most of their units were 12/4/2.5 - one shown near W5. Their single dragoon (48/16/2.5) killed one of my 60/40/1.5 riflemen but the substantive war lasted hardly any time at all. I took a defenseless Cordoba (south of the mountain chain) in 1630, Sevilla in 1640, Madrid in 1700, and Toledo in the north in 1772, using my spyplane to pick the most profitable times for capture of the latter two. By 1814, I have built new cities: in the Arctic; on a coal and wine site east of E3; and west of Beijing. No murmurings of hostility from the remaining rivals, who have all military knowledge up to gunpowder but do not have ballistics, engineering, or even currency and would need a very large force of dragoons to beat my 60/40 riflemen, which are behind city walls with air unit support. I have a Space Port and am well on the way to Transstellar Colonization.
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