Presently a grand comedy of errors cascaded down upon my Mali. First was the lingering barbarian city that was still holding my copper, since I'd never had time to go deal with them. This meant I put off the Statue of Liberty since spending undoubled hammers on it seemed wasteful. Just as I was about to finally get there, Egypt conquered it instead.
The next disaster was losing Notre Dame by two measly turns. Egypt built it. Okay, that settles it, Egypt must die, especially since he was playing the whee-horn and the only target could be me. I naturally now beelined to Steel. Then to Astronomy so that the commerce cities could build observatories.
While that was going on, I somehow completely forgot to pay any attention to the AI tech progress, and Hannibal stole Liberalism! Okay, once again this wasn't a variant of comp-stomping. The treasury shows that I've spent 11k gold on deficit research... that's only about three techs worth, not going to pave Lib to something like Radio.
Anyway, I built three cannons, and declared war on Egypt...
only to watch my iron get swiped away! Dorylaeum had been founded in a gap after our war. I didn't notice that the iron was in its second ring, and that Byzantium's prior culture on the tile would kick back in once it popped borders. Grr. Now I had to go for Military Science just to have a decent unit available. No time to get as far as Rifling, since I also had to hit Economics just before Hannibal got there.
I beat Egypt's main stack with collateral and conquered one Egyptian city, but then...
Japan declared war again! Which kicked in 5 war weariness! I had to go culture slider for happiness!
And JUSTINIAN declared war again too! I do not believe these were bribes, because it's almost impossible for the AIs to offer each other enough when tech trading is disabled. No, this was just rotten luck.
And the Apostolic Palace stopped the war against my REAL target Egypt! Sheesh ghod almighty. Man, I have never ever ever had this many things go wrong in a Civilization game. Or heck in any game, like ever.
And the combination of all those events got my army STUCK in Memphis. No open borders and peace was locked in. At least this one had some answer, if a bad one: gift Memphis back to Egypt just to get my army kicked out of it.
And actually that had a pretty good ramification: getting Ramesses back to Cautious and willing to trade resources. That was an incredible cost, but I needed that iron like crazy.
Naturally, the minute I did that, my city went and popped a fresh source of iron all on its own. Ten points for results but minus one million for timing.
One piece of good news, beat Egypt to the western island by a single turn.
ANYWAY, the tide finally turned. I fended off Japan at the border, and made peace to focus on Byzantium. A couple dozen turns later, my stacks of cannons and grenadiers were rolling for real and overwhelmed Justinian.