That broke England's back, and the rest was academic.Here's an overview shot of my empire in 325 BC, after decimating India. (Not sure why the pic took with the culture borders turned off.)
My first three cities had long been stuck against the happiness cap, so all they were doing was churning out axemen and more axemen. My two new acquisitions built barracks and then did the same. I healed and regrouped for a few turns, and got the horses re-roaded and connected to start building Horse Archers. So presently in 220 BC, it was time to declare war on Elizabeth. Despite being my better friend of the two remaining civs (she'd given me that Open Borders out of nowhere), logistically, she had to be the next target.
York was my first goal; it's south by southeast of Bangalore. Also, it had ivory resources, and I *had* to take out York with those ivory resources before England got to Construction and elephants. The city falls with only one loss (somehow my screenshot didn't take), and my stack healed again and advanced towards London.
Meanwhile, though, a chariot slipped past my front line and stole my horse city of Bangalore! Well, I did have a pair of Horse Archers coming from the home cities to fix that little mistake. Fortunately, my cities were allowed to resume their Horse Archer builds where they left off before the interruption.
Anyway, the battle for London commenced.
The city proved a much easier nut than I expected. It only had the standard three archers when I got there - it didn't even get to whip another defender. The RNG handed me some bad luck with the first axeman (he'd been promoted to City Raider II -- see, I'm learning quickly) losing at 60%+ odds, and then a couple rookie axemen also lost, but the rest of the stack carried the day.
That broke England's back, and the rest was academic.
I lost a few units, but the home cities replenished them.
As before with India, the gold from razing made up for my negative economic production. In the early going, I'd just handed out promotions to units based on whatever battles they were about to fight (Cover vs barb or Indian archers, Combat II against chariots), but now I was learning to give the axemen almost exclusively City Raider promotions. With the free Combat I for an Aggressive leader, even a fresh axeman can have a whopping +35% on city attacks, going to +60% after one battle victory (that's strength 8!). Some spears came along for the ride just to protect from mounted counterattacks that never materialized; most of them got Medic promotions. War weariness popped up again, but there was nothing to be done about it except just let the angry citizens rage on until England was gone.
I'd been sending my most recently produced units back over towards India to wrap up that loose end, and declared war the very next turn after eliminating England. Unfortunately, my first salvo at Madras failed by one defending archer, and it took me an extra seven or so turns to get a second wave of attackers over there by which time he'd healed that archer and produced another. But India is eliminated eventually.
