Epic 25 - This is bleh

[sunrise089]

Retired around 1000AD when an enemy got Liberalism and I didn't have maces.

I rushed the nearest AI hard with horse archers, and conquered him easily. I didn't pay close attention to just how far away those cities were, and my economy never recovered. I held off each AI stack, but it was clear I was falling too far behind in tech and had no chance of victory.

[Compromise]

I feel your pain about the crashing economy. So often I think to myself "okay...this time I'm not going to overexpand," but then I do.

After the horse archer rush, were the other AIs fielding elephants to stop you, or just too many metal-based units and too much distance for replacement units to cover?

(I'm essentially asking if you think you could have pushed the rush further if you hadn't kept too many of Tokugawa's cities, or if you think that the resources committed to building the horse archer assault just left you too far behind relative to the other AIs.)

[sunrise089]

No, I could have probably pushed farther had I razed 3 cities and kept 2 or some such thing.

[Olodune]

I also had fairly late maces (though just a few turns after Mansa started fielding them) and lost the liberalism race handily. I don't think that Liberalism is nearly as valuable without trading partners, so I used scientists for academies rather than Paper/Education bulbs.