Montezuma is attacking Egypt, the last civ standing in the game. Everything else on the continent is now dust, except for Thebes. Warfare between our two peoples have eliminated any chance for a timely scientific win, and culture took a back seat to modern armor and stealth bombers. With everything else around the city in ruins, I decide that a nuclear missile would say exactly how I felt about Ramses II. Launch.
City still standing. No problem. Next turn, I launch another nuke.
Um, still there. Okay… I’ve still got tons of cash. No problem. Launch another nuke.
Thebes is still holding on. I decide I’m not being thorough enough about it, so I build a missile carrier, load two nukes onto it, then build another nuke in Seoul. I pray to the gods to deliver my enemy to me, and all the other occupants of Thebes belong to them. Next turn, I launch all three, boom, boom, boom.
The entire area chokes with nuclear fallout. There’s radioactive deer prancing near the radioactive river flowing beside Thebes. Thebes’ fishing boats will be pulling out three-eyed salmon for the next five hundred years. Yet miraculously, Thebes survives. The gods watch, laugh, await my next move.
So I figure I’m going about this the wrong way. I’ve got two Giant Death Robots stationed near Seoul, calmly watching the proceedings like Tucker and Church, Hugin and Munin. They could do the job in a single turn. I imagine the chatter between the two of them, after having wiped out about TEN EGYPTIAN CITIES BY THEMSELVES, involves a bewilderment as to why my Aztec scientists can’t, you know, stuff a little more plutonium into those missiles. One of them volunteers to station itself next to Thebes & witness first-hand the power of these nukes, thinking that there’s some drunk scientist back in Tenochtitlan who’s been selling radioactive cores to a barbarian encampment out east in exchange for some Indian coke, and the nukes are filled with Cheetos instead of radioactive isotopes. I seriously ponder sending the smartass in to Thebes and nuking him, a modern-day sacrifice worthy of my ancestors… and then I have a better idea.
I pull out of storage my very first Jaguar unit. Jaguar I, the proud unit that sacked Kyoto by itself back at the beginning of time, was pulled back to the capital to guard it against the French. I take a few years to put the old troops onto a train heading eastward across the continent to the coast, embark them onto a transport, have them escorted across the Montezuma Sea (which is what it’s going to be fucking called once Ramses is stuffed into his pretty pyramids right beside Thebes, which by the way are also still standing), and onto the war-torn continent that used to be home to the mighty Egyptian empire. Also, they had silk. My people still clamber for silk, and I still make use of the sacrificial temple that my ancestors used. We have cotton! Isn’t that good enough for them? Gods.
I bring my venerable Jaguar I within two hexes of Thebes – and lo, like fire of the gods descending from the azure towers of the ruined Egyptian capital, there’s still artillery lurking somewhere, enough to damage my Jaguar unit. To no avail, however – the next turn my multi-millenial Jaguar unit comes in close, raises ancient blood-stained blades, and attacks. These proud Jaguar warriors do what six nuclear weapons cannot, and the head of Ramses II is violently removed from its body and unceremoniously chucked down the palace steps.
Fifty years later, as my settlers are making last-minute preparations for Alpha Centauri, I instruct the head scientist to ensure that his city buster weapons are powerful enough to punch holes through the continental shelf. His eyes travel westwards, then to the ancient temple near the launch pad, and he slowly nods. This mistake will not be repeated.
