Just when socralynnek was about to declare war on me, the apostolic palace allowed me to enforce peace for ten turns.
I might pull that same trick again soon, although I think there will be re-elections first, so that might take a while. Would be handy to know what the time schedule of the apostolic palace is: when are elections and proposals due?
Anyway, let's start with my realm:
I'm paying a serious price for the huge army that I have. But I need it if I want to have at least a chance of survival, which is already slim at best. Because I have two fronts. Socralynnek dropped his army in the north and Beorn is about to invade me from the southeast.
I tried to convince socralynnek to attack Beorn instead by offering 40 gpt and while I attack him from the southeast. He respectfully declined.
I tried to convince Beorn to call off his attack by telling him I would attack him and let socralynnek do his business. Because seriously, I cannot fight two fronts at the same time. I either split up my army and lose on both fronts, or choose who to attack. Since Beorn has been pestering me almost from the start and sold the barbarian city that he conquered north of me to socralynnek, which was doomed to fall into my hands afterwards, I have a lot more empathy for socralynnek in this game. Beorn understood, but tried to convince me that if I would trade world maps with him, he could get another target and therefore I would be out of the picture. I didn't buy that bullshit. But I didn't convince him either.
We did agree to move our stacks northwards. He went halfway, I went all the way. The idea was that we're far away enough, the incentive to attack would be lower. But he was just playing with me. Now we are about to see how much that worked out.
So here is the situation. Every turn counts at this moment, so it's important to know that me and Beorn have played our turn and socralynnek has not.
So now that my army is upstairs anyway, my plan is to destroy every unit socralynnek has deployed there, discouraging him to attack further, and then get the hell out of dodge. Beorn will probably have conquered Constantinopel by the time I'm back, but no matter the situation then, I'll be able to attack him with his pants down because of the borders. I'm building catapults only, so that the macemen can do the rest after that.
And thus I
might be able fight them both off. In the worst case scenario, socralynnek will deploy the other units he has anyway and my attack on Beorn will go in vain. But at least I think I optimised my chances.
I will be the first to circumnavigate the globe, though I doubt that will ever be of use.
Meanwhile the effect of
great library seems to be wearing off. I've done the very bad mistake of not going for
education as soon as I could. As soon as I have that, I will rush build enough universities to build the
Oxford University in Groningen as fast as possible. That should get me back on track.
Nonetheless, I don't understand how socralynnek and Beorn have been able to research faster than I do. Beorn is working on
chemistry already! I've had more GPT than them almost every turn.