Originally Posted by Ebenezer

You did well considering what you were up against.

Couple suggestions. When a war starts, make sure you immediately run an anti-espionage mission. We got 2 revolts for reasonably cheap prices. Having to bombard would have bought you time to reinforce. Which would have at least made it more painful for us. Keep a defensive spy stationed in cities you need to defend. We had 3 spies in the first target for a long time. It actually took all 3 to get the revolt (failed at 77% twice), so if even one had died from anti-spy activities, it would have again forced us to siege. (I know you had at least a couple spies out, as we caught them, so some of this may be irrelevant)

The pre-war culture-war. No human is going to put up with that. I realize why you did it, but you could have backed off once you had clear superiority on the resource tiles. Had you not been flipping tiles 2 rings past that, you might have gotten more time.

Anyway, good game, and hopefully we can be nicer neighbors in some of our other shared ones.

Thanks for the espionage tip, I'll try to remember that.

As for the culture thing, I figured that I was in a rather good defensive position (if you don't take the UU in account), so I could afford to just annoy you and mean "c'mon, try me". Also, having such a big cultural advantage meant that if I wanted to strike against you, I had a big speed advantage and could take you by surprised (You were 2 turns away from getting a surprise attack on Bursa when it only had a single little warrior defending it. I knew I couldn't have kept it, but I would have razed it, you would have lost lots of income (religious capital). That's what my spies were for, making sure you couldn't reinforce until I could carry out the attack).

Even without the culture thing, you probably would have attacked me when the UU had kicked in, so I don't consider the cultural provocation as a strategical mistake.