Since there isn't any active war story thread anymore and I have a story that I simply have to tell, I'm hereby creating a new war story thread where we want to share the stories of our AoC games that we have played. So I will get it started with my story:

Yesterday my dad and me were trying to take down David the Air Force General. This battle took place on a map that I made where we started in the southern corner of the map and David in the northern one. The center of the map was water which expanded all the way to the southwest border, the rest of it was snow land with occasional shallows. Because there are (luckily!) no aircraft units in AOC, David started with five docks instead and his ships resembled airplanes and helicopters. He also had a lot of towers at the beginning and he was Koreans so he could create quite a lot of dangerous dock units. My dad and me both started with only a TC and four villagers, and my dad was Goths while I played as Spanish. There was also an A.I. enemy who turned out to be Chinese, this A.I. was allied with David while my dad was allied with me.

Right at the start we found out that the Chinese had started very close to our bases so we had to fight him, and he was constantly building towers in our perimeter but my dad and me both made our own towers and eventually the A.I. had lost all of its villagers and resigned, making it two versus one. However, when the A.I. had resigned, it left some active towers and it still took quite some time until we had razed all of them. Meanwhile David was attacking us with archery range units which were shot down by our towers. But then I was so boneheaded and wasted all of my wood on ships, and even though it was already 20 minutes into the game I hadn't built a lumber camp yet! So I had only 64 wood remaining and my villagers had to walk a very far way to finally gather enough so I could build my camp.

Then David was starting to attack us with ships. Of course we were playing my mod, so his ships could also drive on land and they had tons of armor so our towers couldn't kill them so quickly. My own ships tried to speed it up but I was still struggling to get more wood so I could not simply pump them out. Several times David managed to take out some of my villagers with his ships and he also continuously annoyed me with his squads of archers. But eventually we both reached castle age and my dad tried to research heated shots to turn the tide. Somehow it didn't seem to work AT ALL. The enemy turtle ships still only lost 1 of 390 hit points per rocket (Goths get rocket towers in my mod). I then tried to help my dad by creating knights but they were shot down incredibly quickly. One single turtle ship managed to take down several of our towers before we could finally remove it.

Soon David went imperial and quickly had Galleons, Hand Cannoneers and Arbalests attacking us. His galleons were very dangerous because when they are defeated, they transform into a Laser Defense Tower which has more range than a trebuchet and fires extremely quickly. These towers could also shoot up our buildings very quickly. And if the enemy galleons died outside of our towers range, the enemy towers could outrange our own ones so I tried to always have an emergency squad of Light Cavalry ready but they were too puny to stand the laser tower fire. I always did find some way to remove them but most of the time they inflicted a lot of casualties. We were also trying to build castles and extra towers but somehow David always concentrated most of his attack forces on our castles. That way he quickly took out one of mine, and when my dad built his castle in the exact same place, it was taken out some time later. He also tried to expand to the east by building more towers there but then we found out that David had forwarded a castle right there so we were confined to the southern part of the map unless we found a way to take down the enemy castle!

Unfortunately I had a resource problem. The only gold mine that I had access to was too far away from our towers and castles, so my villagers would be unprotected if they tried to mine the gold, and all my attempts to build towers in that area failed because of David's non-stop attacking. I had a trade cart route going with my dad but every now and then my carts were shot down and our entire base was so crowded that they got stuck every other time. A rather short while later all the trees that I had access to were gone as well and the only remaining ones were once again too far away from our towers, and getting no wood means no possibility to create farms, and no farms means no food and no food means you cannot stop the enemy at all any more! So my only chance was to ask my dad to tribute something since he was harvesting everything at the south corner of the map. Of course he had banking researched and he sent me some stuff so I could keep on going.

However, we knew that our resources couldn't last forever. After we had both imperialed my dad tried capped rams. He sent them to David's forward castle and razed it after a few tries while I focused on defending our town against the hordes of Hand Cannoneers, Galleons and assorted junk units. David was also sending scorpios and capped rams which were exceedingly stubborn and razed my castle more than once. But my dad was going around the map with his rams and razed many of David's towers and castles. He also tried to hit the primary enemy buildings like the TC and training centres. After he had razed the second dock David taunted us by saying "That's two of my docks you've hit! I'm starting to get annoyed!" but my dad continued attacking and razed the third dock. Now David was really pissed at us, and he cursed us and announced that he'd go right for our TCs should we manage to raze another of his docks.

I still had resource problems because I hadn't yet managed to secure the one lone gold mining site although it was close to our base, and I still couldn't gather a lot of wood. Every now and then I made a few hussars to defend the base against long-range units, and sometimes I also used them to try and protect my dad's attacking rams or to take down some of David's many villagers. My dad still had to tribute a lot of stuff to me to get me going at all. Also, suddenly the enemy was attacking us with a bigger amount of ships than ever before and managed to shoot half of my base to shit. I was demanding a lot of stone and wood from my dad to rebuild everything and even though I managed to set up new towers, I feared that we would run out of steam entirely and eventually get rolled over by the incessant waves of enemies.

That was when my dad, who had just secured the west part of the map by using his capped rams, decided to build a secondary base there to harvest more resources and establish some additional training centres to pump out his capped rams and archers more quickly. At the same time I tried to evacuate my villagers to the far east where a really big forest and quite some gold mines were waiting for me in the corner because luckily my dad had previously cleared that area. When I reached it I found out that David had built some new buildings there but luckily none of his devastating towers so I just ran past everything, placed some towers in the narrow passage leading to the gold mines and then demanded wood and stone from my dad so I could set up a new TC there. I did, and razed David's monastery and grabbed the three relics that were in there. Then I also built towers in the other narrow entrance to that corner.

My dad's secondary base seemed to run quite well, he had a big attack squad of at least 20 capped rams, several heavy horse archers and some other units, and he had built quite a lot of towers for protection. I was also helping him out with my ships. He sent his rams to raze all the enemy buildings in his vicinity up to one, which happened to be a Siege Workshop. That one last remaining enemy siege workshop then created a single capped ram which proceeded to ram all of my dad's new base to debris and ash, and his horse archers were wiped out by hand cannoneers. My dad was bitching both at me for not helping him and at the enemy for destroying all of his new base - at that point in the game we didn't know what had happened because my dad was focusing on attacking an enemy town center when the ram had razed his town, and only when he tried to change his view back to his new base did he find out that everything was gone.

Things were looking bleak for my dad because his original base was gone too. He only had four villagers remaining who were gathering stone in the west corner, and a big squad of capped rams. So he desperately went around using his rams to raze almost everything to the ground. I asked him to build a market and tribute all his remaining resources to me quickly which he did, then he went on ramming enemy stuff. Suddenly he hit the fourth dock and David was really VERY angry now, and a tidal wave of arbalests, longswords, spearmen and skirmishers were created at the spot where our original bases had been. They quickly removed what was left of our bases and then they were all coming for me together with a big amount of Elite Hand Cannoneers (yes, there's actually an elite version of them in my mod). But wait! It wasn't over yet! My dad razed the last remaining enemy dock and now David was really mad at us, shouting out "You forced me to use tanks! I hate using tanks." The razing had also activated a trigger which was creating Paladins for our enemy non-stop for at least 10 minutes and they were spawning on several tiles at once, always being triggered to move away automatically so soon the entire battlefield filled with his Paladins.

My dad tried to ram as many enemy units as he could find but it was hopeless, he couldn't stop them with only rams left. However, he might have saved the entire game because while he was ramming away I was uber turtling and building as many towers as I could afford. I have to mention that Spanish towers are very powerful in my mod if they're fully upgraded because not only do they shoot rockets which pierce enemy units just like scorpios so they can hit several at once, but they also shoot four times faster than other civ's towers. Of course that would be very unbalanced if there weren't disadvantages to compensate for their atomic power: They are quite expensive and take a lot more time to be built. I mean a LOT. I barely finished some of them when the Paladins were at my door. Then I also threw everything I had at them, missionaries, galleons, halberdiers... and my towers scored a lot of kills. However, there's one more drawback of the Spanish in my mod and that is all their buildings are very fragile because they lack armor. Masonry, Architecture and Fortified Wall are unavailable to the Spanish civ in my mod, and the buildings start with a -2 armor penalty meaning that they have 2 points of armor less than they normally do.

So I had to really spam those towers lest I get razed to dust. My dad had finally enough of his pointless ramming and so he parked his last ram in front of my monastery and left his computer because he had to do other things. I was still fighting the enormous waves of enemies and now that I finally had wood, food and gold, I finally researched the paladin upgrade and used my own paladins to fight the enemy ones. It took a lot of my warriors and ships to finally repel that huge flood wave of units but I actually managed to do it! After what felt like at least 30 minutes of nonstop fighting and spamming of units, the triggers were finally deactivated and the enemy didn't get any more paladins and other units automatically. Then I went to check my castle and found out that spies only cost 400 gold, meaning that the enemy only had two villagers left! I researched it and hunted down the remaining enemies.

And believe it or not, my dad was the one who razed the last enemy building. Some of his units were coincidentally standing around it when I had already defeated everything else and so my dad achieved the "killing blow" although he had actually quit playing already. He didn't resign, however, and I had been able to keep his last ram alive for the entire time (the stealth fighters appeared only after the huge flood wave of units had been beaten already) so he wasn't defeated and we were both winners. When I looked at our stats, I had over 3700 kills, my dad had 320+ razings and David had a biggest army of 968 soldiers.

Screen shot: http://img-a1.pe.imagevz.net/photo3/d0/9a/1e6ae748deaadea2fa9575577fb6/1-4333eab50d7f35e85cff838ddd07c527.jpg (copy the link into your URL bar because the word wrap somehow messes up the URL)