Looks like I might lose my first city in this game! All the AI would have to do is attack...
What happened though was that only some units attacked, while the rest decided to pillage instead.
Not only did I manage to hold the city; I also lost
no unit! Next turn, reinforcements arrived and
the city was safe again. Well done, AI. 
Now that the frontlines had been pushed westwards, Essen was no longer the target of the AI's landing attempts. Instead, Saladin repeatedly tried to come through from Damascus to Delhi with his galleys.
But as you can see, my caravel had gained some experience in sinking enemy galleys by now.
While generally I had no problems defending against AI stacks, I lost several valuable units to a game bug (feature?) now. Remember the screenshot from my first Drill IV crossbowman? I had four of these buggers now, one even being Combat II on top too, and they had ruled the battlefields for a long time, serving as superior defense units. They *should* still rule, except for one really annoying thing: Elephants. Take a look at this screenshot:
It may be hard to see, but there's an enemy War Elephant attacking my stack, and who's defending?
My Combat I/Drill IV Crossbowman. He lost. Which is not surprising, as War Elephants are mounted
units with a strength of 8, while Crossbowmen only have a strength of 6 and only a 10% bonus against
mounted units. What really drove me mad though is, why had the game selected the crossbowman to
defend in the first place?!? 
There was a fully healed
Conbat II/Formation pikeman in the stack too, which would have eaten the Elephant for breakfast!
That happened multiple times, and after losing three of my four Drill IV crossbowmen, I finally gave in
and left the last one at home, in safety. CIV selects the best unit against a given attacker to defend,
but somehow that does not work when War Elephants attack and Crossbowmen are in the defending stack. Every time,
the game would ignore my Pikemen and would select my precious Drill Crossbowmen instead, who died horribly. Argh!
I don't know what exactly happened there; my only guess is that
the game overestimates first strikes somehow when calculating combat odds, or that in actual combat, War Elephants
have a hidden immunity against first strikes. This is really annoying, as it breaks the Rock-Paper-Scissors combat
engine!
So when I finally discovered Rifling in 1577AD, I only had one unit to upgrade to this:
Yes! A riflemen with 3-6 first strikes! I love it. I also upgraded
all my City Raider macemen to riflemen, and where it had been a hot knife cutting through butter before, it now
turned into a complete bloodbath.
I started to mass-produce units again, researched Military Tradition for cavalry, then beelined to Assembly Line for infantry. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but what happened next was that I had three attack groups capturing enemy cities at a frightening pace, and later I had even four stacks. I actually saw one enemy crossbowman, a couple of enemy macemen and even two(!) enemy knight before the game ended! I was impressed...not. But mainly it was cavalry, riflemen, and infantry against longbows, elephants, swordmen and catapults.
I had spawned multiple great people during the last centuries, trying to get a second Great Scientist for that
academy in Hamburg. What I got though were two Great Artists, another Great Engineer and a Great Merchant.
Go figure. So I used two of them to spark another golden age.
Oh and I popped another one in 1634AD, another iron at Berlin. Un-be-lievable! I had popped four resources in this game now, three at Berlin alone! My capital was a really scary city now, with wheat, cows, two iron, gems, and gold... I almost felt a bit guilty for that.
So after sparking a golden age, I still had a Great Artist left. Heck, before waiting for another great person to spark yet another unneeded golden age, I decided to use him to speed up domination a bit! When I captured the next AI capital, Athens, I used him to end resistance and expand borders immediately. Here's the situation before I used him:
...and here's the city after I told him to create a great work.
In 1625AD(!), Roosevelt completed...Chichen Itza! Uh, well done. Unimpressed by this, I won a domination victory in 1727AD. Sorry for the lack of screenshots and details, but honestly I see not much point in showing screenshots of my City Raider III/Combat II infantry blowing enemy longbows to smithereens.
As you can see in the screenshot, I had set up a perimeter of frigates around my east coast, in case an AI
would get to galleons and land units in my backline. My core was still defended by regular archers, and Berlin
was still garrisoned by my first warrior from 3700BC. 
Of course the AIs never managed to get galleons. Galleons in the 18th century?!? Unthinkable! Yeah right.
Here's a bird's-eye view of my empire at game's end:
And here are my GNP and MFG graphs for the game.
And here are the final unit statistics, for those units that appeared in the game.
This game had had a very strange feeling to it. What makes Always War so special is that these games give you a feeling of constant pressure, of endless streams of units attacking, and that you are hard-pressed to squeeze in at least some infrastructure into the build queues of your cities from time to time between producing all the units needed to replace your fallen.
Somehow, this game completely lacked the atmosphere typical to Always War. I'm not sure what went wrong, but the AIs failed to play their role. Don't get me wrong: I had fun rolling over one civ after another, and I do not complain about the game being too easy! I think I've made some good moves in the beginning, with sealing off the lands I wanted to settle later, and then going for a CS slingshot. That, in combination with the level being Noble and the No Tech Trading option enabled, should lead to a somewhat easy game. That I had expected.
However, what I had not expected was that the AIs failed to deliver their part of the AW package. It had taken ages before they started to take the war seriously - I was able to hold off all seven civs from my pre-claimed lands with two axes only, while my cities were building infrastructure! The biggest stack I came across during the whole game was the Spanish one behind Bombay, all other stacks were considerably smaller - most of the time consisting only of three or four units. City defenses were laughable: Three units at most, in non-capital cities. And yet I wonder, if the AIs were not producing units, what did they do all the time? Longbows, catapults and elephants appeared only very late, and while the game lasted until 1729AD, the most advanced units I saw had been one crossbow, four macemen, and two knights. That's it - with the knights being the only exception, I never had to face units with a strength greater than 8. Now granted, I've only ever played one game on Noble (my first one ever), so I have no experience with the tech pace on that level. But the small number of units the AIs had thrown at me were...strange.
Several times, I suffered "peace" for numerous turns in a row, where not a single enemy unit could be seen! Numerous times, I had my whole empire on infrastructure builds! I did not build a single wall in any of my cities. Not once did any AI manage to break through my frontlines, threatening to pillage my resources in my backlines. I think I had only two city defense units (archer/longbow/rifleman) during the whole game with more than City Garrison I, because I was able to wipe out all units near my cities before they were able to attack! And last but not least, I suffered from no war weariness.
All this is highly unusual for a typical Always War game, where you quickly have some City Garrison III units to rely on defending your cities, because you cannot deal with all units offensively and have to let them attack your cities instead. In normal AW games, you have to produce units constantly to replace your losses. Normally, you have difficulties mounting an offensive counter-attack against enemy cities - in this game, I quickly had two attack groups.
I hope that this had been the result of some bad luck in my specific game, and that others managed to experience the
typical AW feeling more than I did. That I popped two happiness resources, one very early, didn't help matters
I guess. 
I'm looking forward to see if other games were more
AW-ish, and what went different there.
I had fun nonetheless, even if it felt like a builder's game at times.
I know I could have won much faster if I hadn't a) lost focus
two times during the game, and b) wouldn't have overestimated the Noble AIs so much. Still, I had no Panzers
to use, and thus no date for the first Panzer victory.
Thanks Sirian for setting this up, and see you all next time!
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