In concentrating so much on making my settlements happy, I've totally disregarded the entire empire expansion part of the game. Although I've managed to be one of the more successfull civilizations of the game, I'm also the smallest. Most of the land around my empire is already claimed by other civilizations and I haven't concentrated on building up a navy or any kind of ship, which rules out the possibility of settling on another continent. My only option was to go to war with one of my neighboring civilizations. India was the most convenient place to go to war with because since I had an open borders agreement with them, I knew where every Indian city was. This made it easy for me to plan the best route for my units to take to attack every city in the fastest way possible making the war as quick and hopefully uncostly as possible. Another reason why I chose India was it was the weakest militarily out of the other neighboring civilizations. Each city had very minimal defenses and i outnumbered them by quite a lot. By going through with this war, I was hoping for not only highly expanding my empire, but also gain more goods and opportunities to increase the happiness and health of my current cities.

I was fairly certain it'd be a quick and painless war. After all, I was a much more advanced civilization than India. Just like what Diamond talked about in the second part of his documentary, one of the major keys to conquering other civilizations is having more advanced technology. My technology differences between my civlization and the Incas were very similar to the Incas and Pizarro technological differences. India had no guns and their most advanced military unit was the spearmen. I however, had musketmen, cannons, grenadiers, etc. all of whom used firepower and guns. Diamond mentions in Chapter 13: Necessity's Mother, that the main factors that lead to the difference in technological differences between the conquering Europeans and the New World natives were the level of food production, barriers to diffusion, and differences in human population. India, being a peaceful nation focusing on spirituality and religion, seemed to focus mainly on developing the things necessary for survival. But their location obviously made it very hard for them to accomplish this. The majority of the land was mountains and they had one sea coast and a few rivers in their territory. It was a very poor location to base a civilization in, and the only good things about their territory were a few pastures, dye plantations, and they had a good number of fish and whales in the area. It could have been their low level of food production that made it so hard for India to progress as a civilization. This only made them that much easier to conquer.

Although the whole germs aspect of conquering other civilizations isn't a part of the game, I thought my superior numbers and weapons would make it an easily won war. But the game really enforces the advantages of city defending, and since I was always on the offensive, it made the fighting fairly even. Because this was my first war, I had no idea what to expect. I thought that since I was a much stronger civilization militarily and financially, I'd have no problem. However, I was very wrong. India turned out to be a much stronger opponent than I had thought. In under 3 turns, they created double the amount of military units they started out with before the war started. Luckily, India fought mostly defensively so I didn't have to worry about losing any of my original cities. Regardless, I've been getting really aggravated because it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would, at much more of a cost. My cities, which weren't very happy or healthy from the start, are more pissed off that I'm at war. I was also shocked to findo ut that the amount of units I had in preparation for the war weren't enough to beat India. Which meant I had to continuisly make more and better military units to rush over to fight. This causes me to stray away from improving my civilization itself and making improvements to my cities. Hopefully it'll be all worth it in the end, as I've already taken over 3 cities which I've already begun to work towards benefiting the rest of my civilization in the best ways possible.