Please -- please, stop! You have utterly decimated my Age of Empires war machine! You have crushed my offensive army, then threw the weight of your empire against my city walls. They broke on it like waves crashing on the shore, again and again, until my towers were reduced to rubble and the holes too numerous to count. Your battering rams and catapults reduced our warmaking capacities to cinders, as the smouldering ruins of our stables and barracks will attest. But please -- I beg of you -- stop the slaughter! Only the women and children, the old and infirm remain!

Oh no, do not topple our granary into the dust! It has all of our food, our only hope for surviving the winter. The granary never set out to hurt you. It was only there to ... grain stuff. It's harmless!

Wait, stop -- that's a university! Is an institute of higher learning nothing to you? Please don't crush it with stones and burn it. Those books are fine scholarly works, and less than half of them dealt with the crushing death of your empire and how we planned to stick your noble leaders on sharpened pikes.

No -- oh no -- please don't trample the homes of the peasants under the crushing feet of your elephants. Where will they live? The sound you hear from the town center is the weeping of the children. They are sweet and innocent and had many years of childhood ahead of them before, at the age of 12, I planned ot press them into service and hand them a sword and explain to them that they must devour the still beating hearts of the enemy and die in battle if they hoped to reach the kingdom of heaven. Would you deny them that?

Okay, okay, fine. Mow them down like wheat for the thresher. I don't know how you sleep with yourself.