I'm thinking that Literature, instead of Iron Working should be our next tech. It looks like our defenses our pretty sound and we are not at war, so an immediate need for Iron Working is not present.

I favor Literature for the trading advantages it gives us. Others may know CoL, but Philosophy we have a monopoly on and also Republic. Once we get a Curragh across the ocean we will meet new civs. With Lit, CoL, Philo and Republic in near monopoly status, we can trade for all the Ancient techs, including Iron Working. At some point the Orange Apes will sell Iron Working to fair Theodora and we can buy it from her.

Literature lets us build libraries, which are good for culture and research.

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Cheers? Jeers? Rotten fruit?

Aye! Literature sounds like a good way to go. Libraries produce a lot of Culture and I'm all in favor of that. Give us an edge in reseach over those sea-farin' clans, it will. We can go figure out this Iron Workin' stuff later. :thumbsup:

I'd say IW, even though being defense minister might be biasing something :mischief:
Even if we are quite sturdy, it would be good to know where the iron is, and exploring with GSs makes the barbarian threat considerably smaller.

Both Techs are good...

However at the moment I lean towards Literature... may delay IW a little, but it will help us get future techs.

IW should definitely be researched immediately afterwards though...

And I agree with Falc about following Lit with IW.

Since we're not likely to leave gaps in our settlement pattern, I guess it doesn't hurt to do Lit first.

Literature.

Hopefully Theodora will trade for IW and we can buy it from her.

Literature is good, since I'm not betting on seeing specialist farms in this one. Getting Libraries early should help keep our research going strong. Iron Working can wait, especially if we are going to delay our revolt.

Literature. We're not in any military threat right now, so we should just go for more economic-based techs.

Why are we hoarding tech and researching tech that is already out there? Iron Working, for example. The Byzantines have it now and we have Philosophy. We shouldn't be afraid to trade with neutral civs.

We're thinking about the Great Library which will give us almost all the techs that the Byzantines have. If we did go for the GLib then we should hoard gold for Gallic Sword upgrades. :)

It is 27 turns to the Great Library and in that time we could build a lot of Gallic Warriors. If we are going all out for the Great Library and stopping research until then, then trading for Iron Working in the meantime would enable us to do that. If we are continuing research during the build I would still rather do the trade than research something already out there. We still have Code of Laws we could hold back to slow them to Republic and of course we should hold back Literature.

We do have a lot of Warriors but most of them are Regulars so we need to get them promoted by fighting Barbarians or we will have many units not really worth upgrading. They will be expensive to upgrade though and in the meantime the support is the same for an ordinary Warrior as a Gallic Warrior. So more of our gold will need to go for Support and luxury to enable our cities to grow.

In balance I still want to make the trade. I think it was Philosophy for IW, Masonry and 21 gold, but perhaps getting just IW and more gold may be an option.

Furiey, my friend, we can not do everything at once. At least not yet. I will concede to the deal with the Byzantines (Philo for IW, Masonry, and 21 gold). But I am making recommendations in three or four other areas that I feel we need to do/ focus on after we help the Byzs with their research.

We'l need to raise our luxury rate to 10%, as we only have 1 luxury and we need our cities to grow. Then we will have to put the entertainer in Maeve to work cutting down trees in the forest by the river. This will let us complete the GL in 22 turns rather than 27. By sliding our research down to 20%, we will then get Mathematics in somewhere around 18 turns (<-guessing) while capturing 1 gpt. These moves can change as Maeve and other cities grow, but I feel they need to be done now. I see Currency as our next big tech goal.