Round 3: 775BC - 55BC
After a long time playing on Normal speed, it seems to me that Epic gives me weird dates.
Anyway, as you might expect, I decided on Alphabet first. And I thought that grabbing Philosophy and, with it, Taoism would be good, after which a prophet should be in order for the Taoist shrine. We might just be able to have a monopoly on religion on our continent. Of course, we would have to research Drama first, but I would not have minded saving the GS till then. So that we would get a GS first before a prophet, I ran scientists in York shortly after it whipped a library:
Which would let it generate a GS before Stonehenge could generate its prophet:
After Taoism is founded, the free missionary could go to London first to spread the religion, so that our capital would be able to whip a temple and run a priest to hasten the birth of our prophet next.
It all sounded like a mighty fine plan.
Unfortunately, Taoism was founded in a distant land soon after:
As the birth of a GS in far far away preceded that, it was probably lightbulbed. That's the earliest I've ever seen the AI found it. And that put whoever it was in the Medieval Era while we were still mucking about in the Ancient
Our good plan in shambles, I decided to let the prophet be born first and fall back on lightbulbing Theology.
Meanwhile, I sent a force to take and raze the barb city on the stone:
Erm, that's more barbs than we could handle, so I had to retreat our forces
We'll come back when we have axemen. Seriously, the barbs on Immortal are no joke.
Our exploring chariot had mapped out the Roman lands, and it was scouting out German territories, when it revealed an interesting detail:
Bismark built the Pyramids. I'm not surprised, but it's especially worrying because his favourite civic is Representation. He would become a force to be reckoned with, at least economically. And Berlin is a little too far to be captured anytime soon.
And, as you can see, Christianity was founded on that turn. Looks like we'll all have to be heathens for a long time more. The other continent is really religion-whoring. Biggest clue that we can expect at least Isabella in the game.
This would make diplomacy more of a touch-and-go on our continent, and the lack of the happiness bonus from religion is a shame. Another sigh of relief that we at least have the Charismatic trait to help us out. We would also be unable to benefit from any of the religious civics
The only good thing is the folks from the other continent wouldn't automatically hate us on the first meeting, giving us a better chance at choosing which side to take. Maybe that would help with a diplomatic victory.
We discovered Alphabet on the next turn. Only one of our neighbours had Mathematics, so it wasn't available for trading yet. We had to choose which direction to take our research next. We could go straight for CoL, but without many cities before going to war (Caesar has decided to arrest our peaceful expansion onto the mainland us by settling cities near our northern borders), the usefulness of that is really questionable. We couldn't go for Construction yet, and it was still too expensive anyway. That left Metal Casting, which leads to Machinery (a key tech in our Redcoat strategy) and allows the building of forges and the Colossus, as well as being a good trading tech to boot.
It would take a long time to research at our current rate (45 turns). However, there was a good way to really speed it up:
This was on top of running a scientist in York. As London didn't have useful builds anyway, except maybe axemen (which we had enough of for the moment), it seemed like an effective way to dispose of the hammers of the production city.
A few turns later, Mathematics became available for trading:
And we also traded for IW:
Bismark refused to give anything more than IW for it, unfortunately, a first in a long time for me. Well, we could now start clearing the jungles around York and make it more cottageable.
[to be continued in the next post...]
I would say that there is a window of opportunity to become "the spiritual leader" of our continent - afaik there is no religion founded yet, so if aelf manages to lightbulb Christianity timely, it should spread like wildfire!
... with Cyrus on an isolated starting location 
. But this showed me that my skills really have improved a lot since i had a hard time on Prince when the new patch came out.
To that effect, I think heading for Construction next makes sense. Then, while building an army of mainly catapults and elephants, we can research towards CoL, which would ideally be discovered by the end of the first war. We should be able to backfill a little by tech trading in the meantime.
I agree with Sisiutil that going to HR is going to be a much higher priority civic change than usual for the extra happiness, even though you're charismatic. I like his trading-for-monarchy scheme, too, by the way.
