Community Deity Game #14 - The Celts

So seeing the achievements I of course decided I'll go wide and settle as many cities as possible and use religion to help me overwhelm my neighbours. So I settled in place and got my pantheon on turn 5. This was a pretty tough choice because seeing the neighbourhood basically half of the pantheons could have been a good choice and I took a few minutes to weigh the pros and cons. I finally chose to take God of the Open Sky because of the high amount of pastures I'd get in almost every expo and because I thougt it would synergise well with wide cultural victory if I eventually chose to go that way. This led to me not making a lot of FPT for a long while and I was only able to found the second to last religion a couple of turns ago (France got the first, Sweden the second and I think the Ottomans the third, not too sure about that). Strangely enough, the only religious buildings taken by the AI then were cathedrals and monasteries (bleh !) so I faced another tough choice : pagodas, mosques or something else... I chose to take mosques because I'd need a lot of faith to buy buildings in my many expos and I thought I'll get enough happiness later on from the Ceilidh Halls and culture from the pastures anyway. And who knows ? maybe I'll be so insanely lucky I'll still get the pagodas when I enhance (in which cas I will definitely rush Sacred Sites and go culture ^^). I took Tithe as a Founder Belief because Church Property had already been taken and I am not confident in my ability to use Initiation Rites efficiently early on when it pops. And Ceremonial Burial would probably have been a little bit overkill (not even sure it was still available...).

In order to be able to expand as fast as possible I chose the following BO : scout, monument, granary, scout, worker, pictish warrior, settlers x 7
I took the monument that early cause I wanted to hit Collective rule as fast as possible and followed by the granary because seeing all this wheat I wanted to get to at least 5 pop in Edimburgh before pumping out a continuous flow of settlers. This was a success and due to CR plus plus my 5 pop working on the 2 copper, iron hill and 2 plains horses I was able to get a settler every 4 turns from the very beginning of the REX I even delayed the first hard built settler to get a pictish warrior to deal with barbs and escort the poor defenseless civilians (I later rush bought a second one just in case but barbs were pretty calm this game so he didn't do much for his loan...). My first settler went to the far NE spot on the copper next to the mountain and bananas. I can't decide if this was a mistake or not because this spot has exactly 0 production if you don't rush buy the iron hill to the NW (which I hadn't the gold to do immediately) and lots of food so the city was at 3 pop in the blink of an eye which contributed to some serious happiness problems I'll come back to later. The second expo went NW on that desert hill next to the mountain, 2 copper and flood plains which bought my warrior time to claim the gold hill to the E for the third expo on his way back from the first expedition. Then I claimed the northwestern spot next to the cocoa (where I even got a worker from a barb camp !) and I was disappointed to see that Harald was starting to expand toward me and planted a city in a spot which forced me to shift 2 of my future cities by one tile from the spots I had planned for them... Anyways I rapidly took those southeastern spots next to the salt/pearls and wine and finished my expansion by settling the northern copper hill, the near northern cotton flood plains next to a mountain and finished with the eastern copper hill next to the lake. At this point I was dealing with between -3 and -7 happiness and I had to be creative to alternate between improving new luxuries and settling on them in order to be able to continue expanding without interruption... In the end I got those 9 cities down around turn 65 and after building the initial monument, most of them followed by producing exclusively pictish warriors in preparation of the hard times coming up...

On the scouting/stealing/politics point of view I have been way less successful as I should have... Having no AI as a close neighbour I decided to rely on stealing workers from Kaboul and building my own. Of course, I didn't stick to that and sent the weakened thief to explore the west side of side of the map... only to get killed by moving him too close to a barb camp I knew was there. This was probably a big setback because I think at this point I could have at least 2 more workers and maybe discovered Mt. Kilimandjaro earlier and planned for and expo there as well... I also knew only 3 AI for a long time and by the time I had something to sell, they didn't have spare luxuries anymore which put me in deep unhappiness for a while. I met Harald in the E first and sent a scout there to see if I could grab a worker or two put that was never an option. Soon I stumbled over Nappy and Harald told me he didn't like the arrogant frenchy and that he'd like me to join in a war with him. Here I did something I had never done before and I accepted, hoping that would set both those crazy expansionists back to buy me the time to expand where I want. This partly worked. While Harald managed to put Troyes to 0 health he has never been able to take the city even though he had sent a carpet of melee units and only one or two ranged. I guess this is a good point for me because if both of them stay at a comparable power they'll weaken themselves while I run away ^^ In the meanwhile I had met Gus in the west and was happily selling him my iron (strangely in this game, every AI has tons of horses but no iron so I am easily selling it to them while I'm sitting on a bunch of horses I feed my depresive citizens with... has this something to do with the map script ?). Then I met Pedro from whom I could see the borders of an expo since a few centuries but had no one to send over to take a drink... A long time after those events I eventually met Suleiman and then George and Hiawatha last which was the only one who had a luxury to sell me... At this point I have absolutely no knowledge of the northern and western parts of the world save the capital locations and I wonder what's on the southeastern island. Maybe it's worth settling a few cities there, we'll see (maybe a bit late though...). Shortly after finishing my expansion I wasn't too surprised to spot a danish army marching slowly toward my first expo. I bribed him generously to bring it on against France for another round but on the next turn I still got double DoWed by my two beardy close neighbours. I think this is actually a good thing because I got my bribe money back and Harald is distracted by the Maginot line because Nappy settled in a way the vikings have to pass near his cities to reach their target. On the northern part of the front, the brazilian army has no way to take down my expo because of its excellent defensive position and the fact it is defended by a few angry and mustachy picts. On the downside I have lost way too many of those in this battle because I am still very poor at estimating when a unit is likely to survive a move or not...

So that's me at turn 80, in the middle of the Liberty Golden Age, having a whopping 40 CPT and 50 GPT (won't last though) and a few turns from completing the tree. I'll get NC around T90 and I'm not too happy about that because I could have shaved at least 4 turns of it if I had started on the libraries eartlier... I'm merely friends with 2 maritime CSes but none of the others and I had to piece out with Kaboul when he started to sent catapults and horses to my latest expo. I'm now at -1 happiness with a capital at 6 pop, an expo at 3, 2 at 2 and the rest at 1. Due to a big lack of workers I am building a queue of those in my cap but that will definitely slow me down... I have 0 caravans and only the one granary in Edimburgh...
I have almost no idea what I should do next because I'm approaching the phase where my liberty play usually gets stuck and I fall behind...
I'm still not decided if I'll go late domination or culture but I am sure I won't be able to take Copenhagen with only melee units before the modern era I think I'll let it be. I may be able to take Paris but due to its location relative to other AI I probably won't be able to keep it. Pedro built the Great Wall and Gus is my friend and I'd like him to stay in order to screen the crazy indian warrior.

Please don't hesitate to comment ! I'd be happy to hear any comments, suggestions and critiques