from the screen shot Giggles is on your border so I would convert to buddism especially if you dont share a border with Qin.If you can get giggles to pleased/friendly and maybe stop him trading with Qin so an army cant get through his borders to attack you.Zara gets to pleased/friendly pretty easily so yes I would share religion with these two and sod Qin-He is a backstabber anyway and DOW at pleased are common...
Problem is that I have direct borders with everyone. Qin is in the NW and Giggles in SE, so Qin wouldn't need to pass any other's territory to reach me. At the moment I'm trying without converting religion.
...First of all, just forget about plains tiles early in the game. Plains farms and plains hill mines are not worth working. You are better off whipping out the population than working those tiles early in the game. You've built a ton of PH mines and windmills, while the grasshills around capital still don't have mines. Grasshill mines are way better than PH mines, because they are only -1 food instead of -2.
In the meantime I have built something on the grass hills. However, windmills, not mines... I thought for the capital I should aim for the commerce bonus of windmills.
Not sure if those plains farms around Huamanga are there for chain irrigation, if not, then they are really weak tiles to work and your workers have better things to do. Irrigation spreads through cities also, so put a farm NE of Huamanga to irrigate the corn.
As the first I had built the farm 1S of Huamanga. Then I indeed thought that must irrigate through the city, went to 1NE of the city and the farming button wasn't active. My guess was, irrigation through cities doesn't work if the initial water source isn't a river but a lake and started to build that long chain around the city. Now, I assume I did something wrong, maybe the 1S farm wasn't really finished when I checked the 1NE tile with another worker or whatever...
Your cities are way bigger than my cities usually are when researching paper. A big capital is good, but the other can be whipped more frequently. If it took you 20-30 turns to take out Hannibal's capital with maces vs archers, then you most certainly wasn't whipping enough. When facing a war, stop everything else and pump out that army asap. Also 2 pop whip the temples to get them built faster.
Hm, it might be that I'm handling whipping too restrictive. Basically I only whip when ALL of the following 3 conditions are met:
_ It is exactly 1 turn to grow to the next population point.
_ The whip will cost exactly 2 population points.
_ The whip costs only 10 turns of unhappiness, or in other words the "we cannot forget your cruelty..." from the last whip has disappeared.
During that war I made only a single exception, namely an emergency whipping of a longbow for 3 pop. Especially condition 1 and 2 often don't meet at the same turn. If I understand you correctly I could be more unscrupulous with whipping? I could imagine that condition 1 might be less important...
Are you sure capital is the best place for National Epic? It should be working cottages and cannot run very many artists. Amsterdam for example looks much better. With 3x seafood and 4 grassland farms it would be at +16 food, allowing you to run 8 artists at size 15. With pacifism, Parthenon and National Epic this would mean 84 GPP/turn, in Golden Age this would go up to 108 GPP/turn which is extremely good. If you don't know, the first Great Person costs 100 Great People Points, the 2nd 200GPP, the third 300GPP and so on, until at some point after the 10th it starts increasing with 200GPP for each new GP. So with 84 GPP/turn those Great Artists would be coming out very fast.
That's interesting now. I've stopped the National Epic for now to go back to the drawing board. You calculated 8 artists * 3 points * (1 + 250%) = 24 * 3.5 = 84, right? I had to try and figure out, how this GPP system works, which I actually didn't know at all...
If National Epic would be in Amsterdam, isn't there actually 1 free GPP from the building more, so: (8 * 3 + 1) * 3.5 = 87.5 GPP ? And if I would build Sistine Chapel in Amsterdam (Parthenon is already in Tiwanaku) then 2 additional free GPP: (8 * 3 + 1 + 2) * 3.5 = 94.5 GPP ? Does it work that way?
Does your calculation of the food surplus +16 assume that I also farm the 5 plains tiles and don't work the gold, horses and the 2 hills? I get city size 16 then, however I will lose 1 or 2 plains tiles to Bad-Tibira, maybe you took this already into account?
Oh, and please get BUG mod already.
Installed now!
C) Kill everybody and try culture again in the next game
Just a few turns more for the cultural try. If it's hopeless then I trash this game. The next game is already reserved for Kill Everybody.