500BC (0) Well, overall things look pretty good. We took advantage of our time as the Zulus to get Ikhandas in most cities, and our newest city has an Ikhanda queued up - which means it will be able to continue construction even after the swap! Madrid is suffering from two whip penalties... but those will of course disappear as soon as we change to a new civilization this turn. The only minor weed is that Barcelona and Ondini are a single turn away from growth, and will drop down to zero food after the changeover. Whoops! Well, not that big of a deal.
I roll the civ first, and we get... Portugal. Ugh.
That's a total dud, nothing interesting we can do there. I guess when you go Random, that's the sort of thing that's going to happen! For the leader selection, we get... Ramesses!
Industrious/Spiritual, the combination that I will always associate with Gandhi. Well, this changes things a bit, doesn't it? I'm going to swap our research over to Masonry, and see what we can do with a Pyramids build!
The Change:
We've assumed yet another color again, this time dark green. I leave the builds mostly alone, although as a Spiritual civ we'll probably want to try and get some Christian temples built during this particular phase. I'll swap over to Christianity faith as soon as we hit the happy limit at Madrid (which is of course running max growth at the moment). The other main goal for the turnset is to explore the southern part of our continent. That galley will ferry our chariot over there in just a couple of turns.
485BC (1) We are no longer allowed to continue working on the Ikhanda at Ondini. I guess "someone" was mistaken about that.
Oh well, I swap it over to a granary. It was worth the experiment!
425BC (5) Masonry discovered, as I finish running through the bankroll Dantski left me (back down to 5g). Madrid swaps to
Pyramids. We'll grow to size 6 next turn, so I leave it on max food for one more turn. This requires another point of happiness, so I go ahead and make the (free Spiritual!) swap to Christianity. The one down side is that now Ondini (which holds Islam) won't get free border growth. We'll have to get a missionary in there, or whip a library or something.
Which tech to go after next? Well, since we're working on the Pyramids and would really like to get that wonder, I'm going to head for Monotheism and Organized Religion civic. With our free Spiritual swaps, we might as well make use of them, right? In short, since I've committed us to avoiding an early war, there's no sense in rushing towards Construction. Better therefore to concentrate on economic development for now. We're also overdue for Writing/libraries (and we still don't have a single cottage as yet!) but those things will have to wait a little longer.
Our chariot pops a map from the hut to the south. Normally this is useless, but look what was revealed:
A STONE resource!
Well, well, well. Lookee what we have here! I swap kwaDuzka to a settler (14 turns) to go grab that resource! Looks like there's room for two very nice cities down there. Too bad it's definitely an island... but if we limit ourselves to just two cities, the colonial costs should be minimal. I'll try and do a dotmap in a minute.
That stone does change one thing, however. If we have stone, we DON'T need Organized Religion. What we need is courthouses! I swap the research path over to Writing/Code of Laws instead.
410BC (6) Hinduism, Confucianism, and Judaism are randomly founded somewhere out in the fog. Maybe we'll see them again someday. The ETA on the Pyramids drops from 750 turns (at 1 shield/turn) to 36 turns (at 14 -> 21 shields/turn). Hooray for being Industrious! I think we'll be pretty safe to land that wonder.
405BC (7) I have Barcelona start another worker, because we can use one. It can also whip its Christian monastery, if desired. When to do so is your call.
350BC (10) That's all. It's a quiet turn to close out my round.
We've probably got the Pyramids in the bag at this point; even another Industrious civ working on them at the same time would likely need to have stone to beat us at this point. We may want to settle the stronger of the two dots on southern island first, rather than race to the stone:
The black dot is the mainland city that we've been including in the dotmaps for a while now. Red dot is clearly the best location on this island: three potential fish tiles (some which can be shared with other cities) as well as copper and three hill tiles. I'd even consider making that location the Heroic Epic city down the road, since it doesn't have much commerce potential. Yellow dot is considerably weaker, but gains us the stone resource. Green is where I'd put a third city, if I were to add one. That's a decision we can hold off on for some time to come.
I went for the Pyramids because Representation would be a huge boon to our small civ, starved for happiness resources at the moment. The Great Engineer points should also open up some interesting possibilities for the future, especially if we draw more Philosophical civs. Economically, we kind of stink right now, so hopefully we can get some cottages going (or some Representation scientist specialists down the road!) to help turn things around. Overall, I think our position is pretty decent. Weak at the moment, with much later potential.
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/SG/RBTS5/RBTS5-BC-350.zip
Let's leave the roster alone at the moment to avoid confusion. I'm more than happy to switch things up the next time through, if that would be fun.
Sullla
TheArchduke <<< UP NOW
sunrise089 <<< on deck
Swiss Pauli
Dantski