The war with the Celts has ended.
A rolling battle across the plains and into the hills was the route to victory, armies leapfrogging each other as the Celt towns and villages fell to the knights and templars of Babylon.
Some little damage was caused by flippage but only two casualties were taken. Singleton knights and templars played a zone defense against limited Celtic coutnerattacks.
At the very beginning of the set traded up for the last two MA techs and got Steam Power
Steam was immediately traded back to England for ~100gpt so I got three techs for an outlay of a little more than 1200 gold pieces. At the beginnng of the round there was 232gpt in net income, at the end it was back to ~160 even with 20% going into the luxury bill (had to keep those Arabs happy).
I was a laggard when it came to backtrading with Joanie - she really didn't offer much, but I probably should have taken Miltrad and a couple of other optionals off her, though the value of all of them is slight.
Busted up all the alliances against Maya and got Henry to pay us some money 55gold and a couple gpt for continued peaceful relations. I was really tempted to put the warmongers screws to France and England, but decided that could wait till they had some more interesting stuff for sale.
China finished the Universal Suffrage building and shortly thereafter got to Electricity which I had shortsightedly selected as a research target as we entered the IA. I should have gone for Medicine, but frankly, it is so long since I have had to play tech catch up at this level I had forgotten my techniques, so we have some probably wasted turns into Electricity.
The workers have started railing with an emphasis on the two capitol cities. We could easily peel some workers out of Babylon and some of the Arab towns without hurting the economy at all.
Time to build up the Celtic specialist economy while the two capitols prepare the sinews of war against China, the only real threat to us at the moment. Mao has rifles if he needs them but has no coal.
There are a couple of galleons on go to's to the tip of the continent closest to Arabia - before starting a real war it may be handy to eliminate Abu - the lingering whining about joining the motherland was annoying to me.
And there is lots of micro-managing left to do
Any progress, brother Monk?
That's always a nail-biter for me, wondering if coal will be available. An Industrial Age without it isn't much fun with workers chasing after pollution 3 tiles at a time.
Tone 
