You can only build workboats on lakes that have a resource, such as fish.
Very nice tip!
The Rome also connected Iron quickly in my game - but never build a single Praetorian!
My experience differed significantly. I had a few Chariots watching Roman lands, but I'd lost some of them to Strikes and Augustus got Iron connected. I only clued in when I saw 3 Praetorians appear on the same turn as each other! They were built in 3 different Cities, of course. My remaining Chariots in Roman lands retreated to the Iron, which was also conveniently to the location of the Horse Resource, then played a game of Pillage-and-Stay-Close, while my 1 Archer + 1 Axeman combo played a game of cat-and-mouse with a stack of 2 Praetorians + 6 Archers from Augustus that kept wanting to come toward my Gems City through what was probably a Mountain Peak Pass that had been set up by MarleysGh0st. Of course, the stack retreated to head the long-way-around when I went to the Hills + Forest square, and then would come back to the short pass when I retreated, allowing me to play that game indefinitely.
Otherwise for wonders I've only invested hammers in the Temple of Artemis for failgold, but now I'm two turns short of completion. What to do?
I'm sure that you're past that decision point now, but:
It's a useful Wonder to self-build if you are low on Food Resources and you want to spawn a Golden Age with your first or second Great Person, since you will get to your next Great Person relatively quickly, but the Great Person won't likely be a coveted early Great Scientist or early Great Engineer.
It's a useful Wonder to build yourself if you plan to grow the City Size of the City that built it to greater than Size 10, when the bonuses to Foreign Trade Routes can start to stack up.
It's a useful Wonder to let an AI build if you plan to generate a Great Merchant, as you can often get additional Trade Mission Gold from that City relative to other AI Cities.
edit: I still don't know what a minor civ is. #cities=1 according to the screen information, but borders are much larger.
You cannot perform diplomacy with a Minor Nation and you are locked into a war with the Minor Nation. While you are at war with any AI, be it a Civ or a Minor Nation, the number of Cities that the AI is known to have is limited to the count of Cities that you have revealed on the map, with a value of 1 being the lowest number possible. Note that I haven't tested to see if the number might go down to 0 as a minimum value in a game where "Complete Kills" is enabled and where a player would no longer need a minimum of 1 City (after having settled at least 1 City) to remain alive in the game. Otherwise, you have that minimum of 1 City being required to be alive in the game being listed on the Scoreboard (and AIs plus Minor Nations will settle on the first turn, unless completely blocked from settling, and thus they'll practically always have 1 City at a minimum).
When you are not at war, you have the ability to have a diplomatic talk with a Civ's AI Leader, and thus the Hall of Fame Mod aka the BUFFY Mod will tell you a summary of how many Cities that Civ has, since you could count the amount yourself just by going to the diplomacy screen with an AI. Even in the early game, you can press Ctrl + click on a Leader's Name, when you have nothing to trade, to get this information, and thus you aren't gaining any additional information from the Mod in this regard, but are just getting a convenient tool to summarize the information for you.
The same is true with how you could click on a Leader's Name and ask them what they think about other Leaders... instead, we have the F4 screens to summarize this information for us. Of course, in a game with Minor Nations, you won't see this information summarized for the Minor Nations, and you can actually talk with Elizabeth to ask what she thinks of the Minor Nations, but this information is probably just for fun, as Elizabeth is unable to interact diplomatically with the Minor Nations.
As for me, I took the Challenger saved game. I took LowtherCastle's implied advice and went a bit west with the Settler, to stick by the Rivers. It was an important choice, in hindsight, as it allowed me to build several Riverside Cottages.
As a side note to LowtherCastle, I'd still take a Deer on a River in place of a Deer with a Forest--I agree that the Forest would be preferred for building your first Worker/Settler, but later in the game, you often feel happy enough with getting a Deer without a Forest but on a River, which can happen regularly on a Great Plains map. Since a Forest growing on a Riverside Deer square would make the +1 Commerce from the River go away, it is one of those scenarios where you often just give up on waiting for a Forest to grow and plop a Camp down, knowing that once the Camp has been placed, a Forest won't be able to grow on that square.
I had hoped to find Copper on the starting Plains River square, thinking that we'd have Iron far away and would have to use Copper for our Gallic Warriors. Plains, instead of Grassland, on the starting square, would have made up for the fact that the Mapmaker had (hopefully) put Copper underneath of our Settler, as settling on Copper would not have completed "wasted" the square-gains from the Resource, as we would have still earned an extra Hammer if the square had been a Plains square. Yet, I did not feel that I would have time to get to Bronze Working before the other Worker techs and thus I chose the more conservative route of teching Archery first, then Worker techs.
Warriors are great for fog-busting in most other games. With 3 Minor Nations, fog-busting wouldn't be of much help, and the Units from the Minor Nations would likely also inadvertently help with fog-busting. Therefore, I wanted Units that had a chance to collect Promotions and even Great General Points when fighting Minor Nations' Units, without the high-risk of falling to pieces like Warriors often give us.
I expanded too quickly, getting to 6 Cities, thinking that 2 Gold Resources, 1 Gems Resource, 1 Silver Resource, and 2 Fur Resources would help to pay the bills. They were far from sufficient.
The greatest challenge was the economy. By 1 AD, I had limped my way to Pottery and have been building Cottages on every available square, possible:
Chopping GH Riv Forests and putting Cottages on them, putting Cottages on Plains squares without Rivers, on Grassland flatland or Hills without Rivers; anywhere and everywhere that I can afford to do so, without going as insane as Cottaging over my Rice Resource.
I believe that it was the game in which I had begun working the most Cottage squares by 1 AD in any XOTM game that I have ever played.
Without Masonry for Duns or for Wonder Failure Gold, without Iron Working for Gallic Warriors, and without Writing for hiring Scientists from Libraries, I have been fighting the Strike Monster with sacrificial Units just long enough to capture the odd Minor Nation City with stacks of Chariots, only to allow said Cities to get recaptured to avoid having to pay for their Maintenance.
Stonehenge went to Louis, and I've managed to capture and lose a City in which he settled a Great Prophet; it will be a City worth recapturing in the future. The Oracle went to Elizabeth early on; it's not like I had the techs required to compete with her. I did not even have the techs for The Great Lighthouse, which Augustus claimed. Other than briefly owning a City that contained a settled Great Prophet, I have no chance of earning Great People for quite some time.
I'll need another week to finish the game, so,
I'd love a one-week submission deadline extension.
Otherwise, I'd consider moving on to the next game, but we don't seem to have one. Is there some plan to end the series at Game #250?
On an unrelated note, did this website switch its SSL Certificate to one from Let's Encrypt?
I missed the Oracle--could have whipped and gotten it but I thought "Eh, I can have it in 2 turns with natural build--it should be safe." Not. I did get Stonehenge, though, which is handy. While assessing things at 1 AD I noticed I still did not have trade routes with Liz, and although I have marble hooked up, I lack Polytheism and Aesthetics. Well, with teching so slow, you gotta let some things slide.
