I had an embarrasing case of my laptop shutting down because it couldn't run without power or batteries. Need to upgrade I guess
. Autoloaded with no harm done.
I load up the game and do the Alex bribe. This is the kind of stuff I need to do more often in my solo games. It does mean we can't get Maths without giving up CoL monopoly, though, so I delay trading for it. No SS because of imagelimit.
First IBT, Khan comes making demands. I accept. The only real cost is pissing off Wang, which we can afford. I also do a lot of switching tiles - the Civ4 governor is rather decent, but he can't share tiles between cities worth a damn. Particularly cities around Delhi borrow unworked hill mines.
I switch to Caste System. I am not planning to do any slaving, and we don't need more slave revolts. I should probably have gone Low Upkeep instead, seeing as I only hired a single Caste-specialist my whole turnset (more on that later).
The Wonders of the World. Korea just picked up Pyramids. We are probably never going to capture any Wonders, seeing as our variant demands us to raze.
A lot of weird builds finish, particularly Swordsmen and Temples. I observe that we have too much military (we are paying upkeep for it!) and don't really need much happiness. I start up two new settlers and two workers. We want to keep expanding until we win this game. Courthouses are become more urgent, but will mostly have to wait until next turnset. Our scouts are also costing us.
I used my inherited Settlers to found 9N (gemsville) and 6W (Iron). I instantly used Conf. Miss. in 6W.
Eyeing the F2 closely, I pull most of our Barb-busters inside our borders, to avoid wasting supply money.
Isabella comes making a demand. I give her the finger.
The only caste-specialist. I am not sre if it was really called for in this case, but it is a cute trick and I want second gems mined ASAP.
Our economy pre-Currency. Note our gross income.
Post currency. Most important tech, evar. I really have trouble understanding how it jumped
that much, even with one more
per city.
The second benifit of currency: I break CoL monopoly with Gilgamesh, netting some delicious
, and also sell Priesthood to Alex for
. Genghis has pissed off Wang/Isabella more than Alex, so trading with him is fine diplomacy-wise.
We get a total of two natural spreads of Buddhism, this one foreign to Ur, and another domestic (Agra, IIRC). I am also spitting two Misisonaries to strengthen our economy and prepare the Market in Delhi.
Also, our second prophet pops. I seriously consider bulbing Theocracy for Christianity, plus to seize the apostolic palace (delicious hammers and diplomacy denial), but in the end opt to go the boring way. I am coming to think this was a mistake, because we really want the AP - so much Hinduism around, and we don't want to get screwed over when we switch to Conquest mode. I fire all Prohpets in Delhi. We might want to hire Merchants when it finishes Market.
I cancel Sheep->Genghis, closing my 10 turns. Wang has impressive amounts of
stacked up, which we might want to buy from him. I haven't done it yet, not wanting to anger AIs too much (though, aren't Izzy everybody's worst enemy anyway?).
Curret state of the empire:
- We have invested a grand total of 2
into Metal Casting (from our single artist) while 0%'ing. I don't think we really need any techs - Bueracracy is not very awesome, but better than nothing I guess. Metals casting gives forges, which gives both 25%
and 2
from Gems and gold. We might want to manual-research Theology, just for AP.
- We might want to do Slavery->Courthouses in our foodrich cities.
- We have two new settlers. I have suggested to use them in 3W (Iron) and )W (Gold) - marked with signs.
- We need to be conscious about our improvements. Cottages everywhere is not going to cut it - We have already designated the 3N/6N/9N as commerce cities - I think the rest should be farm-hammer-specialist based.
- Keep the expansion going and raze barbarian cities. I am not sure how to do this without risking units (maybe getting a CR2 Sword to punch holes).
Our position is excellent. All cities are contributing very well to the empire.
EDIT: I really need to resize images. Does Photobucket help me here?