Predator
2nd spoiler post for me, continued from
here.
As usual, true to my motto "Make Techs Not War", I've been spending the middle ages with all attention focused on scientific discoveries, and tried to keep military spending to an absolute minimum.
This meant that the Dutch went for the top part of the scientific tree first, with education of course being a key tech for universities, though for me the discovery of Astronomy was of even more importance. With only 1 tech for ourselves, like I suppose we all have had problems with this game, maintaining happiness was a huge drain on income/scientific output, with 20% luxury tax at times being required at least.
Since I had decided not to go for the GL, my only option of getting trades online was heading deep into the tech tree as fast as possible, originally I had hoped one of the AIs with a lux to trade would have built the Lighthouse, allowing at least one lux to be traded, but to my amazement, as can be read in the first spoiler thread as well, the AIs apparently all felt the same way, with several wonders reaching completion but none of the cascades resulting in the Great Lighthouse, nor even a nation starting to build it.
Not sure if I made a mistake with this, since I do feel the Lighthouse is very expensive for its limited abilities.
However, as said, it did mean quite a lot of unhappiness, so when I noticed that the civs that I contacted the latest (Zulu, Egypt, Maya) were continuously lagging behind, and were looking rather feeble, combined with the fact that they were lightyears away via ocean connections, I decided I would abandon them as research partners. By gifting the Zulu some key technology, and then declaring war on them (resulting in a "cautious/war" relation with them
), I hoped they would use their tech advantage to bribe one of the other two nations in against me, as the resulting free happiness would be of immense value.
And as could be expected with the Zulu, they did not do anything to help me, once again resulting in them thwarting one of my plans, though this time in a totally different fashion than their usual sneak attack routine.
Maybe because of the lack of resource partners, I only got the AI to research Feudalism and Engineering for me, and fortunately, as I had already anticipated that the AI might be a bit slow with building harbours themselves, I had created my own connection to the other continent near the incense SW of Madrid, rushing a harbour there to get the first lux online, and signing a ROP to get two of my own men in to connect ivory for Spain (they had miraculously roaded around the ivory so far) and create a land route with France. At this moment, they are still improving the land there, hoping to boost the AIs research potential:
So later in the age, when finally magnetism became a known concept and ocean trade was enabled, I made peace again with the Zulu, almost getting a city from them in the deal, though I had not done anything to make them feel uncomfortable about the war, trading some wines with them and getting a connection with my furs-city in the far east, introducing lux 6 and 7 to Holland, resulting in an end to happiness problems. Lux 8 is still out of reach, since Maya refuses to build a harbour..
Finally, with Cop. Obs in Amsterdam giving the final boost for the tech rate to be continued at 4/tech, the industrial age was entered in 250 AD:
Interesting tidbit: France has finally started building the Great Lighthouse in 190 AD, the latest date I've ever seen I think, and a bit too late to be of any help now...
And to finalize this spoiler, a question for DaveMcW, regarding the pic you posted of your empire, I notice almost all cities being run by the governor, and I was wondering whether there is there some special reasoning behind this, as usually the governor is regarded as not very useful for city managing, or so I believe...?
, but I think I know the answer: on the peninsula. If you only have only a few cities, corruption will be low in all cities anyway.
Moreover since I did the same thing myself and only got 'Amsterdam' just before the city names started to be 'New somethingorother'. Utrecht is my capital, which is rather nice, since I live there!
