Picking up from my 3000 BC update:
I researched mysticism, the wheel, iron working, pottery, and then spent the next 60 turns at war while adding a few beakers per turn to metal casting. Hopefully I'll be able to trade it around to get back up to speed when the Roman Legions return home to become farmers and merchants.
First up was to settle two cities to create the base of production for my Praetorian army. I settled the capital in place. Second city went to the west for the flood plains. It is on the coastal floodplain, and is 2E of the copper, allowing it to work that high hammer tile and be useful for producing units. Second city is up to the NW. I settled right on the silk which put the corn tile in the BFC 2N1W of the city. Cathy settled over to the East of that, where she is on the coast and gets the two bananas and the iron she doesn't yet (and never will) know about.
BIG strategy decision here.
I built Stonehenge. It was just SO cheap, and there wasn't anything else to build while I was working on Iron Working. I also figured that I'm going to capturing quite a few cities, so the free monuments are going to be a little like being creative as I go about my business. As it turns out, this was a VERY helpful little move.
Also of interest, just as I was about to complete iron working, I had a warrior wandering through Greece (he opened borders with me) and was alarmed to see the number of Phalanxes he was massing. My open border agreement had me at pleased with him, (which means nothing for Alex) but my power rating had dipped to 0.3. I hooked up my copper before Iron Working was done, so I quickly whipped out three axemen to get the rating up to 0.6 and then I crossed my fingers.
Once IW was done, iron connected, and a couple Praets hit the board, power was up to about 0.9 and Alex did declare war, but on Joao. :
hew!::
I completed my first six Praets around 1500BC and immediately killed off the two archers in the Russian Banana city (BTW,
plains bananas? Boo!) and headed for Moscow as more Praets were heading up from the homeland. Lost a couple, but I caught Kathy really early and Moscow became part of Rome as well. Nice city. It's too bad that don't have sailing (or any immediate chance of getting sailing) to protect my clams there from the barbs. Lastly, the legions captured (and kept) a third Russian city to the west of Moscow by the dye. I REALLY didn't want to keep this one, but it was a very good site and there was simply no shot that Hannibal wouldn't settle it within 15 turns if I razed it.
Now, the economy is not so good. Also, Kathy settled a fourth city somewhere, and I have no idea where the hell it is. Most annoying, but it is what it is. I took peace from her, since there was no reason to be at war any more until I find her last city.
I got notice that the most powerful nations in the world are Greece and then Rome. Damn. How many units is he freakin' building over there. Well, I see absolutely no reason to wait around and find out, so the Roman Legions regrouped in the silk city and then marched into Greece, looking for a fight. We razed the two cities to the north and west of Athens. Pretty much decided to use the CR1 Praets to soften up the Phalanxes (about 20%-30% odds on the initial attack) and then destroyed them with the second attacks at very high odds.
Just before 1AD, I captured Athens and saved. I am not sure what to do from here. The workers are very busy building cottages back at home, and I've even built a settler to go build a city to work the silver and fur (this being one of those cases where a tanking economy could actually use another city.)
I could either take peace with the crippled Alex at this point and try to save my economy, OR I could just keep right on burning Greek cities for the war booty. Maybe I'll see if he might give me a couple techs for peace.
Diplomatically, I decided to make Hannibal my friend for a couple reasons. He would most likely help me out with Alex if need be in the future. He'll be a good trading partner once I'm back in the game, and he'll be a nice buffer between me and the civs on the other side of him. Also, his UU is not a particularly nice thing to see coming at my UU. Not the worst thing, but not something I want to mess with. Also, once I adopted Hannibal's religion, I was able to mooch archery from him. It was getting painful to leave such expensive units behind to protect my rear cities.
If I decide to make peace with the Greek, I just might stack up the legions and go declare war on somebody else. I could use the cash, I really need to slow everybody down for a while, and I might be able to get some more techs.
The next group of turns should be interesting. I've started to switch most citizens to working on commerce tiles. I set one city to build the pyramids. It seems unlikely that I'll complete it, but the gold from failing will be much needed. Actually, once the two happy resources are hooked up, I might have a shot at building them, as that city does have the ability to work a lot of hammers.
Maybe I'll even be able to report back that I've actually researched another technology all by myself.
