Mansa is capped. He actually hit WFYABTA right before the war. That means that the tech tree's not even halfway done and I've already traded for more than
twenty techs...absolutely insane. Off the top of my head, I traded aesthetics for alphabet, math, and IW, polytheism, sailing, animal husbandry, and monarchy (with some of the earlier techs being brokered for the later ones); monarchy + lit for calendar and currency; music for CoL/some of civil service/metal casting; education and nationalism for gunpowder and printing press from a friendly Wang; something for construction/machinery/engineering/guilds/banking; MT (that I libbed) + astro for scientific method, and finally MT + astro + SM for chem + economics + constitution from Mansa right after capping him. There's some I missed but either way, this has been the craziest trading game I've ever played. Now I'm on track for 800AD communism, except I already have the vast majority of the Renaissance. With just 4 crap cities Mansa can still somehow get steel for me in 13 turns. After I knock out Wang, I can really win this however I want...but it's been a while since I've won space on terra
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Maybe more details coming tomorrow about early game when I'm more awake.
The most important part of this game was settling Guimarães, Evora, and Braga even if it meant tanking my economy early-game. The first so I could get easy iron, and all three to act as whipping factories for cuirassiers. To do a successful cuir rush you have to absolutely overwhelm your opponent with hammers, and at least 4-5 sites with 2+ food sources where you can whip every 3-5 turns endlessly, is the most reliable way to put together a force strong enough to run especially your first target over. One city had wet corn + banana + sugar, another had fish + sugar, and the last had 2x sugar + pigs. Without them, it's impossible to say how long it would've taken to gather the 20 or so cuirs I needed before I could confidently attack.
Tech situation - as you can see, there are the people clearly ahead, the middle of the pack, and then poor Toku and Alex limping along...
Oh, by the way, a bit ago Mansa used his economics great merchant and then I got THIS deal out of it...absolutely insane, I've never seen anything like it! He's the true MVP of this game.