1650AD-1695AD
Pre-turn Examination
In terms of tile improvements, these cities are a bit under-specialised. In my opinion, a city with mines all around it shouldn’t have cottages unless there is an excess of food and it is already working all mines. Even then, I would prefer to specialize it further by building workshops (or watermills) instead of cottages. A city like that needs maybe a grocer and a marketplace to bring up happy/health and doesn’t need a library etc (unless its for a wonder). This is just my opinion and the way I play, but I find its fairly effective. I am going to plow under some 5 commerce cottages around specialized cities (like our heroic epic city) so that we can move them towards their specialized function a bit more. I leave the builds as they are however as most production cities are already focused on cannons and we will soon need those.
Also in terms of specialization, we don’t have a GPP farm.
Civics
The combination of a our no-chopping limit and the presence of two food, two commerce tiles makes our capital a little sub-par for running bureaucracy so I switch to vassalage and while I am at it, pick up mercantilism.
Research
In 1685, we learn the secrets of military tradition and I set research to 0% while I upgrade our knights and catapults. I want to provide the next player a usable modern army as best as I c an. I also set research to printing press.
I try to make some trades happen and I notice that we are at the ‘WFYABTA’ limit with Monty and China and that the greeks don’t like us enough to trade. Well, so be it. We’ll just have to beat some techs out of the English and Milanese.
Tile Improvements
I indulged my pet peeves a bit and cottaged or windmilled grassland hills near commerce cities and built watermills and farms near production cities. This lost us some turns of growth but I think will strengthen us within the time frame of this game. I want to continue farming/workshopping our cottages near Cologne, but havn't targeted the big ones yet because people might not like that.
Great People
We could use our scientist to light-bulb part of education but this is already known by two civilizations and doesn’t provide any immediate benefit. We are not in a position to start building universities and we aren’t in a liberalism race. So I merge him to our academy city.
Builds
Our production cities built grenadiers and cannon, as did our hybrid-style capital. Our commerce cities built commerce-type improvements (markets, libraries, etc) and our newest acquisitions worked on courthouses.
Foreign Powers
Early in this turn-set, Mao began a golden age. In 1670, Monty (pleased diplomatically) adopts vassalage and theocracy and now has ‘enough of his hands’ when I highlight war options. Looks like ol’ feather-head is gonna rampage soon. Lets just hope our pleased status gives us a break. He is annoyed with Victoria and she has the lowest power. I had hoped to go after her anyway, so I hope that’s what he does so we can double-team her. In 1685, England kick-starts a golden age.
Damn Damn Damn Damn Looks like we are now at war with the Chinese… arghhhh! I wanted to fight Mali or England. Merry Christmas Victoria.
The very next turn (last turn I played), Monty asks us to cancel our deals with the English and on the very same turn, the English ask to trade crabs for dye. I think she needs them for happiness.
War
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to recall all our forces which were converging on the English border to the Chinese end of our empire.
He immediately sends some pillaging knights. Our own knights, cannons, catapults, city-raider macemen are scurrying across our empire to get to the western borders and fight the Chinese but because he declared on Mansa, his main forces are probably on the Malinese borders. Hopefully he takes a few of those cities and we can take them from them for ourselves…
Mali's and Victoria's cities have lots of cottages and are probably really nice at this stage of the game while the Chinese cities are all just huge tracts of farmland...
Sorry about the war situation but that’s sort of the nature of this variant.
Here’s the
save.
, have I mentioned how much I like cannons 
.
IBT, Monty moves a stack through here, chasing the cavalry away (only 3 of them left one injured 
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This is good as our borders expand into the area where it used to be.
