Good progress versus China.
Yes, great name for the leader-generating unit.
I like the plan of building the Forbidden Palace in Pasargadae and using a leader for a palace jump, but I don't understand why you've gone off our original, and excellent, idea of building our second core in China. We need to establish our second core on good land, and we need to do it as quickly as possible. China satisfies both these conditions, Russia neither. We need to keep attacking, and it would be nice to grab some luxuries, but these considerations are quite separate from the question of where our FP/new palace should go.
The problem with attacking Russia next, it seems to me, is that we'd be expending a lot of effort on a minor threat. If we ask which of our rivals seem likeliest to manage a spaceship launch before we hit 20k, the answer is fairly obvious: Babylon and Greece, two large civs on good land. The whole continent Russia is on, on the other hand, is so poor and miserable (look at America's starting position
) that the civs occupying it will probably never achieve much.
Given this, I'd rather get started on offensive operations against the Greek/Babylonian/Korean continent. Since amphibious invasions are tricky, it would be easiest to attack the feeble Koreans first, get well established on the continent, and then turn to the Greeks, whose best cities are conveniently close to the Korean border. The Koreans have one luxury (under Seoul) and the Greeks have plenty, so this plan would address our problems in that regard. If you like this idea, OneFastWarrior, you'll want to start positioning some galleys for the invasion of Korea right away, since this process takes forever.
It's also worth bearing in mind that if we realize late in the game that we're in danger of losing to a launch, it'll be easier to organize a quick attack on Russia, which is close to us, than on Greece and Babylon, which aren't.
I also wouldn't object to a war with the Mongols, simply on grounds of ease and opportunity; our forces will be right on their border when we finish up with the Chinese, and with all those unproductive flood-plain cities, they look like pushovers to me. But they have no luxuries, of course.
OneFastWarrior, you can cut three turns off Arbela's time to build Leonardo just by doing a little MM and getting rid of its useless food surplus. This town may not have much chance of getting Leonardo, but it can have a better chance than it has at the moment!
If Arbela doesn't get Leonardo, you can keep the prebuild alive by switching to the palace, of course.
Since we're at the beginning of our minimum tech run anyway, you might want to try the gambit of going for Printing Press rather than Gunpowder. The reasoning is that we're a lot likelier to get Gunpowder from the Great Library than PP, which the AI tends to ignore. PP is also the perfect kind of tech for a forty-turn run, since we want it, but not in any great hurry. Your call.
). Change research from Gunpowder to Printing press.
They still had 6 turns left on our MA.
