After looking at our situation, I decided that we needed to push expansion during my round. I changed Washington's build to Settler and recalled the lone exploring Archer, who was stuck in the middle of a wide expanse of fully explored territory anyway. I would concentrate our workers on roadbuilding toward the south. Our military is SO thin, and our shield output so low, that there is no time to build the Library in Washington any time soon. That would cause way too many vital things to wait longer than they can afford to wait. (Having only three cities on a Huge map at 1AD would be choosing unwisely!)
Washington has two high food plots and is best suited for training our settlers and workers. New York has decent shields around (three 1/2/0 plots? Plus food) and is building barracks. Having New York produce military on a high-shield config while Washington trains a few more settlers would seem to be in order. Once we have about six cities and enough units to defend them decently, then we can shift to upward expansion, with stuff like Library and Theater (by then, we'll have Drama!)
The early Alphabet will mean AIs wanting to make tech trades and even asking for tech gifts. Giving away ultra cheap early techs like Meditation, Sailing, Priesthood, etc, is actually a great way to make early friends (especially on first contact) and reduce our odds of being attacked as well line up some future Friendly neighbors who will be more lenient with us in the number of tech trades they are willing to make on in to the future.
As for making actual tech trades, though, we need to choose wisely. We COULD grab everything on hand, but trading for Mining and Pottery, et al, will mean the trading spigot shuts down on us in the late middle ages. I don't have any specific orders or plans in mind, though. Just offering general commentary. Getting roads built toward our neighbors will be a big deal, as trade routes to peaceful civs will be a larger slice of our total income than is typical. At some point, we will also want to try to spread our religion to civs who have none, rather than letting rival religions get there first. It would be unfortunate if ALL of our rivals end up holding religion attitude penalties against us.
I like the idea of Library in Washington and aiming for an early Great Scientist, but let's get a decent core of cities going first.
985BC: Meet Elizabeth, our closest neighbor, to our east.
Not the worst neighbor to be having around. We should try to cultivate her as a friend. She doesn't tend to nab early religion, so perhaps by my next round (or during it) we will try to get a Missionary to her. If possible.
I also move our warrior in the far north, who is next to a hut, east and then south across the river to pop the hut. Seemed like a worthwhile gamble, with no hostiles in sight. However, we have lost the gamble.
Wow.
Talk about bad luck! Not only did we pop hostiles, but the FIRST one, attacking across the river at low odds, wiped us out. Let us hope that we got all the bad luck we're going to get jam-packed in to this one tragic event. (There goes a Woody Warrior, too! Slouchy.)
955BC: Our lone westerly-moving warrior meets a Persion unit.
Hindu? Well, that's not so bad. We may want to prioritize giving Cyrus a tech freebie at some point (especially if he asks) to get him up to Pleased.
940BC: Two of our warriors are attacked. One beats off a Lion, the other a barb warrior:
Each loses 40% of his health and will need five turns to heal. (Ugh).
925BC: Boston is settled.
As you can see, I've chosen a conservative location, close to the capital.
The settler being trained in Washington will head to an equally conservative location, east of the lake, giving us a half-circle of cities in the capital's first ring. I feel we're just too thin on military, with our major scouting policy having sent six units out (one of which is now dead, sadly). After that, cities five and six can push to the second ring, one to the east on the river, one southwest to the horse/lake site.
910BC: Our starting warrior pops a hut in the far south, gets minor gold.
Over 300 in the treasury now, good for funding full speed research all the way to Drama for sure.
I think I should have just sat tight. Oh well.
![[pimp]](/images/smilies/pimp.gif "Pimp [pimp]")
