Alright, here we go! Atlas and I played 20 turns, and things are really looking up. My thoughts and pictures are a bit jumbled because I don't have much time, but I hope you can get an idea of how things are going.
I forgot to take overview screenies of the empire. I founded 3 new cities in Germany this turn, and I believe Atlas founded one over in Japan. I feel like our civs are finally maturing.
Here is the tech situation when we started (pretty grim!)
We are behind, but it won't last
We were researching optics and finishing up the Sistine Chapel at the start of our turns
Sistine Chapel and Optics finish in two turns, and then it's time to talk strategy
So after those finished it was time to figure out what to do. A few options presented themeselves. Beeline for astronomy to speed the invasion? The sooner the better, but we had a great engineer and no wonders to use him on (Notre Dame was already gone) and no one had founded Islam yet. So, as you can see, we decided on Divine Right -> Civil Service (for Samurai) and then Astronomy.
You can see, the strategy paid off, and now we each have a religion
We also decided that Germany could benefit from Versailles more than Japan, so Atlas loaded him up on a Caravel and sent him my way. He rushed Versailles a few turns later (and the next player will get to look forward to finishing it on his very first turn!)
22 turns = 1 chop, which is already done!
During the turns, we both popped Great Merchants. I sent mine to scout out the American / English lands, and Atlas sent his to Russia / China. The idea is that they can scout out the territory and then complete a trade mission.
Great Merchants make great explorers
(Obviously, these pictures aren't coming in strict chronological order) You notice that we've met Peter and Mao by this point. They are not NEARLY as far ahead of us in tech as the other team (stupid financial civs).
And, there's no better way to transfer our final thoughts than a screenshot of our closing conversation:
Our guidance to the next team
Many thanks to Atlas - it was a blast to play with him!
Good luck next team!
The Save
). The AI is in 
CoL, they beeline for it everytime (not a bad strat really), and too a lesser degree they beeline for every relegion tech (also not a bad strat as relgions are nice and almost all of the religion techs are coupled with useful civics). I think this game is coming along nicely, some thoughts on that engineer- Versaillies would be helpful, Notre Dame would be good too, if that has not already fallen (I can't remember). We don't need to use him on tech, we are not far enough behind. Anyway just some random thoughts... What do others think?
