Major discovery: Longbows are pretty naff at capturing cities, more of this later.
A non-sequential report.
Research: switched to CoL straightaway (24T), coming down slowly.
London gave away the cows, stagnated and built a couple of longbows.
York got the cows, grew to pop 4 while finishing archer and is still building a worker. No improvements (working grass hill). Archer went to Nottingham to protect the workers.
Nottingham got a monument and a chariot chopped out and is building a barracks, growing slowly and working horses while waiting for a border pop. Chariot is near Nottingham on barb patrol. Workers finished the horses, did a couple of chops and built roads in anticipation of border pop.
Alex has a trireme off our coast.
Our exploring workboat started looking at the islands, met a carthaginian trireme, dodged it somehow and is now exploring down south (exploring islands would have been suicide).
But how's the war? Not so good. Alex got another archer in Thebes. A greek chariot and warrior turned up near a fortified archer, chariot promptly wiped out the archer and our perimeter was breached:
Battle of the Theban cows followed. Chariot attacked our archer and died, warrior killed our archer and is running somewhere down south. Got a longbow looking for him.
Then there was the seige of Thebes:
Two LBs and an archer against 2 archers and a warrior (no culture defence).
Drill3 LB killed CG1archer at 77% odds (down to 0.8str).
Geurilla LB attacked unpromoted archer at 74% odds and died!
Archer vs warrior 32% odds, didn't bother and left him to protect our wounded LB. Wounded LB got Drill4 next turn but odds were still naff so retreated.
Thoughts
We're probably better off attacking cities with CR2 axes and stacking LBs as stack and city defenders.
We won't be exploring the eastern islands any time soon.