Main thing we have to decide now is on who to turn on next and tech path.
Who to attack next? I would like to finish off Suleiman now that we have cats and elephants to break his hill city defenders. But that is not actually urgent -- we can do that whenever.
Catherine or Louis.... I think I prefer Louis, because he has more cities (and is thus more dangerous if we leave him alone) and does not have HAs (so we do not need to wait for spears/elephants to handle them). We will need to make sure Rheims has enough defenders, might even want to build cheap walls there once the stone comes online. But the local sea sort of stretches Louis out, so we can attack him sequentially as we work around the coast. Catherine would have a broader front, plus the mobility of HAs, so I think we leave her until a bit later after we prepare a bit more and have a larger number of elephants and cats.
But I am not picky.
If the team wants to go after Catherine first I will not object.
Tech path...we have several good options available to us. What do we think is more likely to become available in trade? Then we can tech a different option.
MC - forges would be very nice for our high-hammer cities, plus adding extra happiness from silver, gems, and (soon) gold. Expensive but I think well worth it.
Calendar - improve the incense at Ankara and the two bananas at Edirne, plus other resources in Louis' territory that we will soon control.
Feudalism - longbows for strong defenders, vassalage
A few other things to think about:
- National wonders, especially Moai
I am tempted to wait until we capture the barb island city, and then put Moai there. But we could also put it in Istanbul, Rheims, or a new city SE of Edirne that uses the multiple seafood there. MA could even build it, but MA has so many good non-water tiles to work that I am not sure it is the best use of Moai.
- Claiming a barb holy city (or two, or three...)
I really think we need to fit this into our plans very soon, to start the process of spreading religion throughout our empire. We do not want to leave all the religious efforts until after most of our conquering is done, as that would really stretch out our victory date.
- Exploration
We need to find all the barb holy cities; if none of them are double (or more) holy cities then we still have some to find. We also need to determine if that barb city south of Ankara is reachable without Astro. Finding Victoria and Churchill (presumably west of the Romans somewhere) so we can plan better would also be useful.
- Apostolic Palace
Assuming none of the AIs conquers a barb holy city (and the AI is terrible at naval invasions) then we can probably build the AP whenever we get around to having Theology and adopting a state religion. But we would need to act quickly once we conquer a barb holy city, as the religion might spread beyond our borders before it spreads to us. Of course there might be an AI with Theology already, since we do not have Mono to see.
Anyway, building the AP would ensure our eligibility for votes and also ensure that it is locked into our choice of religion. This might give us a tool for a quicker victory than domination, especially if we vassalize multiple AIs and did not have enough land after the halving factor. That we could get some free AP hammers for some of the many temples we are going to build anyway would also be a nice boost.
Edit: Two more things!
- Building a spy to steal Aesthetics from Catherine
Worth doing? Or wait until shortly before we are going to declare?
- Settlers for more cities
If we are going to settle open sites (east of SL for the two orphan seafood, SE of Edirne for the whales and two seafood, the copper/wheat site SW of CS) then we should probably get the settlers out and found them quickly. The first two are strong sites with good food, they can easily grow fast to whip whatever we need (a library and run scientists, military units, etc.). The copper/wheat site would be slower growing but still pretty good, if it has not already been claimed by Catherine.
We may also want a settler or two available to claim sites once we clear out Louis' control, depending on whether some of his newer cities are worth keeping.
But I am not sure yet if we will need Astro -- the barb city south of Ankara has a line of ocean tiles blocking it from the north. There may be a way to it via the island where Julius has a city, but we need to try to confirm that before we decide we don't need much research. I would not be surprised if Astro turns out to be necessary.
Maybe it will chase Victoria's wb instead, but that just means it will end up in the middle of our local sea. We are going to need a ship or two to handle that.
