My inital view on this was... why the heck did we go to war? Cyrus is in a Golden Age, he has Longbows, and was our only religious buddy...
Also, we're in Caste System and only Toledo is using it for Scientists.... We're at war people!!! I'm going to revolt over to Slavery asap.
Not much else I can do, so I hit enter.
IBT Cyrus lands a sword and archer outside of Seville
1010:
I sell Calendar off to JC for 80 gold and cancel our Ivory for Crabs deal with him (since we have no ivory for ourselves and thus no chance at elephants if we wanted to build them).
I take the newly built cat in Seville and attack the landed sword and archer hoping to at least make Cyrus pause a turn. Our cat withdraws after bringing the sword down to 0.6 (and collateral on the archer to 2.3)!!!! wow.
1020:
We pop a Great Scientist in Toledo and I use him to research (and complete) Philosophy. The only reason I did this was to use it for currency in trading for other techs.
1030:
I trade Philosophy to Louis for Feudalism and to QSH for Metal Casting and 10 gold. We're crawling back into the tech race.
I make the attack on Pasagarde after finally getting the cultural defense down to 0%. Cyrus has loaded it up with longbows, but I should be able to do it. Losing two cats on suicide runs (and promoting our third cat to 10/17 exp when it withdraws!) and a Horse Archer and our Axe means my last swordsman must take out a longbow with 0.9. And he does:
The Galley just off the coast has an archer and a settler in it, so I should be ok in holding with just a 5.0/6.0 swordsman for this turn.
1040:
With some fancy techs now, I revolt to vassalage and Slavery. Cyrus' GA also ends this turn (finally).
Civil Service research completes and I go for Drama to help us hold our southern borders in the culture wars after we finish Cyrus - or at least beat him down enough.
1050:
Mali comes offering us Machinery for Philosophy and 210g. This takes 1/3rd of our treasury, but the trade is worth it imo.
JC comes calling and offers crab + 1gpt for our extra stone.
He also completes Angkor Wat this turn...
I
barracks in Toledo to take care of the unhappyness and to get it ready for the war we're in.
1060:
1070:
1080:
Drama comes in and I start us researching on Guilds. Its a bit expensive in beakers, but it will give us our UU and that's a big deal here.
Also this turn I find out what Cyrus has been up to down south...
That piece of doody has snuck some forces through QSH's lands and popped up by Cordoba. I quickly upgraded the archer there to a longbow and whipped the one in production. Hope its enough of a deterent.
1090:
The sword decided to pillage our stone (note that if we want to have stone available to us we need to cancel our deal with JC as he's now taking our only stone for grabs and 1gpt). It looks like the party of three will content itself with doing a bit of pillaging. Most of our units are up in the north on the war, so I start to bring one Horse Archer back down south. Most of our cities are finishing up Longbows to pump up our defenses.
1100:
We're running at 60% @ -3gpt on a treasury of 62. Guilds are due in 12.
I intend to leave Susa and Tarsus for the last as they will only drain Cyrus on maintenance and don't look to be a threat. I've got a woodsman promoted sword next door keeping an eye on Susa and a cat just out of range on Tarsus. We should have someone pillage the iron south of Susa - but I don't think Susa is hooked into the rest of Cyrus' empire so he should be cut off from iron in his capital with the taking of Pasagarde.
We're setup alright for the taking of Perseopolis once the cats reduce his defenseses. Here's what's going on there:
I did not upgrade any swords to maces because our treasure wouldn't stand it.
We've got one galley (actually had built two) in order to reclaim the seas. There's no way we're dominating the seas tho and at least two civs have compass now. Once we get our conquistadors going we need to blitz up the sailing tech tree so we can get to the far continent asap. Getting the circumnavigation bonus would be a huge help here so consider sending the galley west and perhaps buying world maps when you get a chance.
Sorry about the heavy tech trading, but we needed to get back to some parity while we were on a war footing. We might want to consider switching to Hiduism after the war (but that will require more missionary work) to pick up some + relation points with Mansa. He's the only one without a holy city.
No one is really all that happy with us, with Louis prolly being the closest to a friend. The next player might consider swapping out of the war civics and getting our abysimal culture out of the dumps along with our infrastructure. I had to sacrifice quite a bit to make the war against Cyrus workable. Unless Cyrus is really tricky with his settlements, taking his capital will probably take him out of the game for the forseeable future. The advantage to wiping him out of course is the reduction of "return to fatherland" penalties.
Here's the cultural map:
As you can see we're getting some decent pressure from QSH now and I'd expect him to attack us sooner rather then later. Keep that in mind. When I picked up this game our defenders were single archers and warriors... that's not good!!
I did post a sign on the invading/pillaging force down south just to be sure the next person sees it and is prepared to deal with it. One Horse Archer is abotu 2 turns north to help dealing with it. No other real offense in the area (until our treasure gets up enough to upgrade a warrior to a maceman that is)
The Save:
, must be I keep my mind on military builds without thinking straight. Suggest next player to build a Hindu Missionary in Cordola to spread it to Barcelona to resolve the happiness issue. Also suggest spreading one more to Toledo to enable one more priest specialist.
... we'll see 
