[SPOILERS]Boudica of Rome and Gawdzak ask: "Raise your what?"

[Gawdzak]

I took another city and this means Donovan lost control of his Iron tile.




Except:






Look at the excellent research visibility I got. Looks like as many as 4 people are racing for Lib. (I'm not one of them)

[Gawdzak]

Mack libs Printing Press.

I took two more cities from Donovan, including his capital. He had castles in both cities so it was a PITA.




I'm going to take a shot at Economics.

[Qgqqqqq]

Nice progress!

How exposed are those conquests to (is it Wetbandit?) from the North/South? How much farther do you intend to go?

[Gawdzak]

Nice progress!

How exposed are those conquests to (is it Wetbandit?) from the North/South? How much farther do you intend to go?

I don't think they are very expose pre-Astronomy. All of Wetbandit's core cities are separated by water. If anything, the few cities he's managed to snatch from Donovan are extremely exposed to me. Donovan is down to only 5 cities at the moment. I definitely want Uppsala, the Jewish holy city. Unfortunately Donovan didn't build me the shrine. (he spawned a Great Prophet during our war and used it for a golden age)

I can definitely kill him off, but his western cities are next to Seven. Which could be too far away from me to adequately defend. Seven still got ~20 turns of golden age left. Did I mention he built the Taj? Well now I just did.

So realistically I want to take Uppsala, Mason Waters and perhaps another city. I will post a zoomed out map next time I play.

I'm happy to answer any other questions. I think this is an interesting game featuring the showdown between Mackoti and Seven. If that's not enough, I'm in it.

[Gawdzak]

I bulbed Economics to get the free merchant.




Wetbandit is researching Economics at the moment. I think he just whipped an University in his capital and I won't beat him there even if I build Wealth in all my cities. This way I trade a merchant for a merchant and denies it to one of my rivals. I think it's worth it.

The promised map:




The borders are a little hard to see due to the colors. I mentioned that I want Uppsala, I also want Lateralus for sure. You can also see Seven's capital to the extreme left.

I'm not sure that I want a war with Wetbandit at the moment for the former Donovan cities but we will see.

[Gawdzak]

HAK was eliminated this turn. GG.

HAK had a city razed by Seven as early as turn 82. So they were possibly warring for effectively half of the game. I suspect there were fighting earlier than that.

He had a decent trait pairing in FIN/PRO. However, he was off to a really slow start due to researching Meditation first and then building a turn 39 Stonehenge. Against a neighbour like Seven, he was heavily punished for it.

As for me, I'm going to start a golden age in 3 turns, just enough time for my 2 newest cities to come out of revolt (8 and 9 pop) and use Caste to pop the borders. I will tech Philosophy in the mean time. I wanted to complete some Universities before starting to tech again, but Free Market should be worth it.

Something interesting I just noticed. We recently had a reload due to server crash. Before the reload, I remember Mackoti swapping to Free Speech and Free Religion. After the reload, he only swapped to Free Religion. Did he forget to swap to Free Speech? Or did he realize that Free Speech wasn't as good as Bureaucracy after he made the switch?

[Gawdzak]

For the lurkers that like pictures more than words, here's a power graph:




Still top power even after I switched focus off military. Joey recently got rekt in a battle with Haram, who's also at war with Grimace. City changing hand all over the place. No clue what's going on. You can also see why I had success in my war against Donovan, he just didn't have enough units.

[Gawdzak]

Mackoti is now researching Gunpowder. My guess is that he is going for Chemistry. Since he stayed in Caste, he will soon have 1/5 grass workshops and 0/6 plain workshops. How can I come close to matching that?

The only way I can think of is the Kremlin. Going to try for a Great Engineer for the next golden age, which is delayed a turn due to a micro error.

[Gawdzak]

Donovan missed a turn while this is going on:




I don't know if there are units on that galley or not. It's a 4 move galley so he could have drop off some defenders. He could have certainly whipped another unit also. He told me to play on so I did: I lost two knights taking the city. Note that he recently built the Moai in the city (wasn't there in the last SS I posted), I don't think that's a worthwhile investment.

Golden age next turn. Looks like Mackoti is heading toward Communism,considering three of his neighbours are at war: me with DZ, Haram and Grimace at war with each other, it's probably a good move.

I see everyone's research at the moment, I've been a passive aggressive bastard in that regard.

[Commodore]

Looks like Mackoti is heading toward Communism,considering three of his neighbours are at war: me with DZ, Haram and Grimace at war with each other doing a thing, it's probably a good move.

FTFY