I guess I'll post an update one day, including the T150 posterity report. I took a lot of pictures for that one, nine turns ago. Current events involve saving cash for a while so that I can blow through it in the next four turns. I should be able to one turn research Meditation, Priesthood, and Code of Laws in the next three turns. On T159 I'm posting the #2 GNP, so most of the main contenders are probably saving cash right now. I don't care enough to keep up with the cash history for the other players or to look for this turn. I'll find out what they did in two turns when the graphs update. I still have graphs on all my neighbors and have added Commdore's. I'm working on Plako's now. No one bothers to lock me out of viewing their graphs because everyone else has bigger fish to fry. I'm a small potato, and decidedly not delicious enough to try to peel and eat.
In terms of general game outlook I'm mostly just playing the turns as they come, I'm not doing a lot of planning. The most recent plan of any sort was this turn when I decided I had enough cash to make a run through CoL before stockpiling cash again. I'd been going back and forth on deciding between researching toward Civil Service for bureaucracy in my awesome capital (well, half awesome, it has half the tiles it should) or going for Feudalism and vassalage. Vassalage will save me about as much on army maintenance costs as bureaucracy will gain me in overall commerce generation. You might think that the +2 XP per unit would tip the scales toward vassalage if the economics were a wash, but honestly I'm not building that many units, just a steady trickle as I go because that's all you can do with the piddly cities I have when you can't whip them much. I may have mentioned this earlier in the thread but RB Mod is making me less competitive in this game than I would have been in vanilla BTS, purely off the whip to hammer conversion process. I just don't have the tiles to workshop now. All the tiles I could workshop are covered by highly developed cottages and I'm not going to plow over those and destroy the remainder of my economy. So I'm left in a state where my research rate actually isn't too bad for now, but I'll be stonewalled when I hit the tech inflation wall RB Mod introduced. And with the recent revelation in the tech thread that the known tech costs aren't going to adjust like they were designed to...well I'll just be that much more behind when that happens with no way to catch up. As awful as playing a tech trading game would be (I mean, you guys are reading PB9 now, and assuredly everyone read PB5 -- I can't handle that kind of game, it would drive me insane) I'd be better off in the hopes someone could sell poor little Portugal their tech for pennies on the dollar. I'd at least have some way to stay in the game come the Renaissance.
So to recap, I'm small, I have no production, my GNP is good for a gimp of my size but not nearly good enough to compete on that basis alone, I really don't have the resources to build up an offensive army that can accomplish anything (that I can foresee, if anyone has ideas post them in the lurker thread and I'll be glad to read them later), and I don't have land to expand into to solve any of these problems. Yeah, I'm still building out the last few scrap cities I can but they're all marginal and only worth anything because I have trade routes with everyone I know (except Serdoa. And stop offering me trades, "We would never trade with you, our worst enemy!")
I have 51 pop on T159. FAIL.
I guess it won't kill me to post this turn's pictures, so consider this the T159 report. I'll dump my previous map and F9 shots eventually.
Finally, in news that's going better:
That's 95% on the Yahoo overall standings, so I'm doing fine for now, good enough to lead my tournament pool so far (suck it BGN -- your sheet looks like someone bled all over it).
Of course, not included in this shot is that one of my missed picks was one of my final four selections...
Even when I'm winning, I'm losing.