I was being nagged for pictures so here ya go ya filthy animals
We settled our third city Javert this turn, with plenty of chops and two food sources, this will likely be the site of our Pyramids push. Building a monument to claim all the forests in BFC, will switch to a granary when Pottery is done
We will stall expansion briefly to build granaries. The exception is that Creon will slowbuild a settler off the sheep and horse (and one chop) for our Moai copper/crab city. I didn't want to settle that backfill while there is still land to claim, but the copper is too good a tile to be unworked, and no additional defense is required unless Bingvac want to get frisky with a Galley (they went sailing super early for being neither ORG for LH or PRO ictr I guess FIN maybe their cap has seafood like ours, still would've gone pottery/granary first imo). I could chalk it up to BING trolling, but Civac has some serious REX/early snowball skills, so I'll be watching with interest.
Here is our aspirational dotmap for the north. The competing interests are that the pink set makes claiming the ivory, dye long-term as well as the stone and wheat short-term quite simple, but forces us to make an awkward reach settle for the sheep and the horse, Magic Science is complicating matters by settling in that direction as well.
Here is our future southern border with Naufragar. Now the red dot is ideal to claim stone and ivory first ring but will necessitate a city for the deer (marked in black, not actually settling on the deer, but that's the locus of points where we could plant in order to work it). The big problem with red dot is that it is on flat land, reasonably obnoxious* and will probably never control its own diagonal against a city that's started to produce 6 culture per turn from last turn until the end of time.
So the alternative to permanently staffing spears and pikes on flatland ad infinitum is probably to settle some of the green dots, but that's two cities worth of infra to build and they are quite forkable. I'm not really happy with either solution, of course it depends on Naufragar.
*I consider the plant obnoxious bc it takes two resources, but the border is not particularly inconvenient for either player, so it probably is livable long term if Nauf swallows his pride. Of course, Nauf is a psycho so he's gonna try to hit it, but if he's gonna be a psycho anyway, we play like Gav, assume hostile intent and provoke on our terms.
Yee Yee Prisoners Dilemma defaulting
I'm not particularly concerned if we get muscled out of our desired dotmaps by either Nauf or Magic Science, though if both converge we will have some trouble.
) I'm not super optimistic about our long term economic prospects. Only way to make use of all these plains tiles seems to be serfdom but without SPI, that's a big big ask.
