Kaiser Strikes Back!
Kaiser stuns my tribal merc and brings it down to 2hp, advancing with his heckler-promoted warrior and militia in tow. Simultaneously he's popped his scout onto your free city site to delay your Statesman seat a couple turns.
I could've either tasked my warrior with clearing the scout or with joining the main fight and chose the latter, hitting his slinger.
Tactical advice:
Ignore the sign I placed about force marching your Zealot warrior, it won't be necessary as it turns out. I didn't realize until after I submitted my turn and reloaded the save for the screen shot that my Merc will be free to move because apparently stun expires at the end of the stunned player's turn (not the start of the attacker-who-stunned's turn), so it is now free for you to move and attack Kaiser's slinger.
Attacks from both my merc and your warrior should kill Kaiser's slinger, allowing you to stun his warrior. All in all, we might trade units 2:0 at the end of this.
I moved your Scythian Merc to go assist the statesmen settler. You can choose whether to force march it to start plinking away at the scout (and consequently settling) one turn earlier, but I'd probably save the training.
Development advice:
Spoked Wheel would be another very good tech to pick up, you can train chariots in the capital and rider's seat and moving quickly, they are very order-efficient units, plus they have the threat of routing, wouldn't necessarily prioritize over barracks, but it's good.
Luxuries don't help your family opinion that much unless you have a lot of cities. And it takes the capital out of commission for 8 turns, to put that in perspective, a new settler would take 6 turns, and a warrior would take 3-4 turns. Both of those have much better ROI than 20 gold, 2 culture, 1 science, and +20 family opinion (+10 from the luxury +10*per city for a "desired" family special luxury).
In best case scenario that extra family opinion would give you 1 extra civic per turn or +5% unit strength for all Statesmen cities or military units respectively. That's something to worry about in the mid or late game, training a specialist now is a mistake (See CMF's odd choice to make two specialists in the capital).
Also, production decays in queue, I'm not sure of the formula, but it does, so you probably want to finish that warrior.
I think this turn is a great teachable moment for anyone new to, or curious about, Old World.
Both with respect to war maneuvers and economic strategy.
Units in Old World are extremely mobile and deal damage primarily only when attacking. This leads to very powerful alpha strikes, but anything you've advanced and attacked with is now vulnerable to get countered and traded away.
This is also very expensive in orders to both parties, and the combination of orders restriction and alpha strike balanced by negative sum trading is part of why OW makes a better dueling game than FFA. But balanced it is, and Kaiser is about to lose units dearly in recompense for his quick attack against ours
As for economy, I think this is a case to examine the way the production system works and how choice of "what to build" is so important. Three different production streams of growth, civics, or training means that whenever you choose to build one item, you are losing the ability to use the other two streams of revenue. And in general, converting each stream into it's respective build is far more value than returning it to the global pool. 60 Civics turned into a specialist is much better than 60 civics in the pool, 100 growth turned into a settler is far better than an extra citizen (which only becomes useful once you train a specialist), and of course a Warrior (assuming you have targets to kill, gaps to fill, and the orders to use it) is much better than 60 training in the pool.
In picking what to build in a city, you want to be using your largest production stream. Carthage has a large production stream at ~16 training per turn now, and will have a large growth rate at ~20 after the pasture and Hanging Gardens finish. Compare that to the 9 civics per turn it makes. An 8 turn fisher is built at the expense of 2 4-turn warriors and 1.5 6-turn settlers.
Next turn I'll do a full update with pictures on my own domestic development plans for the relatively peaceful north. Sorry Bruindane, you drew the short end of the stick with your proximity to Kaiser, but I have faith that we will yet pull through
