50 turns later, my civ has seen only vertical development, not horizontal. no new cities captured or settled, but a lot of pop growth and tile improvement. ideally you want conquest to happen at this stage of the game, and lljubjana and naufrogger have been hard at work there, each taking away 7-8 cities from GT. He survives with his capital, sadly delaying the turn pace significantly for as long as he lives. I may have an opportunity to take some land off of Dreylin in the future, but am not holding my breath.
I'm solidly middle of the pack in most demos for the moment:
Part of the GNP lead I am seeing on other civs I think is due to them having Serfdom. Serfdom does a lot when there are a great many tiles that have to be allocated to plains farms. I do not feel secure enough yet to give up whipping, as both lljubjana and Mmjd are going for guilds - ostensibly to attack other players, but there's always a risk they aim for me. I've tried to invest enough in longbows on border cities to not look like easy pickings, but I won't feel truly safe until I have engineering. Hoping to swap into Serfdom / Nationalism with the second GA.
The other part of that lead is, of course, civac being civac. He's leaving even Mmjd's pyramid wonder economy in the dust.
No idea where the MFG is coming from, though. Mass windmills, maybe?
Crop yield is where I've put in the most elbow grease, staying higher in the middle throuhgout. But I will lose over time to players with 20+ cities.
The slow and steady power growth on all sides, save for poor GT. No one has gone on a truly massive whipping spree yet, from what I can tell.
Right now, Civac seems to be aiming for gunpowder + nationalism + ??? in a golden age to get a jannisary army drafted to crush Dreylin. I've seen Dreylin crush a 2v1 with me in it before, so I will be utterly cautious when going in if I do go in at all. I will aim at the most defensible cities I can capture and not split my stacks, and wait for civac to engage the brunt of his forces. I expect civac to commit hard to annexing Dreylin, because he just finished the hindu shrine. I will be content to just take some more land if I can. My forces will probably be a mix of Maces + horse archers + cats. Not 22 cataphracts, but I'm a lot poorer than I was in pb72.
Domestic look at my cities. I foolishly gave civac my only rice for some reason, so I'm struggling a lot for health at the moment.
Capital has finished growing on almost all available cottages. rest of the remaining tiles are windmills. Desperately needs an aqueduct, but right now I need to prioritize military builds.
Delicious hybrid city and potential future Heroic Epic site. Will get even better with windmills.
This city was capped at size four without irrigation. Now it's growing steadily and not a half bad production center. Goes to show how important a tech Civil Service is on this map.
One of my last cities that had terrain for cottage cheese before hitting constant dry plains. You know, maybe I should have chosen Christianity for my state religion instead of buddhism, just for those AP temples...
Other players were probably mocking me in their threads for this city. I settled it 20-30 turns ago and only now have I got iron working and calendar on hand to finally make it productive. Yeah, it has been a drain that whole time. My logic was that I had the money to cover the expenses, and it was still worth it to begin dumping the creative 2 culture a turn in this region. I'll let lurkers be the judge if that was worth it.
But now that I finally can improve the land in this city, it will make a half decent specialist farm.
Screen of known tech bonuses. While my economy is humming along more nicely now, I still feel naked without guilds, engineering, or machinery.
