Turn 79 - 900BC
Turn highlights include finishing research on Sailing tech, connecting a trade route to other teams, and getting a free religious spread into Horse Feathers. Let's go through some of the pictures.
This is the north, with a view into the German city of Worms before moving the spearman. (I moved the spear southwest onto the jungle hill, finding nothing of any interest. The tile 2S of Worms is resourceless jungle.) The German team whipped twice at the end of their turn including this city, obviously producing the chariot that we can see. Their power rating has continued to climb as they keep whipping; I really don't think their team is in any danger of losing further cities. Hopefully a bloodbath on all sides and nothing further changing hands.
That image also reveals our new trade route connection, with a road on the bananas tile leading to the northern river. Note the tiny little trade icon next to both the German team and WPC. We don't get any trade route income this turn of course, since trade routes are calculated at the beginning of each turn, but we should get a nice little boost in income next turn. With luck, we'll upgrade from 1 commerce -> 2 commerce trade routes in every city, which is worth about another gems tile all on its own. Not bad.
This is the eastern side of our territory. Up towards the top, our axeman on the gold tile moved to kill the barb warrior as shown, taking no damage in the process. (Barb warriors still refuse to attack our axes; their AI must consider the odds too low to attack.) There are actually two more barb warriors down in the south below Focal Point not visible in this screenshot. We have plenty of time to kill them when they finally do show up. Focal Point has another axe coming out soon.
The scout move still shows no sign of CivFanatics (including tile bleeding / cultural overlay) but did reveal a wines resource to the east. Hmmm... wines resource located very close to stone resource. Looks like this map script might have some repeating sections out there between teams. It's more and more obvious why CFC wants to settle this region. So long as we are able to claim the stone/horses/wines area across the water, it's not a huge deal to me. If they take forever to settle though... well, we'll see.
Here in the southwest, the barb warrior moved exactly as expected. We killed it with one axe and used the other axe to cover the worker who moved to the plains tile 2S of Gourmet Menu and roaded. Everything is on pace to found our new city next turn on the desert tile. As it turned out there wasn't another barb warrior in the area ready to kill any of our workers - but better safe than sorry.
We also received a free religion spread of Hinduism into Horse Feathers, which is a very nice little break of luck. Now we can grow the city to size 6 instead of size 5 before connecting Calendar resources. I expect we'll make a slight change or two here when we go back and do the next micro plan as a result. HF has tons of food and is only limited by the happy cap, making this the second best place for a free spread after the capital (which would obviously be the best). Next turn will be very busy for this region, as we'll get the long-awaited border expansion at Gourmet Menu (allowing us to use the clams) and also plant a new city. 12 more tiles here we come.
This is our tile micro for the turn. It looks almost identical to last turn, except that we are working the corn tile at Horse Feathers instead of the capital, and a cottage tile at the capital. The iron tile goes unworked for this turn (HF will not regrow in one turn if it works the iron). The addition of the gems tile at Tree Huggers, now at size 2, adds a very sizable amount of commerce. It was very obvious when looking at the GNP for this turn.
The trade routes let us see what resources the other teams have connected:
One simple way of telling how other teams are doing is to open up the trade screen and see how many resources they have connected. More resources = stronger civ. Pretty basic. Everyone has corn, copper, and gold connected, confirming that the stats were very closely mirrored. We have more food resources than either WPC or the German team, and we are the only team with a second happiness resource connected. Since no one has a capital above size 7, this again lends more evidence that luxury resources other than gold were tough to acquire on this map. German team also has their own native source of horses, as we fully expected.
I'll also mention that we have several improved but unconnected resources in our territory: cows, pigs, and iron are all not on the trade network currently. Keeping the iron hidden for now is probably a useful idea until we need it. We'll need those health resources connected eventually (Tree Huggers will be unhealthy at about size 7) but it's a non-issue for right now. And we also will add the clams at Gourmet Menu next turn when the borders expand. As a rough measure of expansion / economy, looking at the resources is a fairly useful tool.
Here are the Demos at 0% research. Our new 0% value is almost identical to our 100% value prior to connecting gems. (We are #1 in GNP at a break-even value of 70% research.) Our Food value continues to tick up, and we'll add about 10 more Food next turn with the combination of two city growths and a new city. Production is only low this turn because we aren't working the 1/5 iron tile. Everything else is about the same as before. I'm really looking forward to seeing these numbers next turn, with 3 more pop points and our new trade route income.
Nothing particularly interesting in terms of espionage points. No one seems to be allocating EP towards us right now. WPC had slightly higher war weariness at the start of this turn (15 instead of 12) so they probably lost another unit in German territory. As much as we have (rightly) criticized the German team for playing slowly, they did actually end this turn early, with about 8 hours left on their own personal turn timer. Thank goodness for that.
I've ended turn because I'm pretty sure there are no moves remaining to be made this turn. No big surprises in store at the moment. Everything seems to be proceeding according to plan.