Lizzy's rise to greatness

[Ben Kenobi]

Well, we did pick up sailing did we not? Anyways, we need COL.

[Dinner]

The bottom line is we could have courthouses in X turns but because we want to go the cheaper but longer path we end up spending Y times X turns. This is the same reason we don't have a religion. I doubt we'll even grab philo first because someone else will be line to get to the important milestones while we're still plodding around picking up everything under the sun instead of bee lining.

[mzprox]

There are too many things always that we would need right at the moment. Soon we will see the benefit of monarchy and the increased happyness will be good to our economy as much as courthouses would be.
The tech path should not be altered now. Alphabet makes currency cheaper, then currency makes code of laws cheaper and when we get there we can finally bulb philo.

[Dinner]

I know lots of people have kept coming up with excuses to not bee line to CoL but it's killing us. Seriously, it's killing us. Let's build courthouses, get our maintance costs down, and start expanding. Anything else is just lost opportunity.

[mzprox]

The upkeep is about 32 gold/turn and we pay only 3 gold/turn for units (we are among the lowest power ranked civs). It does seem like some other civs are not so affected by the extra distance cost, as our GNP is quite low now compared to them. maybe they have extra gold mines or I don't know.
Anyhow, we will keep our science at 0 until we gather enough gold to do alphabet and currency in one go. the benefit of this is that hopefully we can have an other academy and two more libraries when we resume researching.

I think the civ we found is realms beyond.
You can give me input what to do:

make contact
make contact but explore the shores first so if we agree on open borders we can have trade routes
try to make a surprise attack

[Dinner]

Wow, science is at zero and we're still only making 39 gold per turn? We need to get costs down and the economy up.

[Hercules]

I suppose that land to the west revealed by our chariot is Zulu territory but I could be wrong.

We are building 2 axemen to boost military. We need those warriors in cities now for happiness issue, we are growing fast.

The Aztecs are missing out on those spices discovered by Belle. I wonder is there room to squeeze past the mountain as a short cut home.

[Hercules]

Here's some screen shots.

[Hercules]

Btw that was a Zula scout, we met with away to our west.

Also Belle has some turns to go, to map it fully, but it is getting clear what the geography is around that south east area.

So any ideas re further diplomacy with the Aztecs and Zulus?

[Dinner]

It looks like we'll have to adjust that city location to take advantage of the stone. We will need to build the city fairly soon too just so we make sure we get it before our neighbor though since they're at war we have some breathing room on the time frame.

[mzprox]

we have found stone, could be good idea to grab it since we wanted to build the hanging gardens.

[Calanthian]

Agree with the city spot. Good production. River certainly helps with defense.

[Dinner]

That looks like a good spot. We can back fill later.

[Hercules]

How about 1 SE of the wine? On the river, gets the wine immediately, gets lots of flood plains, several hills.

I agree with OzzyKP about future city site.

[mzprox]

yeah, that's not a bad spot, though a bit far away and we might need to think about our borders with the Inca. They might have a city closer to us since our warrior visited them, but it is not coastal because our workboat explored the coast.