Anyway, back to where I put my cities ... my 3rd city went off on the island with two gems and lots of grass lands ... a little island near Spain. This city generated a lot of my commerce but hardly any hammers ...
I had scouted out a lot of the islands had decided on my next city locations ... the only problem was that when I got settlers there to build, they had been claimed by pesky AIs ...
The city (I was projecting that this would be my 6th and last city) to the South West also picked up Iron and would (with border pops) pick up ivory for the phants. It was a fairly marginal city but the Iron was critical. However, given that Mansa had taken my 4th city location and Catherine had taken my other city location, I had to drop back to make this city my 4th location for the Iron. I needed this to build my war army and take my two other city sites back.
I don't know what Catherine was thinking, didn't she know that she was settling next to a sleeping giant? Anyway, she settled near my nearly formed city (and her culture pops took some of my ... MY tiles!) ... coupled with her taking my 5th city location meant that this ... was unavoidable
... and this ... (don't worry, Sirian, each of these cities, in fact all cities captured in this game were razed ... more later) ... I decided that Catherine actually had a fairly good location there ... I was initially thinking 1 tile SW, so I decided to found on the ruins for my 5th city. You can also see Rostov in the NE of this picture ... this city started to put pressure on my city here and so it had to go too.
I was looking at my 6th city being this commerce giant ... 20 tiles, 2, excess food, 6 coast, 2 plains, 10 grasslands with (eventually) towns ... I think that will grow to become a monster ...
However, my 4th iron city wasn't giving me iron. It is in the BFC, mined and roaded but it is on a different island ... why didn't someone tell me that this wouldn't give me iron to build units with! This is a critical oversight on my part (and a learnt lesson for next time ... actually, I think I also read about this in someone's Epic 7 Mano v Mano report) as it meant that my 6th city had to pick up iron and not be the commerce giant that I was looking at.
Well, that just meant that I had to go looking for a nice city site WITH iron. I couldn't find any that I liked that were available ... oh well, bad luck for Mansa ...
... closely followed by ...
And that brings my city total to 6 ... I have a picture showing them all, in order, later if you want to check were they ended up. I think this was looking good, commerce was ok, great people generation was good, hammers were slightly on the poor side with only 2 cities generating good hammers ... was I overlooking something?