Cluck! What a chicken. Zara is looking for a way around my units. It doesn't help his cause that I have managed to get axes there too. If you look at the score, you can see that Montezuma has also caught my religion. He demanded fish off me (yielded) so we also had a 10 turn peace deal. I think these two items went a long way to changing the course of my game ... resulting in Monte spreading my religion like crazy and him also looking elsewhere for his target.
I had a unescorted settler out playing tag with 2 barbarians (warrior, archer). Sure, this is dangerous but you can run rings around them if you are careful. The barbs also act as fog-busters, stopping other barbs from spawning. This coupled with the Great Wall means that you can found defenseless cities with immunity. It’s my move, jump across the river, found the city and the GW takes care of the rest.
Shortly thereafter, Zara takes a straight up peace deal. Sure, Monty is in WHEOOHs mode at the moment, but I am pretty sure that I am not his target. Even if I am, I have the right units in place to hold my growing empire.
Yep, Monty was on the war path ... against Mansa. He even invited me in on the fun (accepted but phony). Monty even managed to take Timbuktu.
This was a time of growth and consolidation for Spain. A few wonders to kick start the growth (Hanging Gardens), a few tech trades with various people. I even found myself in a war of passage with France (again). These early wars, while useful, did have a huge negative in the late game ... Elizabeth and Catherine were not happy with me '-3 You declared war on our friend'. These negatives stood between me and good relationships with the ladies for almost the whole game. I even built my only library ... just to unlock the Great Library. This was the only beaker multiplier building that I built the whole game.
Mansa finally got over me declaring on him but insisted on getting 5g thrown into the deal (oh, ok). I dialed up Louis to see if he was ready to accept a peace deal and he said he was ... he even threw 5g into the deal (talk about lol'd). Mansa is a funny old dude ... one turn later he suggested open borders and 2 turns later he was happy to trade me Machinery plus gold for Theology.
And so 1000AD rocked around. I was second in score to Catherine (1164 to my 888) with 10 cities (all Buddhist). Buddhism was the dominant religion (31%). Elizabeth had Drama, Music, Philo and Compass on me. I had techs on everyone else. I was friendly with Monty (+7) and less with everyone else. Monty was in such a good mood that he was happy to trade me Ivory for Copper. I had the AP almost in the bag and the really big tech for my game was only a few turns away.
Check my GNP ... and that is with almost no beaker multipliers!
