During the forced 10 turns of peace, my workers do their worker stuff, farm, mine, camp, road, etc. With 2 turns remaining on Maths, the workers start to move towards the forests to chop. The first chop target is the Granary ... a critical building for later game exploiting.
The biggest news in the above screenshot is that I have found 'Big Jon' ... no more '?' beside his name. This allows me to call up the civ-trade screen to see what he has ...
Jon has 3 cities - I have 5. I should be able to out producing him. I would check this screen quite often to keep tabs on my opponent. I can also spend my 4 EPs against Jon. Typically, the other human does exactly the same thing and the EP spend is a match for the whole game. Jon only sent 3 EPs my way, spending some on the other AIs (a waste of time in my opinion - the AIs are something that I nearly always ignored in my games - something that you can afford to do in the LCMT types of games but not in the normal Ladder games).
In a few of my LCMT games, I had time to tech Code of Laws, build a few courthouses and increase my EP spend. In those games, I ran a spy specialist and ensured that my first specialist was a great spy - nothing helps the war plans like knowing exactly where your opponents forces are. How many games have you played were your first specialist is NOT a scientist?
Mathematics is in - on to Horseback Riding for the Horse Archer - a very strong scout unit that can pick off opponent units (I killed 2 of Jon's scouts as well as a watching chariot - more on him later). The builds in the cities continued: Granary, Barracks, Stables. At that point, it was mostly over to building units - my North West city (the one with the cottaged flood plains) did build a library to run Scientist specialists - my tech rate sucked and I had to complete my 3rd and (almost) final tech (construction) with their specialist beakers.
So - where is Jon ...
click for larger picture
I've put down a city marker (the final city site was 1 tile South) that was to be my forward position. It is on a hill, no forests, jungles, rivers, hills in front of it - thus it had natural defenses and a perfect killing zone for any future forces that Jon might send my way.
Now to start building some offensive units.