10 turns (1635 AD - 1685 AD)
Again my turns didn't take too long this time around. Focused mostly on culture buildings in our relevant cities. I see that you keep trying to build monasteries in places like Narjan and Mycenian and I keep cancelling them. I think it's our own little inter-civ power struggle or something. We don't really need monasteries in those places, as we don't care about culture except in Mecca, Medina, and Damascus. I'd prefer to try to fix the happiness there and I started up markets in those places during my turn. I feel that if we're not building happiness or health related buildings in Narjan or Mycenian, we should be building riflemen.
We finally got to Democracy, and I promptly switched our government civic from monarchy to universal suffrage. The problem with this is that a couple of our cities were really relying on monarchy to supply happiness, so these places are kind of pissed now. This is a change we needed to make however, as it gives us a big, big boost in production in cities with lots of cottages (like Mecca and Damascus) and we can get the important culture buildings up faster.
So I decided that we probably shouldn't go into cocoon mode just yet. Our great person farm could really use a boost, so I started a beeline to Medicine for our tech tree. This allows us to get Biology, giving us an enormous boost in food from our farms in Medina, as well as the environmentalism civic, which gives a huge bonus in health. Once we get to Medicine, I think we should shut our science down permanently. In the next few turns, there are a few things that we should be mindful to take care of. We still need to get all five of our religions in Mycenian, Baghdad, and Narjan ASAP. These places should be building the temple (NOT monasteries) of each respective religion as soon as they learn them. Mecca is pretty much the designated missionary production city right now. After we've maxed out religion everywhere, we may want to start building more +50% culture buildings in Mecca again, or we could try to build the Statue of Liberty. I'd like to get the Statue somewhere, as it gives us more free specialists (ie artists) everywhere. Note that since we changed our gov civic to universal suffrage, we can now hurry building production by spending cash. It's usually better to not hurry a building right when you start it. Better value to build for a couple turns and then hurry it. You should experiment with this, as it's really powerful. But yeah, other than that, let's get those temples and monasteries up in Medina and Damascus!
Oh, and one other important thing. It probably isn't worth it to join our Great Artists to cities anymore. We should be saving these guys up now so we can go nuts making great works to put us over the top in culture during the end game.
