10 turns (600 BC - 350 BC)
No pictures today. Here's what happened during my turns. I interrupted the Sistine Chapel in Damascus in order to improve our military by a few axemen. We don't want to neglect our army too much. The last thing we want to do is turn into a tasty little powerless morsel for the warmonger civs to go after. Started on the Hanging Gardens in Mecca. This is going to be the most important wonder for us to have. Because of our starting location, we are not going to have a lot of cities, so we need to maximize growth in the handful that we have as much as possible. I founded Mycenian by conquering the barb city to the east. Luckily, they had founded their city in just the right place to keep. The major move I made came on my last turn, just when Alphabet came online. The first thing I did was change our religion to "no religion" in order to improve relations with Mao and Kublai Khan. Computer players will sometimes give you better offers in trades when you have improved relations with them. I ended up trading Theology to Mao for a buttload of techs that we had been skipping over previously. Also used our Great Prophet to give us Code Of Laws. I could have used him to build a holy temple for one our religions, but I would rather not improve the Great Prophet birth rate in Mecca. I wanted to improve our chances of getting a Great Engineer there later on. I think we are now the world tech leader by a comfortable margin.
I think for the next few turns, we should focus on improving infrastructure and growth. Because of our recent expansion, you'll notice that we are now at 50% research. This is fine for now, but it's a sign that we should start working on our economy in a little bit. But currently, I really, really want to finish the two wonders we have being built right now. Once our cities are connected by roads, I think we should get two more mines going in Mecca to speed up production. It's also important to have a worker chop down that jungle covering the rice in Damascus and get a farm down there. That'll help improve growth there so we can work more mines and it will also give us a health bonus everywhere else. The Sistine Chapel takes a long time to build, so we should emphasize production and growth there over everything else. Mycenian needs a fishing boat after the obelisk is done. Baghdad is kind of our free city which can go in almost any direction once the granary is done. Medina should be working on health buildings almost exclusively now, as that will be our Great Person factory a little bit down the road. As we continue to learn the art techs, we'll want to get the National Epic and Globe Theater going in Medina. If you're not sure about the eventual Great Person factory plan there let me know and I can explain it in further detail.
Oh, and I almost forgot...we should switch our state religion back to Hinduism in a couple of turns. Whenever we switch, we have to wait 5 turns before we can change it again. Since we are using the Organized Religion civic, having a state religion that is in most our cities will drastically improve production. I only went to no religion briefly in order to get the best possible trade, as noted above.
**Whoops, I just noticed something that we should get corrected ASAP. There's a mine built on the stone near Medina. In order to use the stone we have to have a quarry built there. Stone will improve production of the Hanging Gardens by 50%. Ignore what I said above and make this the #1 priority. We should change the mine to a quarry and connect the stone to Medina by road.
