So I'm really not sure what we should do now. After making peace with Ramses (and getting a nice windfall of cash in the process), I tried to further stabilize things on the home front by reorganizing some tiles and upgrading our military. Made sure to switch back to Universal Suffrage ASAP as well, considering this is the single most important civic for us now. We seriously have the least varied terrain of pretty much any civ I've ever played. It's all plains and grasslands, making our production pretty poor overall. The hammer bonus from Universal Suffrage is really key for us. Tech wise, I switched away from Assembly Line, finished learning Electricity, and started on Radio. While Assembly Line would give us a better military unit, I think we're fairly safe right now. As long as we keep pumping out our current units and continue upgrading, I don't think anyone aside from Ramses or Stalin would declare war on us. Both of those guys are kind of lagging in tech and are not a threat to spring some new fangled military force on us. We're almost to Mass Media, meaning we can probably start building the U.N. during my next set of turns.
The big problem now is I think we group gangbanged Ramses a bit too hard. You'll notice that he is now third in score, just below Genghis by a very small margin. Remember way back in the day when I said Genghis was a great ally because he had a strong military, but had a very low total score and was not a threat in a diplomatic race? Well, Hannibal gave him a giant boost in score when he agreed to become his vassal sometime during your last set of turns. Worst of all, I think Ragnar ended up taking one of Ramses major cities during the last conflict. (During my turn it was us, Genghis, Hannibal, and Ragnar all on Ramses at once.) Things were starting to get a little out of hand so I had to reach into our tech wallet and bribe everyone to chill. Hopefully, this will give Ramses enough breathing room to rebuild his military and start chugging along in tech again. One major concern though...I think the city Ramses lost was Memphis (don't really remember, it flashed on screen only briefly). It hasn't updated this on the map, but I'm not sure if that's only because of "fog of war" or if Ramses somehow regained it. The reason I bring this up is because Memphis was KEY for him. It had The Spiral Minaret and another big wonder that I don't remember right now. If he happened to lose this city, he's toast for sure.
So I'm not really sure what course of action we should take now. Diplomatically, the last war was a bit of a mess for us. We have to somehow get Ramses ahead of Genghis in score again to have a shot at diplomatic victory. I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to bribe Genghis into a war with Ragnar. They are both very strong militarily, and doing so might preoccupy them with neither gaining a major advantage in the end. Then, we could hope Ramses gets going like he used to. If worst comes to worst, we could gift him a lot of techs somewhere down the road to get his score up, but I'm not sure if we'd take a diplomatic hit from all our allies for "trading with their worst enemy". Also, if you do decide to sick Genghis on Ragnar, we've got to be concerned with the diplomacy hits we're going to take with each of them. Ragnar is going to be a little pissed for bringing in a war buddy against him. And they're both going to be a little miffed that we won't join the war ourselves on either side (declaring on either Genghis or Ragnar would totally kill our diplomacy with one of them permanently). This is a tough call that I'm going to leave totally up to you. The situation is fragile, but I think we still may be able to eek out the diplomatic victory. Otherwise, it's onto Plan B - ramping up our production in preparation for the space race.
