 So you might have noticed that in the last few turns, Scott formed suck-ism, which apparently is a degraded form of Judaism. He really didn't push religion in this game. Meanwhile, my burning wheel, I've got enough faith that I can buy stuff. So let's see what I can buy. I don't play the religion game that often. But... Oh, I can... Pagodas are cheap for whatever reason. I don't know why it only costs $1.30. So I don't care that much about spreading the religion, especially because I don't think the game will go that much longer. So I'm going to take the culture-faith-happiness bonus just right now and forget any of that other nonsense. Now, I gotta rebuild this. That sugar plantation being taken by the barbarians was kind of a blow. But I've been beset by barbarians for a while. I've just now got the domestic barbarian situation under control. Now, I was never sure on this, but now I know. City-states definitely do not give you a city-connection bonus for money. But the city-states should be responsible for the maintenance of this road. And I'm going to let the road go all the way through to connect to Corinth. Normally, I would just wait until I could build a harbor here. The reason I'm building the road is that I want to be able to, when the time is right, start funneling troops toward the end. So, Prague will probably demand, if the game goes on too much longer, a road from the capital as well. But, I'm pretty much, I want a way to funnel troops both ways. So, I'm going to build a road from Athens up across to when I build my city here as well. Scott didn't believe that I had four tri-remes, but I do have four tri-remes. When we did the show today, he said, Well, I have to build some tri-remes now. How many do you have? And I said four, and he said, Bullshit, there's no way you have four. That would be stupid. So, one, two, three, four. And I'm going to cycle them out so there's always some full-strength ones here. To prevent him from ever getting these pearls again. Meanwhile, I'll get my own source of pearls. I've got every city-state allied with me, and because I've been doing their quests, I'm actually pretty strongly allied with them. So, that's not going to be a danger anytime soon of losing them. So, in the culture tree, I'll probably do this because I want the cities to go faster. This would be good for war. I just don't care that much. I think I'm actually going to straight up adopt patronage. But, we'll see. I might do this and I might finish tradition and then start going down patronage if the game continues. Scott did finish the Colossus. I really don't care. It'll let him build a little bit of a military, but I kept him bottled up. My forces are still here. I like to destroy this guy, but I wish he was a city-state quest. But I think I'll just destroy him and then just keep these troops here at the ready. Or I might actually sacrifice this guy to damage Scott and let everyone else filter back to Corinth because I got to get back to my own territory to upgrade. And the era of the hoplite and the companion cavalry is about at its end. So, this is the time when Scott could bust out if he really wanted to push because these units are going to be weak in the face of knights and pikemen. The naval blockade goes well. Still having barbarian troubles on the domestic front. I should be able to deal with it pretty quickly, but I think I do need to build a couple more units here to address them. And I think those units need to be... I'll have knights soon enough, but I need more mobile units. Yeah. Hoplites are good because these horsemen are coming out. I probably need one more decent unit. I can upgrade him with my money later. So... Canyon Gallery or swordsman? I guess I'll just build a swordsman instead of being super mobile. I'll just have a pretty good force. I just need more troops hanging around in here. But the naval blockade is going swimmingly. I can't attack this guy this turn, so I'm just going to stay here and menace. The barbarians are taken care of. I'm almost allies with Prague because they finally decided to make this a quest, so I took this barbarian encampment out. Scott built a little navy! Look at this! He's got some ships! He's got a little navy here. He thinks he's going to do something with it. His navy is... One, two, three, four, five. He has a two trireme deficit. So he thinks he's going to defend this and rebuild. So my best strategy is to retreat the triremes that he can see. So he thinks that he's scared me off, and I'm just going to mass my navy just outside of where he knows... Or where any of his scouts are. He doesn't have any scouts anymore. I'm just going to mass outside of his borders, and I'm going to wait until he builds workboats and actually starts working these pearls and fish again. And then I'm going to come in and take it all away from him. It's going to be wonderful. Alright. That means I got to keep all these triremes just out of his sight, so he doesn't consider the fact that maybe he's made a terrible mistake. Yeah, just hang out. Just out of sight. That one's healed. Get you to go around from the top, because I want to have two and two. Or I don't want to have three down here. He has a bottleneck here, and it's kind of a pain in the ass, so I feel like I'm better off coming in this way. Because I can bring more force to bear more quickly. I should build... After I finish this wonder, I'm going to build yet another. And otherwise... Oh, my economy is doing pretty well. Why did that suddenly jump up? Maybe because I repaired this stuff. Alright. Oh, and now I got truffles. Now I can settle again. I got plenty of happiness. I got more happiness than I could possibly do anything with. I'm going to wait until Prague says this is a problem, and then I'm going to go deal with it. But I'm also going to go defend my worker. Alright, maybe I'll just do the slow burn and build the settler out of Sparta. Now I'd like it to finish. It's got two turns before it gets bigger, so I should at least work on something else for two turns and then come back and build the settler. What would be good? Workboats? All this stuff sucks. I bet I should build a workshop just to... Just to be ready to build things like ironworks. Sparta's not that bad of a city. Yeah, its production capability is kind of crappy. Really only Athens has any significant production capability. Now why is that? Because of all these mines. There's really no word of mine around Sparta. Sparta's not going to... None of my cities... I guess this one can be an industrial city as well, but Sparta's never going to really have that.