 Well, optics allows me to continue my plan and makes it much easier to prosecute this war, but more importantly, it lets me get my settler over here without having to take a risky journey up and around. So I feel like at some point I will conquer this city-state because they're hostile, they won't particularly be useful to me, they don't have any resources, like I'll get the cotton, but whatever. There's nothing important about them. If I conquer them, then I will have a link between this perfectly safe intersea, which will be very useful for defense as well because I can have a navy here that can protect these cities from land assaults. I'd also have a navy that is invincible to surprise attack, and I could come in and out here as I please. It would be very interesting, so I think I might actually conquer them. I very rarely go after city-states in save, but I might in this case. All right, what to do about all this business? I don't need this chariot archer that much because they're pretty obsolete, but I do want to continue to do damage here. This guy should probably slip back and heal. Oh-ho! So, yeah, near great general. He's got a great general up here, always right there. Okay. Well, now I've got a great general. Let's get this great general. Well, let's just move him up this way, then. Once he gets closer, I'll figure out what to do with him. So, what are you going to do with your great general? Are you going to keep it by your troops to make him strong? Or are you going to go here, try to deny me my citrus, which would actually be fun because I've got plenty of other citrus. If he great general's there, what'll I do about it? I'll see if he starts heading that way. If he great general's there, it'd be annoying. It would basically mean I have to conquer Thebes, which would force me into a war that I might have otherwise avoided. It's a long-term war. What I could do is put my great general then here, giving myself an even better platform to attack Thebes, and also starting to cut his empire in twain. This guy, let's just let him heal. I'm going to keep my guys at strength. I'm going to keep this catapult back for now. I've already put a bunch of troops over here. I could swap their positions, and then I can have the catapult come around this way. I'll keep the catapult there for now. I want the spearman. If I move over here, he will be within striking distance of one, two, three, four composite bowmen. I think I'll just keep him here for now. Just keep my mass of troops at the ready. Oh, what's that? Yet another composite bowman hanging out. All right, so if he's massing all these troops here, a strategy might be to take a small force and head around this way. All right, I want to protect my settler. I'll take my weak horseman and just send him around to be ready to make sure there's nothing over here, so this city is definitely secure. This fort will be key between the fort and the city state, which I'll eventually make my ally, because I'm not going to invade them like I plan to invade these guys. Then that will give me a very secure border protecting this city. This city will, yeah, everything will be great here. I can definitely hold on to this city for the time being. Should I go? This guy's mostly healed. I see some more commerce raiding back there. Oh, he's got a camp. I should mess up his truffles. I'll get in there and mess those truffles up. Maybe I should go back over. Oh, that's still pillage? Maybe? We'll see. I'll use these troops to harass. Once this fort's done and this guy's healed, I'll move him up a little bit and then I'll let this horseman heal. I'll cause trouble in his back lines. Otherwise, all these guys are just going to hang out. I should probably send this guy. Well, I guess I'll have this worker. He'll be done with the fort soon. He'll be done with the fort just in time to start working on that city's stuff. Maybe I should just build another farm over here for the time being, prepare for the future. All right, now I can get these. I feel like I went down this road, so I definitely want to keep going down this road. I'm not super happy yet. That's not useful. That will be useful. I'll build the workshops first, then I'll blitz and build a bunch of monuments, amphitheaters, all that stuff. I think I'll build amphitheaters now, so I'll build a bunch of those. All right, where to go? I can go straight for longswordsmen, which would be pretty good for the war effort, actually. Yeah, 14, 21. It might be worth it. Money's kind of a problem. I feel like I should at least backfill because that'll be quick. Yeah, four turns. I'll do currency first. I could do guilds after that, but I'll probably then do steel or physics. In two more turns, I'll be able to start building swordsmen, which I'll then be able to upgrade if I had money, so I won't be able to upgrade. I'll get that workshop done. All right, I got another spearman coming. I'll send him up to the front line. I have significantly more industrial output than him, more than anyone as far as I can tell. He might be close to me under, but I doubt it. So I will take the time to get these workshops done. So I was successfully, I lost the fort temporarily, but I was successfully able to get a force up here long enough to prevent him from settling here until I could come down and settle here. You can see my empire is now very unhappy, but these luxury resources will fix that in short order. I don't want to move that guy yet. Let's see. The one horseman, I saw he had a horse, this horseman was poking around as he grabbed the city, and this one horseman is enough to protect this for the foreseeable future. I'm keeping it from growing until I sort out my happiness issues, which were exacerbated because he finally realized he could plunder this. So I'll get that fort back at some point. Really, I just needed to stem the aggression and prevent Poland from building up much of a real empire or investing in domestic policies too much while I built my army in the south and while I continued my inexorable climb to success. So these are the figures I got to keep pushing. And the beautiful thing is once I get my happiness higher, I can actually settle over here and over here. And then if I take Thebes, which I may or may not do eventually, I'm thinking about taking these guys too because then I'd have this excess. But really I said to hold him off, draw him into bringing his army south, and he's not going this way because he's still in war with Egypt. So I won't be happy for some time yet, but hopefully once I am happy, I'll build a whittle his troops down and then launch a counter offensive. Maybe I should build a little bit of happiness really quick. So that'll get me two more happiness, which will ease the issues I'm having right now. But that let me start just cranking out military units. I'll take the happiness because I got a bunch of swordsmen who are making their way up. Well, this guy can hit that guy. So I might as well take one out entirely if I can. All right, that works. He can't do enough damage to the city to take it because only that horseman or that spearman could come in. We'll see what he does with this great general. He hasn't done much with it yet. But I think I can destroy these composite bowmen faster than he can move in to take the city. And if he does take the city, which again is a puppet I don't care about, the city provides basically nothing to me. It's just it'll either be a nice city down the road. If I'm at peace and I actually let it grow, or it'll be a buffer to keep him from coming south from Thebes. I'd like to get Thebes back, but I won't be able to do that in the immediate term. Let's see, this guy's almost healed. Maybe I should move him into a better firing position. I wonder if he's going to try to sneak anyone down here. It'll almost be worth it to send the swordsmen over here, but then he's mired in all this nonsense. I should send him up to the front lines. That won't really help. He's mostly healed. Now we'll see what happens with that. Keep him in the city. Now I can get this swordsman up here.