So, time to settle that second city.

OK, what is weird here? The barracks build? I want to pop borders, but I have 1 warrior, so wouldn’t a warrior build be more prudent? Perhaps it would be. But HTB grows to size 2 eot T34. By that point I might actually need more than 1 warrior and I’m basically happy to slave a warrior (or rather, 2 warriors) with a 1 pop slave. And to do that, it’s more efficient to just have a single hammer in the warrior prior to the slave. So I’m going to put hammers into the barracks until T34 when I’ll swap production to a warrior in preparation of a potential slave, if it is needed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to slave a warrior until I have to, but as I’m likely to be in a position where I have to slave 2 warriors anyway I don’t want to risk the hammers I would be putting into them.

I benefit from having the peak already within my culture, as it gives me plenty of time to prepare for any rush coming at me. The most dangerous (for me) route to approach is from the tiles 89 and 899 of HTB, coming from the fog of war that I can’t see before the border pop.

The worker MM for HTB is actually fairly fugly. I can farm the corn and then mine the grass hill that overlaps with GTR, but…I need the Wheel for T35 to do much else. And a border pop for the silver, and as I said earlier, Sailing for the whales. So the best thing to do is just slave the city for a bit and keep it at low pop. Once I hook up the happiness around the happy cap will be 7, but until then I need to stick to sizes 2 and 3, only occasionally hitting size 4, perhaps to stack the whip unhappiness. But I doubt I’ll actually want to double whip, unless I decide to get out a settler.

Next turn, back to focusing on GTR for a bit.