Long Live the Queen! Turns 291-300

There hasn't been much going on here at the Leaflocker of late, with a general dearth of creativity and lack of the ability to focus hitting pretty hard in recent months. This is the first August that we hasn't seen a bump in output around here for years, but despite three or four partial drafts and a clean new blogger interface update, I just haven't been able to get into it. Despite the good work being done by Belghast and the gang with the Promptpalooza alternative Blaugust event, here on the Leaflocker, it's just been.... crickets (and not the good kind!)

But then, on the Blaugust discord channel, I was summoned by.... Krikket.

The Thin Red Line

It's just a couple of days short of two months ago that I last checked in on the Kingdom of England (yes, we may have developed Flight but we're still holding on to the Monarchy) in the communal game of Civ VI that I've been taking part of since April, and during my period of inattention we've gone to war, liberated three cities from the Sumerians, and brokered peace all over again. The world is now back in a state of alert watchfulness, and I missed the whole thing!

Time for a call for prayer

If Krikket's trademark move is messing around in boats or boat-adjacent activities, mine is certainly spending all of my fellow leader's hand earned currency on knick-knacks, so I quickly blew our country's accumulated stockpile of Faith points on a small army of Buddhist Prophets and Missionaries to combat Brazil's wave of incoming Catholic zealots, as well as on rushing the employment of a Great General, Sir John Monash, who provides a small rank increase to a unit but more importantly provided an additional envoy in Preslav, returning the city state to the protection of the Empire.

We've got this Diplomacy thing in the pouch

While we're on the topic of City States, I also devoted a few spare envoys we had lying around to gaining control of Stockholm, giving us some sweet scientific bonuses. If there's one big difference that I notice between this difficulty an the higher ones, it's gotta be just how easy it is to dominate the game diplomatically, allowing for a kind of blanket approach that just isn't feasible on 'hard mode'. I can more or less hold my old at Civ VI these days at anything less than the top couple of difficulty modes, but trying to hold on to more than one or maybe two city states is generally beyond me.

We've been driving around...

Having apparently learnt nothing from losing the eastern half of their empire, the Sumerians have sent a Settler unit (in it's fancy campervan) out to rebuild on our borders again. I'm not very keen for that, but unfortunately modern Settlers have better movement skills, so my previous herding tricks don't seem to be working. I could capture the Settler, I suppose, but war with the already crippled Gilgamesh doesn't really seem worthwhile at this point.

Don't tempt us, Pedro

I did get a notification for the possibility of a war against a more attractive opponent, though. Our technological advantage over the Brazilians has opened up the possibility of declaring a Colonial War against Pedro, and while I'm not in a position to explore this avenue further right now, since all our units are still on the western front, taking out the Brazilians would not only gain us some excellent looking cities in the North but also prevent the never-ending flood of missionaries getting in the way of converting the world to the wonders of Buddhism.

The Walrus did beseech

All this talk of war has gotten Teddy all upset, though, and he's decided to try to exhort a little cash. Since this is a pretty small amount of money for us and because I'm generally a friendly guy, I was a little tempted, but the United States has a comically small army so they really have no way to back up their threats, even if they are currently leading the world technologically. We might end up having to gun Teddy down in order to win an eventual scientific victory, so I'm content to let him be upset with us in the hopes that he eventually declares a war that can't he's got no hopes of winning.

Burning out a fuse up here alone

With the development of Rocketry we can start building our three Spaceports in order to start constructing the Mars Colony that we need to establish in order to win ourselves a scientific victory. I start up the first in Stoke-on-Trent immediately under the careful eyes of the boffins at Oxford University, but spaceports require a truly insane amount of production for a city that's not exactly an industrial powerhouse. I also purchase a worker to try to grind a little more production out of the hexes around the city in order to speed up the process a little bit, but as it is it might be my turn again before we see the first space flight out of Stoke.

All the decent campsites have already been taken

Having failed to block that Sumerian settler, I eventually settle (heh) for camping the hexes that would have provided it a viable location. Guess you're going to have to look elsewhere if you want to grow, Gilgamesh!

Hong Kong looming out of the mist

Finishing off the Natural History civic gave us the extra envoys we needed to gain suzerainity of Yerevan, but just as I was getting ready to celebrate being overlord of the whole Earth, Yerevan's superior map knowledge revealed the previously unknown city State of Hong Kong nestled between Teddy Roosevelt and Gilgamesh. How they managed to keep it from us for so long I'm not exactly sure, but we are going to have to work a little harder if we're going to tick of that goal of being the undisputed diplomatic masters of the universe.

The site of one of the ancient battles of the fabled Galloping Arrows?

Natural History also gives us access to the Antiquity sites, one of my favourite aspects of Civ VI and a key part of every successful cultural victory that I've ever managed. Since Victoria has a bonus for Archeology making her museums insanely powerful this could be a pretty good route for us to go down, but the investment of production into museums and archeologists could be a tough ask when our resources are already committed to the Space Race.

I guess I'll find out if we picked one or the other or decided to try for both next time I get made Prime Minister. For now, it's over to the Rambling Redshirt once again.