It's been almost four months since we last checked in with our communal game of Civilization VI with the Blaugust gang. If you've forgotten all about the game or want to refresh your memory, the summary page can be found here, my previous turns can be found here, here, here, and here, and Krikket's turn preceding this one can be found here.
With all that out of the way, I'm pleased to announce that the Good Ship England is still well afloat. We've given up expansion on Earth and have turned our eyes towards the heavens, with our race to establish a colony of Mars moving along quickly. Thus, the world map looks much the same as it did 60 turns ago, except now with the full-HD addition of our host of navigation satellites giving us 100% map coverage (and a very frustrating 'Activate Windows' watermark that I can't get rid of despite hours of concerted effort and hair-pulling, please ignore that!).
Our armies are still massing on our Western borders, just in case Gilgamesh tries anything, but they're mostly just drilling while the nation's energy goes towards fueling our terrifying scientific machine. While we could drop a pile of cash in modernising our military forces if we needed to, I have other plans for the treasury and as it is we hugely outgun any potential enemies anyway. I think there's a good chance I won't have to touch the military at all during my reign.
Catherine approaches seeking niter, and taking a cue from Krikket's diplomatic efforts in the last post, I decide to give it to them in exchange for one of their cultural relics. France has all sorts of Great Works, so Catherine is willing to part with it without bankrupting us, and I figure this is a good deal given that we have a lot of cultural buildings sitting empty and every little bit of tourism power that we can sap from France makes it less likely that they'll be able to sneak a cultural victory before we finish colonising the stars.
Cleopatra also wants a deal, but she doesn't have any cultural artifacts to give up. I'm not entirely sure what the benefits of a Research Agreement are, and suspect they're probably better for Egypt than they are for us, but if it keeps Cleo onside and gets us a few more luxury goods to help sate our entertainment-starved population then that's a good thing in my book. Deal signed!
And just like that, the English Monarchy becomes the English Constitutional Monarchy, with Her Majesty's government electing to try out the advantages of an actual democracy for once. Her Imperial Majesty was quite good about it, really, all things considered. Taking the Democracy government type lets us stack up a bunch of economic and diplomatic policies to give us big boosts to our gold and culture outputs, at the cost of some advantages to our military that we weren't really using anyway. I suspect out policies will need a little refining instead of this quick selection, but it's a start. Welcome to the future!
Continuing the theme of trading useless things for cultural advantages, Pedro was also willing to part with a Great Work in exchange for some horses, and I think our diplomats mostly managed to keep a too-obvious grins of their faces as they signed on the bottom-line for that one. At this rate, England will be a cultural powerhouse before we know it. And Brazil will have some horses.
Krikket had also set me the job of finding something useful to do with our Great Admirals, so I took up that gauntlet by rush-buying a destroyer in Bristol so that I could expend their bonuses on it. I don't expect to have to do anything with the first navy that we've had since our early misadventures in the Great Southern Lake, but it's here just in case we need it, and I've set it to randomly patrolling the ocean.
Keeping on the theme of Great People, I also recruited a Great Merchant, who gave us some additional tourism points for our Industrial Zone. I guess people are paying to come tour Birminghmam's world-famous power plant now?
I've also recruited a number of new trader units while I tried to work out what to do with all these cities we have lying around. My current plan is to use them to trade from Stoke-on-Tent with other nearby English cities in order to earn bonuses to production in order to speed along the Moon Landing program. I'm sure there's a more efficient way of doing this, but we've managed to make significant headway on the project this way, so maybe it'll turn out to be worth it.
With the advent of Composites, we've opened the path to research Nanotechnology, the final step needed in order to begin to establish our future colonies on Mars. There's not a lot of other things left on the tech-trees at this point, but our scientific power is still growing in leaps and bounds, so I honestly expect that by the time my next turn comes around there'll be nothing left for our scientists to do but sit around and admire the scenery.
As a slight diversion. If you're reading this on a phone or tablet, woudl you might letting me know if it was readable for you or if the formatting has been all sorts of whacked out? I'm not going to pretend that formatting has ever been a strong-point of the Leaflocker, but the new blogger editor and I really aren't friends and the preview is suggesting that the formatting of this post might be a bit of a headache for those on mobile devices. It works for mine, though, so maybe it's not a problem.
At the end of my term of Government, I'm proud to announce that the combination of our government reforms, the British Museum doing a roaring trade, and a little light extortion of foreign dignitaries has resulted in England successfully becoming the world's cultural leader. Sure, the French might still have more tourists for now, but before you know it they too will be wearing our knitted jumpers and eating our black puddings.
Thanks for joining me for the three-monthly update. I hope to get the Leaflocker off rolling again at some point soon, but for now, look forward to the next update on the game over on
the blog of the Rambling Redshirt.
