Barbarians only spawn in parts of the map no one can see, and since they're starting to appear more and more frequently, I send a Dog Soldier down to the frozen wastes south of Mound City. He sets up on a hill, allowing him to survey much of the nearby landscape, preventing barbarians from spawning there to attack Mound City or Chehalis.
The realization that the seasons are the same year in and year out allows us to monitor the natural life cycles of silkworms or something. Anyway, discovering Calendar allows us to build Plantations, which are used to harvest the natural abundance of Silk near Cahokia.
Mound City finishes the Hagia Sophia, a feat of engineering so impressive that all of my workers do their jobs faster now. (There are videos that play each time you finish a Wonder, showing the planning blueprints blossoming into a constructed building, but with my crappy system and Steam running in the background, all the videos choke up and don't play. Oh well.)
Like the Dog Soldier to the east, a Horse Archer patrols the southwest side of the nation for barbarian uprisings. He's not even in position before he finds one. Totally worth it.
Getting off the barter system and minting currency allows each city to forge a trade route to another city on the map. The further away the other city, the more money the route is worth. Foreign cities are eligible for this as long as there's an Open Borders agreement signed to allow the merchants through.
It also allows the building of Markets, which increase the gold production in a city and improve happiness somewhat, depending on the resources available.
I built a Missionary to spread Hinduism in Chehalis, but the religion spread there naturally and made the Missionary redundant. So I sent
him to explore the map instead. That Missionary's a spy!
Anyway, he soon discovers that it was Boudica who beat me to the Great Wall. I mean, there it is.
Montezuma and Boudica are both Aggressive in nature, so it stands to reason they'd eventually annoy each other enough to fight it out.
Having a Code of Laws allows the building of Courthouses, which reduce the aforementioned city maintenance by half in each city that has one. Courthouses also provide Espoinage, a new game element that I don't fully understand yet.
It also allows for Caste System, a civic I almost never use.
As much as I would love to plant a big Native American moccasin on Montezuma's ass out of principle alone, I don't even know where the Aztec nation is yet.
Boudica shortly earns a Great General, a Great Person that spawns when you do a lot of fighting. Having the Great Wall and fighting a defensive war both contribute to that, so it's not surprising she got one. I'll have to remember this happened if I ever get into a scrap with the Celts.
Discovering the Alphabet allows the building of Spies, again contributing to espionage. Spies can move in secret but have a small chance each turn of being discovered and destroyed if they're in enemy territory. They're good at sabotage and collecting information, but not at fighting. I'll train some to keep in my own cities, as spies are best at defeating efforts of other spies.
You haven't even discovered Priesthood yet? Man, clearly I was wrong about needing to be on Warlord difficulty; this game is going so well I'm WAY ahead of my opponents.
Numidian sends a Work Boat out to harvest some clams.
If there were wild elephants around I could train them as War Elephants. I can now build Catapults, which can soften up enemy cities a little before my troops march in.
Mound City addresses its health problems by building an Aqueduct, then takes a good long look at their new water source and says "What if we, like, planted stuff all over it?"
Then they start building the Hanging Gardens, one of the better Wonders because it's never obsoleted by anything.
This is one of the new techs in the expansion. You can tell because the quote read aloud upon its discovery is not in the stern, authoritarian tones of Leonard Nimoy, but in the monotone drawl of someone who couldn't be arsed to put any emotion into the script read. I remember thinking the same thing last time I looked at the voiced-over instructions in the game tutorial, so the new techs might be read by Sid Meier himself.
In the lower-right corner, where all the known civilizations and their scores are displayed, I can see that Boudica is working on discovering the secrets of Monarchy. I assume that's the result of building a bunch of Courthouses and thus getting a boost in my espionage.
Explorers are like Scouts but better, but since I've already explored most of this continent and won't get any seaworthy vessels for a while yet, they're not very useful.
And that's the Classical era for today. Somewhere in the world is a nation about on par with my technology advancement; someone has already discovered Philosophy (which founds Taoism). Next update: I get Medieval.