Oh and looky there is a one on that circle thingy up there! Oooh are we playing this week?!

Puppeting is nice because it will keep the city on “focus on gold” and not add to your policy cost. I guess it is corporate. Razing is mean, but consider this: how mean was the AI to give people a crappy city with no way of sustaining itself? Okay that’s not a great argument either. Be ruthless!

The spy: look at your screenshot, in the upper right hand corner, the left most “circle” with a number 1 on it (which means you have 1 spy awaiting orders). That’s your espionage menu.

As for the Annexing, well I feel bad about razing cities and puppeting them seems so corporate. I just want to be one big happy family. Yeah so I dont always play the best strategy of all time, but I have fun!!

A) You have a spy that’s not being used. That’s a new feature in G&K, starting when the first player reaches the Renaissance Era, every Civ gets a spy. You get a new spy when the first player reaches each era afterwords. The espionage game isn’t too complicated, either, you direct your spy/spies to either sit in one of your cities and try to stop other spies from stealing from you, park one in an enemy city and steal from them, or send a spy to a city state to help maintain your influence.

At lower levels, it’s almost always better to put a spy in your capital because that’s where the AI will steal a lot of techs from you there. You’re not going to stop all the spies, but you’ll kill a fair amount and level your first spy up quickly. Plus it’s a diplomatic bonus to forgive someone for spying on you when you catch and kill their spies.

B) You’ve annexed Harar, but haven’t built a courthouse there. You also annexed Addis Ababa. It probably doesn’t matter at this point in that game, but you only want to annex cities if you can a) immediately rush buy a courthouse b) you want to direct what to build in that city and more so, c) the city is so good that you would have settled there to build stuff. If you’re just going to use the city to add gold/culture/science, then you’re better off making the city a puppet and building trading posts around it. There are few policies (I think Autocracy) that makes annexed cities more attractive.

That’s hilarious. You got a great map too. I told you that you had nothing to worry about. If you REALLY wanted to go crazy in that game, you would have enhanced Buddhism with the “Holy Warriors” trait and had the ability to spend your faith on soldiers and steam rolled even faster. I see Atilla got some cities on my land, I guess he was behind the mountains to the NW?

You really had a great map. I spend an hour in reload trying to get a start like that, I wanted to play as you!