Stapel told me that he and Beorn will be at war soon. Allegedly Beorn demanded something for maintaining the peace and Stapel refused out of principle. (I would too.) I suspect that Beorn has no more land left to expand to anymore.
As a consequence, Beorn retreated all his troops from that northern tip of my continent. I am therefore planning an attack plan on Condate (formerly Phrygian), because that city has been bugging the hell out of me ever since Beorn took it. Did we actually make an agreement not to raze cities, or didn't we?
On the other hand, Beorn will most likely win a lot of ground from Stapel. The most logical thing for me to do, is to attack Stapel from the other side. But I don't want to! I wanna blast Beorn to smithereens. Socralynnek is collateral damage. They're probably in a strong alliance anyway and he'll be pissed once I've taken over Condate. So I'm considering to send troops westwards towards Beorn as well.
Another interesting thing is: Beorn has been investing in espionage into my realm...
a lot! Twice already I devoted all my income in a turn to espionage into his realm, just to make sure I can still see his demographics. It's 600 vs 250 points now, or something like that. I assume he can see what I'm researching, so that's something to consider. Knowledge is very important in this game, and he might intend to pull the same trick as I did in the previous game: using spies to change my government from
representation to whatever he has. But in any case, I still consider it a waste and would rather spend it on research instead anyway.
I did build the
great wall actually for the sole purpose of getting a
great spy, but I only got one
great engineer (due to the
pyramids) and since then two
great scientists. Well, at least the
great wall provided me an early
great general, so at least I got something out of it.
Anyway, the situation as of today: