Wow, this was a really challenging chapter! It took me a least 5 starts to finish. On my successful play I'm pretty sure I had work going on the cathedral the whole time, fully supplied, and the guy still beat me! Fortunately, my cathedral finished during his gloating and it let me continue!

My first couple of plays we plague by trying to manually control ascension rights. I learned that that doesn't make sense. The tax level can be used to control class transitions and keep the coffers full.

I had a least one play through sabotaged by an over complicated trade route where one commodity got saturated and caused an important commodity to get neglected.

At one point, I started kicking out beggars to avoid the cost which eventually resulted in them attacking my towns. In my last play through though I took them in, built and alms house, and it seemed to help boost my citizen population.

In my last play I had managed to keep my coins around 20,000. In the last stage I ran at about a 200-400 deficit but I was able to replenish by running surplus goods to the Marie.

I wonder if I should of been using the port based trading. Do you get the same base rate?

I got a lot better feel for aggressively building for the next needed resource while at the same time keeping and eye on growing population demands.

I also didn't find the time controls until the last play through on ch8! I had glanced at the key map for it a couple of times and gave up when it wasn't in there.

I'm looking forward to trying out the continuous play and Venice!