Waiting for an opportunity, and stabilizing our core. Long term we need to grab our way to the coast so we aren't completely screwed when the Age of Sail comes around, but not at the cost of exploding into kibble. Mid term(as in Bronze Age), we need to grab at least one of the major floodplains.
Most of the time doing the diplomatic/assimilation strategy takes generations, based on what we know of the mechanics its supposed to take something like 2-3 turns to convert a trait in a receptive audience, and the Pearl Divers should have had something like 5 traits(and we had a setback where the trait they adopted mutated right after they adopted it, pushing things back by another generation).
The Northlands is not normal, because they declared Holy War on us and ran into a Hero armed with a Megaproject, rendering them supremely vulnerable to our culture assimilation strategy once they killed off most of their adult male population smashing into us.
Same with Arrow Lake.
So that threw our plans out of whack because we had expected to be able to finish SOME infrastructure backfill in the estimated 10 to 20 turns needed to assimilate them and now we had to deal with two conquests.
