[Spoilers] Gavagai, Bacchus and Elizabeth Form a Romantic Trio

[Bacchus]

First run at re-optimizing the micro, please check this, very raw:



EDIT: An immediately apparent msitake is the need to switch from working the mine ("9") to working a grass forest ("2") on T49, and recuperate the fall-through in prod by speeding up growth, we gain a hammer compared to the table.

[Gavagai]

Sorry for lack of reporting lately, real life overwhelmed for a few days. Regarding micro we are following the spreadsheet above. Scout revealed some uninteresting land to the west of Egypt.
I hope I'll be able to post some pictures after I get back home from work. For now I want to report that I thought a little bit about our strategy in this environment and, frankly, I'm at a loss. Given that neither of our neighbors have met anyone but us and given coast visible to the east and to the wes, I would assume that our continent is just a strip of land, going along meridian. Egypt is in the northern end, Mongolia is in the southern end, and we are in the center. And how we are suppose to survive long-term then? We will have two fronts to defend, both of our rivals will have one. At some point we will be overwhelmed.
Also, for both rivals we are a long-term threat as we are able to outtech them. Therefore, they will be quite aggressive towards us.
Germany was in a similar situation before WWI. They tried to solve this problem by attacking one of their enemies pre-emptively in an attempt to defeat them before an enemy on the other side would be ready to enter the battle. And yes, this plan failed and the Germans got their ass handed to them.
However... what else can we do but replicating this approach? While going to work I was thinking if it will be possible to beeline construction and to cripple Egypt at T90-100. The problem with this plan is, of course, that Egypt is too freaking far. The best we can do is to deny them access to this fertile river valley. But we won't be able to eliminate them, therefore even if we succeed, we will have to struggle somehow culturally with a creative civ.
Another possible idea is to get guilds early. Is Caste even viable here? We will need to self-research Feodalism and Machinery, bulb Paper and Philo with Great Scientists and Civil Service and Guilds with Great Merchants. Or may be we self-research Feo-Machinery-Paper and use only GM bulbs. We will need only two GPs with this approach, which are possible to generate quickly.
OK, let's postpone it until BW is researched.

[Gavagai]

Regarding our micro - there is a thing I can't understand about hammer decay. We intend to keep a WB in queue for more than 10 turns, so, we should lose a hammer which we invested into it on T22. But in my sims the hammer still was in place by T34. Can anyone explain that? Is it something about hammer decay I don't know, or I once again screwed up my sandbox in some way? But in which way exactly? All I can think about is a different gamespeed but I would definitely notice if I were playing epic...

[Bacchus]

On micro, my guess is that WB is counted as ship, and ships are buildings, hence decay takes longer. It's also why ships receive the bonus from OR.

On strategy — yeah, it's not pretty being heartland economic powerhouse with early-unit boosted marcher lords. Both Michael Mann and Randall Collins look upon situation with a great deal of scepticism I'm thinking more and more about the possibility of oracling something military, Construction if we can make it work, or HBR. We will have to see how others tech, of course. Note that Sian didn't go for religion, so we seem to have reasonable chances. I haven't look at demos for the last few turns, so not sure about the techs.

[Gavagai]

Aha, that solves the WB problem, I think.

I don't think that oracling construction or HBR is useful. Catapults and HAs are pretty expensive, at T60 we just won't have enough production to build a sufficient amount of them quickly enough. And by T90 we should be able to research one of these techs ourselves.

[Bacchus]

Well, we wouldn't want to build the Oracle by T60 anyway, that's fairly radical, but Oracling something makes sense to make up for the lost turns on researching religion (I always assumed that from game-design perspective that's exactly what Oracle is there for anyway), and oracling MC seems ridiculous in this situation. Another option is CoL, but it's way too early for Caste. And I really doubt we can get Monarchy in time to snatch Feudalism, albeit that would be a very definitive solution to our predicament.

[Gavagai]

I thought a little bit about this. If we Oracle HBR at T60, we will be able to have about nine HAs at T70. And nine HAs at T70... Well, it equals to a nuke. Would be a fun thing to do even if it is absolutely impractical. Of course, it assumes that we have horses nearby.
(The fundamental problem with Oracle is that it requires us to chop seven forests around our capital. And given that hammers in our capital are sparse, building an Oracle isn't something I can be easily convinced to do.)

[Bacchus]

I thought about the sparsity of hammers, and in fairness, three grass mines is a solid amount of prod when coupled with slavery hammers which we have plenty of. 10 base is not huge, but it's perfectly fine for a commerce/specialist city — we only need to build a granary, a lighthouse, and a library, of which library will be whipped, and granary and lighthouse can be both easily built off a chop each and a 2 pop whip with overflow. Together with our settler chop that makes 3, so we do actually have 6 chops reasonably spare. We can use them to speed up expansion, of course, but with our wet corn/cow second city and the abundance of in-capital food we will have plenty of workers and settlers anyway.

Also, settling a great prophet in the capital would be useful — Londra is still the most likely candidate for running merchants and if we find either silk (likelyish) or furs (unlikely) to complement our ivory, we would want to build a market in it, plus the settled GP will give us a solid base prod of 12, should we choose to work max.hammers, which is really enough for whatever we might need. With base of 12, and two 2-pop whips we can produce 6 HA's in 15 turns in the capital alone.

We don't have to think about the Oracle for a while, definitely not before getting AH.

[Gavagai]

granary and lighthouse can be both easily built off a chop each

Assuming you have two forests to spare... That's the problem - we will need these forests to build basic infra, workers and settlers quickly.
(Generally, you want to build early wonders if you have crappy expansion land. If your expansion land is good, you will almost always be better off if you put those hammers into settlers to have good cities earlier. And our expansion land is good.)

[Bacchus]

If granary-lighthouse aren't basic infra, I don't know what is. Our lands are good, but that not that big -- outside of the jungle we really have space for just 3 more cities after the cow-corn one.