I don't even think I'm jealous. We pretty much depend on HR happy for growing the cities, and Rep would limit us there even now that we are whipping sparingly. Comm with Chm may stomach it better, otoh he has less to gain from Rep specialists. But probably it's worth it for him anyways. Or he just goes PS, but that should really put him in a crunch wrt to happiness. Either way he already invested into researching monarchy and took anarchy to revolt, so it doesn't seem part of a big plan really. Maybe he just birthed the GE and rushed the wonder because it was there.
It certainly is a better outcome for us than yuri building it (I should have looked up his treasury). I also don't think we really had spare hammers to build failgold on it at any time?
The city as you see is highlly boatable from the fog. Currently it has two double promoted archers and a horse archer, which should be doable with 3 or 4 boats? But I don't think the benefit of randomly razing it is that much; but it could be the first part of a larger campaign, see below.
Also, prophet for yuri is probably better than scientist. I'm still scared of the astro bulb.
After the adrenaline of building the wonders has passed now, I'm less bullish about our long term potential here. We're looking at lots and lots of incoming GPs, but at the same time we own a total of just 4 cottages. Colossus coast makes up for it beautifully, but still Feudalism is an 11 turn affair already, so I don't think we'll get far past Guilds, and the game might be abandoned before my plan of going for Rifling comes to fruition. So, a samurai/cats push followed up by knights seems to be what we should be looking at.
Who's the target? Thoth of course has less production potential, but last I saw there were already ~12 praets and the first cats out. It's the well known problem with Rome, it's just quite hard to attack even being an era advanced.
Comm has 4 cities to Thoth's 1 and a half, but may have no str 8 units by the time we get the samurai moving. Longbows yes, but they'll take collateral all the same. The prize is also greater, although yuri would certainly get one, if not two of the cities. We also have culture on a lot of Comm's natural territory, which gives us inroads into attacking him, as well as holding against or counterattacking into yuri.
So I have some sympathy for that option, but it will depend how things look in around 20 turns. Right now I have to find the time at some point to plan the right moment for launching the GA, such that we end it in bureaucracy. The first missionary is out already, and the next one is due in 2 turns; after that we only need to grow cities and amass treasury.
If we get a prophet in Brute next, as is most likely, I'm tempted to just throw the merchant into bulbing Currency. The trade routes are negligible (settling the merchant would be more lucrative
), but markets would be helpful if not super awesome (and give us somethign to build during GA besides catapults, which we can't have too many of anyways), and wealth building may be essential eventually to make progress on the tech tree.