Here's a belated report of the finish to the Bob game. After my failed attack, here were the demos during Bob's golden age.
Unfotunately, the only thing he could really put his big hammer advantage into was military. So I got training yards built at either end of my empire and sent warriors from the core.
Then a bit of Ingenuity stopped Bob's inevitable attack. I think he retreated without attacking anything in the end. After that I went back to building up while keeping a strong core of warriors available to be upgraded in those border cities. I had landed Drama and used it to bulb Sanitation previously. I expanded out to 9 cities and stopped there. Further cities were a bit weak, so I figured I was better off growing and not stressing my vault levels. I picked up warfare for the Titan and then pushed out my vaults to the +2happy, +10% hammer level.
At this stage I had a bit of a decision to make between Slavery and Honor or Arete and Kilmorph. In the end I decided Arete was an immediate boost of 30hpt and that was too good to pass up(I blew my worldspell shortly after hitting those 9 cities I think). I decided I would use specialists at firsts and transition to workshops to use up my excess Aristo food instead of Slavery. This was still the old weak workshop version but I wanted to pick up Smelting soon for Smithies anyway and on plains at least that made them pretty competitive with farms 0/3/1 vs 3/0/2. Even better during a GA. A GM was my first manual GP and I used it for the golden age into Arete and Kilmorph. I had grown my cities up to nice sizes too:
I got another GS during the golden age and started on the Bone Palace. I felt pretty safe for all my first-to's all game because Bob's GNP was generally pretty weak.
The GS went for an Academy and I was planning to revolt to Consumption during the Bone Palace GA and get enough GPs to throw my 2-person one as well. By the end of the golden age my demos were looking pretty impressive.
While waiting for Smelting to come in I didn't have much beside military to put hammers into. So I took the lead in power again for the first time in a while and sent a small force against Kabhlag:
That worked out and Bob suggested conceding or playing on for a bit if I wanted to attack. I was still playing the long game though with Smithies, the Bone Palace and the Mines of Gal-Dur in queues, so it would be a while before I could get a strong enough force together. So we called it there.