[SPOILER] - Suboptimal finds trees, still seeks forest

[suboptimal]

I haven't had a chance to read your early game yet, but I wonder if you could do it again would you still go for the early war with Pindicator? Maybe it was just execution and it should have worked, but early war against a good defender seems tough to me in Civ6. This map also seemed to have a lot of spare land lying around so you don't necessarily need to take someone else's.

I think it was a matter of poor execution. I took Nubia specifically to have an early military start. I think, retrospectively, there were three problems with my approach:

- Not enough units on the initial attack
- Should have razed Wealth of Nations the first time I took it - at a minimum that might have hampered Pindicator a bit more than the temporary loss of the city
- Needed a better plan to deal with the terrain, if one was possible.

The thinking behind the attack was to try to take advantage of Nubia's early game unit and the fact that Pindicator seemed to be doing a bit of a farmer's gambit (he was under 100 milpower when I declared). The motivation was that by clearing Pindicator out I would have had almost all of the western part of the landmass to spam settlers into unless someone showed up from overseas and started doing the same.

I suppose that had I gone full builder and just cut him off from "my" half of the side I could have kept pace with the leaders. Two things that I felt a bit stymied by were the food situation and river layouts. I had three rivers (capital, Fondant & northern) to settle along. I guess the one east of Disco Fries could have been "mine" as well but that felt a bit like an overextension. Food felt like it was scarce, particularly in the northern areas, even if it actually wasn't. Not a criticism of the mapmaker as other players might have done things differently in terms of city layouts.

Regarding my science ramp up, I think it was just the first time in the game I really started valuing science. Techs don't feel that impactful to me in the early game, so I focused on snowballing other things. I just took the really efficient stuff like Pingala and the 4 adjacency campus. So I generally prioritised settlers and trade routes first and then when I did push science I had a lot of hammers to put into the buildings quite quickly. It was also getting to the stage of the game where I felt science was important to hit the key military techs.

I will say that going through the saves to see the step-wise evolution of your civ was quite interesting to see (as well as educational). Something additional for me to think about in future games.