I'm playing as Joao and I'm going for a space race victory, but I'm currently behind in tech and power. Game settings are: Monarch, large, archipelago, normal speed, all victory conditions enabled. I'm considering 2 alternate strategies:
1) Upgrade my axemen to maces, switch to Police state/Feudalism/Theocracy, build a massive army and go pillage Justinian and Willem to hold them back.
2) Expand and colonize, beelining economic/scientific techs and spamming Hinduism to fund a higher tech rate. Use my religious influence to instigate war to keep my rivals busy.

I'm leaning toward #2, But I'm not sure if I can dig myself out of this hole. I was going to rush Sankore, but someone got it 2 turns before I got paper. Which techs should I focus on? Should I try to beeline and grab other wonders, or is there a better use for my engineer?

Thanks to your early cargo capacity, you can war with impunity, but none of your religious buddies can seem to help.

I'd focus first on spreading the faith since you have the Kashi building up. It's a good immediate payoff and you should make sure that your hindu brothers have a majority of the religion in their cities.

Grabbing Amsterdam for the GL is tempting, and actually is politically ok since only Justinian, a non-hindu, knows him. Pretty much recon the non-hindu civs and Willhelm and see which would be a sure win. They all seem like good targets with Willhelm being a big payoff and containing Gandhi being a high priority (but you don't know enough about Gandhi at this point, other than you can guess that he has a lot of land). Right now Justinian is a more realisitic target than gandhi.

To support the war, I'd switch to Guilds next turn and build some knights with flanking promotions to soften up the cities before your Maces attack. Your axes have perfect promotions for promoting, except I question having medic I so often when CR1 would have been better. I'd rather have a runt unit in the stack with medic and not highly promoted units with it.

And switch Tenocht to being a production city. Your civ is weak in production and you lack a good build-up. If you take on Willhelm, you have to go in declaring war with probably 4 Carracks and rape his lands. I'd probably go in first with horses and wreck the countryside around Amersterdam because that's his only production city. It may be a good idea to wait the 8 turns until Guilds, and switch some of your cities to having more hammers (even at the cost of towns) while building more Carracks. Then knights to harrass Amerstam. Then ship a stack of Maces and Trebs, heavy on the trebs. Attack with trebs, then knights, then Maces. Follow up by shipping more of everything.


Overall, you're in a temporarily strong position, thanks to being the main player with optics, and your UU. Your big weakness is poor production, but hopefully that's relative given that it's an islands map. Your position will get worse when the others get Optics and Astronomy, so you have to make a killing now.