After we see the rest of Easter Island we'll know just how junky 3e1s is. To me, it's relatively useful if it can do the following:
1. Provide a southern sea passage, thus saving us 16(?) wkr-turns building two junk forts.
2. Enable us to REX the Coast, which includes further south too, right?
3. Help MW work a cottage or two or use a windmill or two when MW is doing elsewise.
4. Use eastern coastal tiles that otherwise don't get used.
5. Quick free promotions for CRII maces for Hammi.
6. At low maintenance, slowly grow and eventually provide a decent chunk of beakers.
That said, I tend to agree with klarius that we need to defog for a few turns to see if west provides something better for now. We need 3 more lib-uni cities asap, one being East Island, presumably. Rice City is a nice site, but pretty high maintenance at a cost of 3e1s and a handful of units. At the very least we need an unconnected warrior pump out west to provide some dummy tile defenders around Rice. Later they could be garrisons, but we're already at our unit limit--we'll start paying unit costs in 2t when the worker is built unless we burn the Conf Miss.
What we really need are some cities that can grow fast and raise our unit cost limit.
EDIT: There's one more use for either 3e1s or Rice City, imo, if we don't delay. Atlantis is far from useless, btw. At pop14 it is already able to poprush a lh, then the library and later a uni. If it loses 2 units per turn while building only one then it won't be long before a few maces can capture it. I wonder how many units it will leave at home to defend...3?...or fewer, since this is not a naturally spawned city...