So first up, I changed my mind on tech order:
I saw that I could tech to pottery in time to immediately put up cottages as soon as the corn was farmed, so I went for that. Since the FPs are on the way to the cow, this shaved a turn off of worker movement. In the end, going pottery before AH basically amounted to trading slightly more than 1commerce for 1hammer during the turns I didn't have both techs. This is not usually a good trade, but I figured I could afford losing the early hammers.
My logic? I needed the commerce asap for my oracle strat, and those early hammers almost always go toward warriors, but I would need fewer, since we could see I've only got 2 directions to fogbust:
(Met Khmer and Byzantines from NW and Japanese from SE here)
And because quechuas do their job quite well. Feel free to debate me on the Pottery AH switch.
Here's another shot of the Byzantine borders, right as I meet them. They are quite close!
Here's a small side effect of this:
Rush out quechua (needed for approaching archer) at the cost of losing the 1 commerce and 3 food from the unworked FP.
My first worker improve corn>cottage>cottage>cow working north to south.
I built 1 quechua only and then settler at size 3. There was quite a squeeze coming from the North! (see land pic below)
The second city had some jungle, but it was able to settle with cows for immediate improvement, and sugar, dye in bfc. I will maybe cottage that guy (again see land pic)
Its builds went monument for cultural pressure (no time for terrace!) and then another settler (again land squeeze!)
After AH I teched mining>masonry>BW>poly>phood
At that point I didn't quite pull off the 1 turn oracle, but with a settler (#3)>whip overflow + single tree chop:
quite miraculous! I took MC for cheap forges and large trade chip. Meanwhile I met all the other AI. Looks like we are all one happy family on this continent. Zara is I believe south, and Brennus is north. Both Zara and Toku got early alpha (lol @ toku--what's the point if you won't trade??) ~1600BC, so I traded poly+masonry for writing (1 turn of research in writing), and then got alpha thusly:
After oracle I teched fishing for the two fishing cities, and started a little on aesthetics (no trade chip needed especially, but TGLib is gonna be soo cheap here)
Here is the land situation where I stopped:
clam+gold site has just been settled. Machu Picchu is borrowing the corn from cuzco, which is still capped at 5 happy. Obviously giving up the early hammers has made my scouting to the south suffer, but at least there is a weak barb city buffer there. If I can get both barb cities that would put me at 6, which would be nice. Of course, that is assuming carib has anything other than desert to its East...
I have only 3 workers (counting the new one about to arrive) so priority #1 is to get the workers caught up to the rexing. Next priority is to get a forge in the capital, and finally get some military to grab barb cities. The blank plains tile to the right of the capital is neither copper nor horses, so I have a feeling it's iron. Here is the tech situation after trading for alpha (on the last turn):
I should probably wait a turn to grab IW with alpha and keep myself and zara as the only ones with MC. I'll need to keep a close watch on the tech situation to make sure I can trade away techs before Zara does.
Any comments, suggestions, etc? No uploads still
