One thing that I learned in my playthroughs was that the first thing to do with early stolen workers is mine those spots along the river, even before you put a plantation on the spices.
Glory7 -- nice job! I never even considered finishing Honor the times I opened with it. instead I dumped some stuff into Patronage. I think I needed to work harder to set up barb mining spots.
With having only two cities for so long, did you have any keeping-up-with-science issues?
with this jungle tiles, spt is better than usual (production sucks, of course). usually, if all you need is to reach dynamite (basically beeline after education, no public school of course), 2 cities is not bad - sometimes even faster than 3-4 cities. 2 cities do not have late game spt growth, but if you are going to war anyway then you can take AI cities (usually well developed) and use them if needed.