Wow! Thanks for a very thorough write-up Alweth.
We seem to have a great lead in every department - techs, contacts and money. I'm very impressed. The contacts situation is particularly surprising, as by the time I reached this point in my QSC everybody had already met or traded and there were no opportunities left. I think we must be pushing the tech rate along faster than I did. I've never used tech gifting much before, so this has been a lesson. Thanks.
After a quick look at the save, I have a few obvious comments. Sorry if these are egg-sucking lessons
1. Shaka will give us all his gold for one contact. He's near to France, so he'll get that one soon anyway, so we should go for it. Our contacts wil expire in value very fast as they get traded round, so we should make what we can from them as soon as possible.
2. We are about to be raided by a barb south of Diriyah. He can grab gold and/or destroy the work in progress on our warrior. We can't get any defence there in time, so we need to do some damage limitation. The barb won't destroy the town, the pop is only 1 so he can't kill citizens, and they don't steal food, so ...
(a) Gold: With Shaka's 47 we'll have 150+ when the barb hits town. I think gold is distributed roughly in proportion to population when you get raided, so we would lose maybe 20-30 gold. Since we shall need embassies soon anyway, we could spend it now rather than lose it. We have lots of tradable items - contacts and techs, so we can afford to reduce our treasury. At our 10gpt rate we can get it back again fast. We could buy three expensive or four or five cheap embassies and leave the barb with little to rob.
(b) There's no point in accumulating extra shields in Diriyah for the next two turns until the barb has done his thing, as he might destroy them, so we should work the flood plain not the plain and accumulate some food. I would be doing that anyway - population is power, and Diriyah is growing slower than it could.
3. I would have moved the worker to the roaded plain SE of Makkah to irrigate, not the unroaded one, and saved a turn on getting the plain irrigation started. Small things, I know, but they build up.
4. 10% research is fine. If you try turning up the research budget you'll find Poly still takes 26 turns no matter what you set it to. With research at 10% we make loads of money each turn and we'll be able to afford all those upgrades and other techs when they come along.
5. Don't worry about isolated rival warriors approaching undefended cities. They will very rarely sneak attack with a single unit. Start worrying when you see a stack approaching. I had several heart-stopping turns during the QSC when stacks appeared near undefended cities, only to see them march on through on their way to some other objective, and I was much weaker that we are. This is going to happen, as we are right in the middle of the map. A bonus of getting some embassies is that we'll start to be able to see who's at war, and make alliances if we do get attacked.
Having said that, I'd like to have one or two warriors or spears around now we have a homeland to defend, who can move to defend any city reasonable quickly. We don't want to have to keep draining our treasury every time a barb appears. Watch out for the river, though, when assessing how fast a defender can switch cities. If they live in Makkah they can cut lux tax as well in the short term, until we need to move them out to our expanding border towns.
6. Don't forget to turn the lux slider down next turn. You'll have the wool hooked up, and Makkah will drop to pop 4 when the settler is built.
@Email10: I know you understand this, but I just want to emphasise that we don't even want to think about using a scientist at this stage in the game. There are several pre-conditions for this, none of which will apply to us for quite a while.
I don't change to 0% and a scientist until I have a seriously corrupt city to do the science in and a much bigger gpt than we have now. We are grossing 19 gpt currently so 10% for research rounds down to only 1 gpt. A scientist won't even be cost effective until we are spending at least 3 or 4 gpt at 10%, and even then the scientist would have to be in a city that can still grow, or sustain a max'ed out pop (6 or 12), without his food contribution. One exception is that you can use a captured city while I starve it down to reduce flip probability. You can make one citizen a scientist and the rest tax collectors. You get income and science even when there are still resisters in town. Sure, you have to reassign them each turn as they starve, but it's worth it. It can also be the case that these conditions don't apply until you are at a stage in the game when you want to max research anyway - beelining to Military Tradition, for example, or racing for a key wonder tech, so single scientist research is rare in my experience.
Oh, and I don't recommend using governors at any stage, for anything other than to exploit their ability to get bonus shields in our settler farm.