So, your stuck on an island...

I've never had a start quite like this. Has me rethinking my strat.

Now I love the religion sub game. I generally use it to boost my economy from the follower beliefs. Generally I play as the Celts when I want to play with religion. So my current game is Immortal, HUGE, 12+24CS.

And I'm on a nice size island...by myself. Well, 2 city states. I have room easily for 5-8 cities. Tons of salt. Some Wine, Marble, Furs and even a natural wonder.

Now my original focus was a cultural win, but I'm thinking thats not likely to happen. To me, this seems like a perfect diplomatic victory start. No one to get pissed at my borders. I've also contemplated going for a military victory using my safe island to build up forces for a late game blitz.

My main question. I've got sailing and optics. I've gone around my island looking for a shallow water bridge, but no luck. Should I beeline astronomy so I can start meeting everyone (to avoid getting too far behind on tech) or just focus on building a good solid economy, nice cities, and such?

Hve you considered going Liberty and taking a Great Admiral as the finisher?

I did go liberty, but didn't think about GA finisher...Good idea.

What difficulty are u playing? The higher it is, the more important it is to meet everyone; to not fall behind techwise and to stop the potential runaways.

Do u have any iron? In my opinion its a necessity for a swift frigate dom game.

For isolated start, basically as soon as you reach Education, you generally want to continue to Astronomy (for Caravels) if you don't meet anybody in the mean time.

On religion, you should have a much easier time keeping the AI from converting your cities than normal, but it will be a total waste of effort to convert major AIs cities unless you have Initiation Rites.

On the Diplomatic victory type, it's really a misnomer. Basically you get it by towards the very end of the game becoming allies with all surviving city states plus Globalism (every spy turned into a diplomat) + the other things that grant extra diplomatic votes. All the AIs almost always votes for themselves for World Leader, so diplomatic relations is NOT a factor.

You can though notice that an AI has completely killed another major AI and return them back into the game for extra votes.