Round 1: 4000 BC to 3150 BC (34 turns)
I started by moving the Warrior 1 SW:
Yeah, nothing too spectacular over there. The hills are nice for production, but I was kind of worried about having enough food to work all the mines. I suspected there was another resource in the fat cross that I couldn't see. Turns out I was right:
Plains cows by a river, a tribal village, and a blank grassland square--possible resource there? Maybe. We'll see.
I decided to research towards Bronze Working. This also pushed me in the direction of building a Warrior first, so as to have more units busting fog and hopefully revealing where any copper might be located.
As my initial Warrior explored the southwest, Uruk's borders expanded and the hut popped:
A Scout--always nice. The border expansion also revealed a hut off to the northwest, so I sent him in that direction. The Warrior was swinging to the southeast anyway, so it made sense to have both units moving around the capital in complimentary counter-clockwise patterns.
My Warrior soon ran into my closest neighbour:
Ragnar. After the first Peter game, he's not exactly my favourite AI leader. Both of his traits make him dangerous. He's very close by, as it turns out, just a few tiles south of Uruk. In other words, he's going to be a problem. I think we may have found our early rush target, if we go for one.
My Scout popped that hut to the NW:
That gave me 27 gold. Better than a kick in the teeth. Or a map, for that matter. Lately I tend to keep my gold rather than spend it on early research; I find it comes in very handy in order to deal with the various random events that pop up. Having some gold lying around opens up additional options that would otherwise be closed to you.
I finished research of my first tech shortly after this:
And from there, I next targeted Bronze Working.
Another nearby civ appeared, this time coming down from the north:
I still haven't found Washington's borders, so I suspect he's much further away. It makes sense, since there's jungle between us. Many of the Americans' advantages don't kick in until later in the game, so I could put off having to do anything to Washington for some time. So I still think Ragnar is the candidate for an early rush, if one is possible.
Having the Scout was proving very advantageous. As he continued exploring southwest, he found more huts.
He got experience from that one. I promoted him to Woodsman II, though ironically he next headed into an area bereft of trees. Not that it was all bad, because he found another hut there:
That one gave me 44 gold and revealed a bear in the woods to the south of it, so my Scout skedaddled outta there but quick.
On the last turn in the round, I finished building my first Worker and also finished researching Bronze Working.
Now for the bad news:
No copper in sight! Nuts. Maybe there's some not too far away in that unexplored area to the northwest. My 2nd Warrior is near there, several tiles north of Uruk, recovering from a Panther attack. But Copper doesn't usually show up in jungle, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.
So what next? One option is to doggedly pursue the UU by researching Iron Working next. That could take quite some time, though, and would leave me without a decent unit for defense. I could research Animal Husbandry, as I selected for now, and hope for horses somewhere nearby. Or I could pursue Hunting and Archery to get Protective Archers available for defense since the UU seems to be a bust for this game. I'm leaning towards AH, since that would also allow me to pasture the cows in Uruk's fat cross. But if there are no horses nearby either, I think Archery will become mandatory at that point.
I think it's unfortunate that the map generate got tweaked some time back to make copper more rare. A unit like the Vulture really gets screwed if you get a map like this. But I'm loathe to regenerate just to keep trying to get Copper. Vultures will just have to wait until Iron Working; they'll still have a role to fulfill at that point.
Some other comments on the map.
I've also drawn one of those strange maps that have a river running through the desert without floodplains (to Uruk's SE). I hate those. Seems like a waste of a bunch of tiles. There are flood plains to the SW, though. But the best land is definitely to the north, though it will require both Iron Working (to chop the jungle) and Calendar (for the Sugar, Bananas, and Dye) to fulfill its potential.
Since an early rush of Ragnar seems out of the question because of the lack of copper, I think I should leave the dubious terrain to the south to the Viking and focus on moving north and west.