This time I went something more normal. SIP'd, Hunting -> BW -> Fishing. Ignored early Cows, micro'd a bunch to get to Size 2 and finish a Warrior at the same time. Settled on Stone, got Great Wall to maintain skeleton defense.
At T50, I was a little tiny.
Kept pushing for Elephants, settled Uxmal as 4th for the Fish and an additional whipper. It actually got enough culture to steal plantationed Spices from Qi.
A GSpy from GWall popped and since I got Alphabet from trade (Math -> enough turns into Alpha until it's tradable -> Constructon) I overflowed production into a Spy. I remembered to focus on Mansa, the prospective tech leader, from the start! Thanks for reminding me to do that, guys, I don't usually spy much.
Don't have many screenshots of the war, but the horns blared at around 150 BC.
Didn't take many losses but I did pull a Cease Fire after messing up a little bit and re-declared causing minor diplo loss. No problem though. Rebuilding was easy with 5 workers from Shanghai and cutting down a lot of the jungle.
Meanwhile the Spies took: Compass, Paper, Theology, Engineering, Literature, Music from Mansa. My 2nd specialist, a GSci, bulbed half of Education.
I was sweating over the techs but Mansa went the Economics route so I went Nationalism (but Taj went to Mansa, argh!) and Lib'd Military Tradition.
I'm 3 turns away from Gunpowder, my Chinese war stack is still there.
Shanghai flipped to Mansa.
Kublai is the lord and master of Qin, but they're both horribly behind in technology.
Stack of wonders in Beijing:
I swung Mansa this trade after getting Liberalism to be able to upgrade HAs into Cuirassiers and get tech:
I'm guessing I should kill Mansa before he runs away though because he already has Constitution and has a juicy capital with Pyramids.
My empire:
HE / Moai in Lakamha because for some reason I have this idea that this fairly little city is close to my prospective frontlines and has just enough hammers (15+) to do nothing but poop out Cuirs.
Taking a break now, I do a lot of micro mistakes, not enough roads (i actually ran on just two workers before the conquests) and the Colossus made me lazy and just working FIN+COLOSstline.
Cyrus has Gunpowder already though.
I'm guessing Kublai and Qin are too much of a wall to deal with right now and Kublai is utterly useless.
Met Saladin, he's completely backwards.
Popped a Great Merchant, not sure if I want a mission or a Golden Age, but there's nothing to switch to (Free Speech won't work with most of my cottages still immature, I'm not sure about drafting Musketeers) other than Theocracy or maybe a brief round of Caste+Paci, isn't there?