With the map info we now have, settler first doesn't look as good. It would need fish near the deer or something like that.
Given the generous Resources of the last few games, we can't count on Neilmeister being that nice again... although if he really wants people to go for Cultural Victories, he had better have given us plenty of Health Resources or at least a means of trading for them pre-Astronomy.
We can get agriculture 3t sooner via Meditation. These 3t seem to carry forward too, even getting us to a point with -TW-pottery-masonry where we may have time to fill up SH before it's built.
As long as we are okay with Lightbulbing Philosophy before the Astronomy line OR are willing to forego Code of Laws (no Courthouses) on a high-Maintenance map), then I'm see no problem with going for Meditation except for one possibility:
- Could we get beaten to Meditation?
I guess we just have to trust Neilmeister's cryptic comment and be assurred that going for eitiher Meditation or Polytheism after settling on Turn 1 is supposed to be a "lock" as long as we beeline said tech from the start.
I wonder... is there a way for him to have, since all of the AIs' Cities were pre-settled, to have had them all start researching a particular tech? Doing so and having each AI research a non-Meditation, non-Polytheism tech could have been a fair way of ensuring that all teams have a fair shot at founding Hinduism (assuming that doing so is technically possible).
As for researching Meditation for Lightbulbing, it appears that Philosophy comes before not only Astronomy but also Optics. So, if we wanted Caravels before Philosophy, we'd definitely have to skip Code of Laws for a while.
I forget, are we capped at 120g from SH? Or can we get even more by partial building it in multiple cities?
Oh yeah, good point--we're only capped at 118 Gold per City.
Note that we can't get 119 Hammers if all of our Hammers are doubled by the Stone and we can't get 120 Hammers since we'd have otherwise completed the Wonder.
As for expanding versus Failure Golding, we can certainly do a combo, where Forests get Chopped by Fast Workers into Settlers and additional Fast Workers and then Mines are built whereby newly-founded Cities can fake-build Wonders for Failure Gold, which helps to pay for the Maintenance Costs of spamming additional Cities... if it weren't for Maintenance Costs, you could theoretically perform an infinite City sprawl type of concept, only limited by the amount of land, but it's Maintenance that generally stops you. If we plug that hole somewhat by fake-building Wonders, then yeah, we can expand quite a lot... BUT, we'd probably want Courthouses sooner rather than later.