Random thoughts to join speculations:
Luckily, we have some scouting turns researching Agriculture before we commit to anything. We also have a Scout so we'll know a lot of info by then.
The more the Pangaeaish map is. the less is GLH worth it, but it is continents-like map so I guess it is very probably worth it. On Immortal, GLH is very late if AI capital is not coastal since AI likes to build a bit of infra and Moai first. Late GLH (1000BC) is very good since it doesn't interfere with expansion in a bad way. Fail gold can be used to buy info.
We'll see how many AIs start by water from demos and plan our GLH, if we go that way, accordingly.
Early game research cannot be sped up later. Overly peacemongering Kakumeika always managed to stay in the tech race with us till the very end, usually with a decent head start, but just failed to capitalize on that and I wouldn't say because of high research orientation but simply because of lack of agression. Our 3 times bigger empires in the end didn't manage to close the gap because of 1T per tech limit and overall saturation, which we will come to if this is indeed deep in the tech tree game as stated by mapmakers.
We need something like 5 GSs for Astro+Engineering, right? You can get those without Caste if Marble is near. With all those gems, we might even get away with 4GSs. We need Astro only when we can use it. For contact, we need optics.
Maybe we don't need to hinder our production with Caste.
Maybe even without Marble since we are creative and our Libraries are super fast. I managed to get 4 GSs and 1GA (Music) from a crappy start with 225BC GLib (late, little effect), non-creative, non-PHI leader by 1AD in an unmicroed game yesterday.
Those gems actually make GLH less atractive since we'll have good research pace without GLH. But, if the land is abundant, we can peacefully settle crazy amount of cities with GLH.
Without 8 good peaceful cities, I wouldn't really go for it.
Astro + GLH is my favorite moment in the game, commerce explosion, and I am extremely biased towards that option.
Maybe mapmakers will finally be successful at enforcing Paratroopers, since that was a plan some time ago but cancel OB teleportation came around that, maybe we don't want to waste our gold on questions, maybe we want 100% slider.
Oracle --> MC, Colossus.
A lot of commerce if cities are coastal. Forge with, at least gems, is really nice with food rich capital and 2 good food cities.
MC is on our way to Astro.
Colossus always pays its debts with copper, even if going for Astro, especially if Oracled.
Again, with those BW available gems, we can actually self-tech Currency.
Oracle --> Currnecy, I still don't get it. I'd rather kill some workers. Production is not a problem with high food start.
If happy poor, Oracle --> Monarchy is m favorite.
So many paths and so little info. How about really discussing that scout?