General
I'm approaching this as a science game and what early chances for conquest there were I left to chance. And as it turned out my military got strong thanks to a lot of gifts from military civs. Both Almaty and Valetta wanted trade routes and needed us to clear some barbarian camps. In Sofia too, our influence soared. The most common gifts during the first 100 turns were chariot archers and African forest elephants (3).
Settling and early moves
I settled on the sugar, which gave a bit of cash and helped enable a settler purchase. (I hate building settlers before Collective Rule.) This settler went NW to claim luxuries before Sweden took them - incence, copper and more cotton. The third city was placed SW in the area where there is a cow and several sheep. They got their stable and eventually Oracle. I did not build Great Library, seeing the need for many other early builds. The fourth city was placed on the coast to the east. A fifth city claimed the whales, but that was very late, around the end of the scope of this opening thread.
Warfare
4-5 catapults and 2-3 CBs complemented the gifted troops. A brief war with Rome netted me 1 worker and 5 gpt. There was also an on-off war with Florence for the sake of a worker. That was not ideal because it postponed their cultural contribution. Stockholm had a great location and the obvious first target. But I should probably have been much quicker because on turn 100 it is still only a size 3 town. After razing Sigtuna my task force went south. An Ottoman settler was encountered, which settled the Ottomans’ fate of being next. They had already been reduced to just the capital, which included silk and gold.
Huts (five scouts in all but a bit for rudimentary defence too)
Not bad. Pottery, >spearman, population, 20 culture, trapping, 100 gold, 30 faith>Oral tradition pantheon, camps revealed (very late, S of Genoa)
Culture and faith
So I went with oral tradition, basically because I value culture higher than faith. But settling on the sugar was a mistake since it eventually deprived us of 1 cpt. More cotton along with incense to the NW was nice, though.
For arguments’ sake, isn’t religion rather unimportant in conquest games? Missing the pantheon would have been pretty awful of course, but around t100 none of the civs on the starting continent had founded a pantheon.
I ended up founding Zoroasterism and choosing the 100 gold for each conversion plus pagodas. This was in spite of the fact that some religious superpower (I’m guessing something green…) far away had enhanced their religion by then.
Social policies
Republic, then most of tradition so far. I may be able to finish tradition before reaching the Renaissance (Astronomy) and turning to rationalism. While opening up tradition for the sake of border growth was an easy choice, the choice between commerce and to go on with tradition is not so easy: Upgrade money will be highly sought after since losses are minimal against the weak AI.
Wonders
Maosoleum of Halicarnassus, Oracle, Petra, Hanging Gardens. Macchu Pinchu would be nice, we’ll see. The National College was almost exactly as expensive as Petra, 245 hammers, so I used the republic great engineer for that.
For once, I didn’t fail at building the wonders I tried for. The Great Library comes a bit too early in the game, I sometimes feel.
The big question now is who to hit after Ottomans. My army being primitive, it will probably be Rome even if Astronomy is not so far off.
