An early-morning session, and I'm already 100 turns in. So far, the game is going as well as can be expected. I thought quite a while about the settle location. I like settling T0, but the hill and the observatory are also tempting, even if I would move away from a lot of civil service farms and a banana, but I thought I might settle another city for those (as it turned out, with the coast just below, I could just about squeeze one in). I think this game will be going to internet, so I moved onto the hill for the observatory, picking up another gems that otherwise I would have settled, nice.
I have seen other commentators give a step-by-step overview of the early game including ruins, so I thought I would also do that: T4 spearman upgrade, T7 map, T8 pop (from 1 to 2, but still useful since it made me reach 3 earlier, at which pop I would make settlers). After that, I became engrossed in the game and forgot about recording ruins, though I did get a few more including some gold, as I was flush with money in the early game. About the spearman upgrade, FilthyRobot did not like it much on single player, since you can't tribute city states anyway, but I value the spearman highly as worker stealing becomes much easier. Early on, there was a limited-vision steal from William available. With a scout or even a warrior, I might not have attempted it, but with the spear I could come charging in.
My build order was scout-scout shrine (for tears of the god, which I got early thanks to meeting a religious city state first) into settler-settler-settler-settler, so 5-city tradition: two cities on the river west near William (so many luxuries and bonus resources there!), and two coastals. The only part of my game that might have gone better was worker stealing. I stole one worker from the Dutch, two from Inca, and two from Tyre, although the second one was very late. I could not camp Tyre effectively because my scout was dragged away to deal with barb camps, so when I returned to Tyre it had already improved some tiles and was starting to get units out. Thankfully, my first expands were surrounded by forests, so I could chop out more workers.
For tech direction I was doubting. For a long time, I always went universities first, but more recently I've been preferring workshops first, to get that production online early. For this game, the capital could really use civil service, as it does not have many bonus resources to work, but I went workshops anyway, also because I wanted to get construction, in case I needed composite bowmen. Warring two AI early game can be a little risky, and even though this is not Deity, early war on Immortal can still be dangerous. In the end, all civs forgave my early transgressions, and I've become friends with a few of them. In any case, most of my neighbours are now otherwise occupied, since I bribed France to war Inca and Polynesia, and Inca to war Netherlands
I was quite lucky with wonders this game. I've recently been playing some older GotM games, and I've had games on King and even Prince where I lost 'everything', but here I got Mausoleum in the capital T93, and Oracle T96 in my second expand, uncontested as far as I could tell (at least no other capitals were building the wonders).
