Well, 190 turns in, it's not looking so good. The big-ish island next to me can hold one decent city (or two crappy ones) - it's about 20 tiles total. There are no city-states next to me (there are 32 on the map). I finally found the Romans - about 80-100 tiles away via the north pole area with one chokepoint held by an island with a barbarian camp (of course) that has an archer in it, so getting there with embarked units at this point is extremely risky. Rome's island looks way bigger than mine, and worse, is mostly grassland, at least from what I can see. I might try to sneak a scout over protected by my trireme, but that'll take 15 turns. At least I'm England. On the flipside, the score for the Romans is 150, I'm at 70.
It took a long time for me to even get to the Romans, because I had to fight a constant wave of barbarian ships that blocked off the approach to the other side. I can see an island next to me with a city-state, but.... here's the catch - there's no coast area for me to glide over there.
Petra is indeed a remote, remote possibility, but as it is I'm not too optimistic. I would've beelined for it if I didn't have to beeline optics first, but because I had to go for optics I don't think I'll get there fast enough. Turns out optics wasn't very useful. I could also just start again and forget about optics (since it's proving to give me nothing) and instead just go straight for Petra.
I'll try to get a screenshot in, but somehow trying to take a screenshot is crashing my game (with no screenshot)
