Round 1: 4000 BC to 2720 BC (32 turns)
The Capital
I decided to settle in place for the reasons I discussed above. Corn, two riverside elephants, and lots of trees was not enough to get me to spend a turn moving.
The capital has a ton of early wonder production capacity with the trees. After those trees are chopped the capital can work cottages and become a pretty awesome bureaucracy capital. The capital began by building a worker with the corn.
After the worker came out, I started on a warrior for exploration. After the warrior, I began on Stonehenge. I like Stonehenge with De Gaulle's combination of traits so I want it.
You'll notice that I chose to work the flood plain instead of the unimproved elephants. I wasn't quite sure which was optimal. But we have a huge happy cap, and I'm not too worried about missing Stonehenge, so I decided to grow as that will give us more options later. When the camp finished, however, I switched to working that tile, even though it took a turn off of growth. Was this the right move?
After the city grew to population 4, I went back to working the flood plain.
I flirted with the idea of working a plains forest. But again, I'm not worried about losing Stonehenge and I want to grow to get to my already ridiculously large happy cap.
At the end of the turnset, the capital looks like this
Scouting
I did this to demonstrate my scouting pattern. It turned out this wasn't as interesting as I thought it might be. But since I made all the notes to myself I thought I'd show you where I scouted. I've spent that last bit of the turn set healing since I got attacked by a panther.
Neighbors
Well this is just ridiculous. We meet our first neighbor before the game even started (not really, but practically). On turn 3 I meet
What do we know about Mao? He is protective which is going to be a pain, especially if we rush him early. He appears to be extremely close, so a rush is enticing. But protective archers are a real
. Mao will definitely declare at pleased. So it's looking like there's going to be some problems in our future.
I sent my second warrior south to see if I could see anything interesting going on with Mao. I was thinking of maybe stealing a worker if the opportunity presented itself, but instead I found this.
Uh oh. What's he coming north for? The land up here is not great. Is there no space to the south? Mao and I both have the same amount of espionage on each other so there's no AIs to the south which means that he must not have room to expand. This is bad news for me as it makes a war declaration more likely. And I was hoping to build wonders for the first 5000 years of this game,
.
Ah crap, an early rush just went even more out the window.
That city is going to be very expensive to take. No doubt about it.
Worker Micro
I really liked Kossin's worker micro report in his current Hatshepsut game and decided to try and do something similar. Be warned that I am not trying to demonstrate what's optimal, but am instead showing what I did with hopes that the better players will tell me what I should have done differently.
I began with what seemed obvious and moved the worker to the corn and began farming it.
After the farm was finished I moved the worker to the elephants that were right next door and started on a camp.
I wasn't positive on what to do next. But I wanted to get a camp on that second herd of elephants. So I sent the worker north to the elephants.
Here's where things got shady. I probably should have put half of a road down on those elephants, but instead I sent the worker directly to the riverside grassland tile due south of the capital. I want this forest chopped since I can then build something on the tile and because I don't like having forests right next to my capital (or any city for that matter) where the enemy can set up defenses.
Well the worker has a turn to kill until Bronze Working gets in, so I have him build a road for one turn. The way I do this is by clicking build road like I normally would. And then at the end
of the same turn I hit the cancel button. If you try to do it at the beginning of next turn the worker often finishes whatever he's doing and wastes a turn. This way I can begin chopping right away next turn, as soon as Bronze Working is in.
I haven't started on the chop yet, as I decided to save the game at the beginning of the turn in case anyone had anything interesting to suggest, like going to farm the flood plain. (Did any of you guys play R. E. Lee Civil War General? It was a really super game. But one of the annoying things about it was that you had to completely finish your turn before you saved. If you saved with troops still yet to move, their turn was sacrificed. Point is, I'm glad Civ let's me save mid turn.)
Techs
Techs went as planned. I researched Hunting first to allow me to improve the elephants. After that I went Mining and Bronze Working. With 13 forests in my capital, Bronze Working was a no brainer tech to shoot for. Also, we need Bronze Working to let us pop Metal Casting with the Oracle.
I stopped the round with Bronze Working and this discovery
We have no copper. So an already unappealing early rush is now pretty much out. I suppose I could research Animal Husbandry to look for horses, but I'm not that inclined to. We have no food that need pastures which would make AH a purely speculative play. Barbs are also not a problem, so getting a strategic resource unit is not necessary for protection.
I look forward to your comments, questions, and answers.
Also, what do you guys think of the write-up being theme based instead of purely chronological? Does it break up the game too much? I found that it made it much easier to demonstrate things like worker micro and city managing and therefore hopefully more helpful for those of you from whom I'm looking to for feedback.
. I think there are definitely benefits to any early war. Mao's capital, no enemy cities that close to my capital to worry about, get some early high experience units to unlock the Heroic Epic and get some Great Generals. 
