Bleys:
I agree that the GLH wins this map, and it was done relatively early and with good efficiency. In an early comment pigswill has concurred with your placement of the Marble-Copper city. I had supposed that your reason for not prioritizing BW even without Archery so early was because in this type of map, chokepoints are more powerful, and there's a lot less land to generate land-based barbarians.
Using that extrapolation, I reasoned that your early lack of military was based on a more thorough experience of the map generated, and also pointed to greater generation of water-based barbarians, which Soirana above seems to attest to.
Frankly, I expected more Galleys to come along and pillage my water resources, so I was expecting to build Triremes earlier.
My purpose for building the Pyramids is kinda obscure I suppose. It's to pursue an SE-type TRE en route to a Culture win, which is my preferred win condition. To that end, I built a WB to find other AIs to facilitate the TRE and to acquire religions through OB and trade routes. The Pyramids boost my research through early Rep later being supplemented with Sistine Culture for the baseline. I only needed 9 cities for this win, so I wasn't too keen on taking out Toku or claiming much land early on. Nabbing the Triple-Ivory site was key in keeping other AI off the islands southeast of Istanbul (and Toku protected islands west of Pig/Fur so there was no hurry).
Indeed, I was kind of thinking about keeping Toku around for as long as Shaka didn't declare on him, because Shaka is harder to deal with than Toku - much more likely to declare war with an appreciable effect.
After Ellies come online, Toku will be a nonissue - he'll get left behind in the tech dust and won't have any troops worth mentioning. I was thinking of gifting him Feudalism later on if he doesn't tech it himself so as to prop him up against Shaka on the other side.
In retrospect, it's probable that my experience on Continents and Hemispheres maps is giving me a greater sense of value in Mids for this situation than it warrants. Colossus could probably turn out to be its equal or better, since we expect to run more water tiles. The production is piss-poor though. I have barely any stacks to speak of!
I agree that the GLH wins this map, and it was done relatively early and with good efficiency. In an early comment pigswill has concurred with your placement of the Marble-Copper city. I had supposed that your reason for not prioritizing BW even without Archery so early was because in this type of map, chokepoints are more powerful, and there's a lot less land to generate land-based barbarians.
Using that extrapolation, I reasoned that your early lack of military was based on a more thorough experience of the map generated, and also pointed to greater generation of water-based barbarians, which Soirana above seems to attest to.
Frankly, I expected more Galleys to come along and pillage my water resources, so I was expecting to build Triremes earlier.
My purpose for building the Pyramids is kinda obscure I suppose. It's to pursue an SE-type TRE en route to a Culture win, which is my preferred win condition. To that end, I built a WB to find other AIs to facilitate the TRE and to acquire religions through OB and trade routes. The Pyramids boost my research through early Rep later being supplemented with Sistine Culture for the baseline. I only needed 9 cities for this win, so I wasn't too keen on taking out Toku or claiming much land early on. Nabbing the Triple-Ivory site was key in keeping other AI off the islands southeast of Istanbul (and Toku protected islands west of Pig/Fur so there was no hurry).
Indeed, I was kind of thinking about keeping Toku around for as long as Shaka didn't declare on him, because Shaka is harder to deal with than Toku - much more likely to declare war with an appreciable effect.
After Ellies come online, Toku will be a nonissue - he'll get left behind in the tech dust and won't have any troops worth mentioning. I was thinking of gifting him Feudalism later on if he doesn't tech it himself so as to prop him up against Shaka on the other side.
In retrospect, it's probable that my experience on Continents and Hemispheres maps is giving me a greater sense of value in Mids for this situation than it warrants. Colossus could probably turn out to be its equal or better, since we expect to run more water tiles. The production is piss-poor though. I have barely any stacks to speak of!
Spoiler :
Bleys was right that you don't see many barbs. Despite this, I still think it was right to place the city by the metal, although obviously not for the reasons we claimed. 
Some of my people are pretty annoyed with me over this (there's 53 unhappies out there somewhere 
). Still... I now have thirteen cities and have claimed every food resource south of the Japanese border.
To that end, I have constructed a reasonably decent army of axes and cats. Some war elephants are being trained to add to the mix. The strike will come soon. I am already first on the power graph. I started with a little trial expedition against a barb city at the corn/pigs/ivory north of the capital, taken at the cost of a cat. 
,
...
as you want, see you soon... 
I think this was after I played my game for this cookbook though. 
