Granary: Did people build a granary in all their cities? If you whip at the health cap the 2 food is effectively worth about 1 food = 1.2 hammers without a granary for a total of about 3.5 with the city tile hammer. With a granary this becomes 6 hammers per turn and is quite good for churning out archers or longbowmen whipping 1 time every 10 turns or so.
If you run organized religion, you can whip at 23 hammers (30*1.25=37.5=60-22.5). Coincidentally, you reach 23 hammers when you hit size 3. I don't think it's especially useful to make granaries early, but there's really nothing else useful to build in your non-wonder city.
Settlers: What is the best way to build settlers? A size 1 city can build one in 34 turns and work a cottage. But grow the city to size 2 (takes 11 turns) and then build a settler and you can whip once 72 hammers have been put into it. That takes 24 turns and together allows 2 cottages to be worked while the settler is being built. Are there better ways to build settlers in the early game?
I found that warrior whipping gives 15 or 16 hammers, and you can whip every 5.5 to 6 turns (depending if you whip before or after size 3). But you generate 3*5.5=15.5 hammers or 3*6=18 hammers, so you don't produce any faster, but you do make a lot of warriors. The only time I find it worthwhile to whip the settler is the final, non-warrior whip. I think size 2 is worth it since you'll have double villages instead of 1 by the time your settler finishes.
Workshops: Initially very weak and not worthwhile, with Guilds and Caste System they can become quite powerful giving a size 2 city working 2 workshops gives 7 hammers which seems very powerful compared with what has gone before. That can churn out Protective archers in 4 turns and longbows in 7 turns; trebuchets take 11 or 12 turns and camel archers take 13 turns.
I found organized religion whipping to be significantly more useful, and you get cottage growth out of it. You can often manage madrassa and aqueducts down to 2 pop whips, and at size 4 you're getting over 2 hammers per food, so really you're trading a 1 food and a cottage/hamlet/village/town for 2 hammers. By the time I hit guilds, I'm only whipping when I'm unhealthy. And if you're expanding adequately, you'll constantly have cities needing slavery. Otherwise, you have to build 2 workshops in range of just about every city, and that's a huge pain to layout.
I wanted to use pacifism, but I really needed my organized religion whips.
Pyramids: Very hard to build but potentially gamebreaking. Three civics are of use.
a) Representation is not needed for happiness and the extra 3 beakers is weak since there are few specialists.
b) Universal Sufferage allows towns an extra hammer and rush buying at 3 gold per hammer. There are a host of sub strategies using early US from Pyramids too numerable to mention.
c) Police State can provide an invaluable 25% boost to hammers from workshops or Slavery used to build units for a final push
I prioritized pyramids pretty late, after AP, apostolic palace, and my GPP generators. Representation was a huge boost to research when I got it, but let's say you go forge first and get an engineer. Rush pyramids, great! But wait, I'm still stuck with a size 1 capital generating 1 to 3 hammers per turn, and I have to wait another 40 turns for my second great person, which means I'll only get 4 hammers per turn to slow build aqueduct (25 turns) + hanging gardens (75 turns) or apostolic palace (100 turns). And my other cities are still stuck at size 2.
Apolostolic Palace: A very powerful wonder when combined with temples and monasteries of the state religion. Gamebreaking if it can be built early enough.
Even better when I remembered monasteries are religious buildings too! You're spiritual, so you can almost one pop whip temples. It can boost your cottage city production 700%! My only issue was that I stupidly converted mehmed for tech trading purposes, and mid game he was way ahead of montezuma and zara. In retrospect, I think it's probably better than hanging gardens. Even if you rush it, you're getting 2 hammers back almost instantly, and another 2 soon after. The initial hammer count in your capital matters so much.
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Hanging Gardens: Provides an extra health and allows all cities to grow 1 bigger. This caused the welcome problem
of unhappiness in my cities which was solved by whipping a temple.
Without apostolic palace or nerfing your economy by running caste, aqueducts are just stupidly inefficient to build without being able to grow to quickly to size 4. It took my like 6 warrior whips to build that damn stonehenge.
Other wonders: Did people build any other wonders? Stonhenge was useful for me giving extra culture and a continuous source of 2 GPPs and was cheap enough to kickstart in the capital with Bureaucracy and OR. A settled GP was a powerful source of extra hammers.
I tried forge->settled engineer in an earlier attempt, but after the forge, without being able to warrior whip or run double workshops, stonehenge takes forever to build. My first engineer came out after I had slow built stonehenge and right before I finished an aqueduct. Stonehenge first (with granary)->forge was much faster than forge->stonehenge. Great priests are less production, but getting 5 GPP that much earlier made a world of difference, and if you play the RNG right you can get a fast great engineer.
(my record)
