I think we might be best off with an army, looking at the save.
The only wonder available to us is Hanging Gardens (three content citizens in its city, one content in all our other cities). I've always thought of HG as a "nice to have" wonder. Its net effect is a commercial one; since there are fewer unhappy people, we can channel some of our commercial output that was going into luxuries into either taxes or science.
Pros: More money for us now; easier to manage the empire if we fight in republic (war weariness).
Cons: As our cities continue to grow, one more content citizen might be less significant. Wonders eventually expire. Aside from its indirect benefits, it does not help us win any wars.
The alternative is to build an army and use it to attack the Persians. The army would give us a powerful unit to help storm cities; if it wins a fight, we can then build the Heroic Epic and get more leaders more quickly.
Pros: The army has a direct effect towards winning the war; Heroic Epic will help us get more leaders later.
Cons: If we are going for immediate leader farming, the army is a disadvantage, because in regular Civ it cannot blitz, so we only get one attack out of it per turn. This might be especially important in view of the fact that we are using skirmishing tactics (we can only skirmish once with an army, but with the three units it contains we can do it three times). Heroic Epic is only useful mathematically if we have ~50 more fights with elites after it is built (see SirPleb's war academy article), and it won't help us get more leaders in the meantime (since we have to spend resources building it somewhere).
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I guess it boils down to how we are going to achieve victory. I know space race has been discussed a lot; are we actually going to get into a race, or can we pound a civ or two into submission on the other continent before building the spaceship? If it is the latter, then we don't have to worry as much about the downsides to heroic epic (have to build it and then fight a lot to see a tangible benefit) because we will be at war later anyway.
I think I would build an army here for three reasons:
1. It has a direct effect on our ability to farm leaders later and will give us an ace (if necessary) when taking cities from the Persians.
2. I don't think the Hanging Gardens provide a significant enough benefit to be particularly useful, especially if we are in Republic after the war. (When war weariness is not a factor, we will have much more commerce available to us anyway, which would duplicate the benefit of the Gardens).
3. Keeping the leader around and hoping we will get a better wonder out of it later doesn't help us with our goals in the meantime. And since the other continent is probably ahead of us in techs (England finished the Great Wall [Construction] in 250 BC, so they would have had to have had the tech long beforehand), we may not get the wonders we want.
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Edit: Silly me! I didn't check a coastal city. Great Lighthouse is available. The Persians are building that though...I'm almost tempted to see how close they are and if we can capture it from them later.
I would STILL rather have an army though. Looking at our map, we haven't yet been successful enough with suicide galleys to show that the lighthouse really is necessary for our expeditions.
Here we are balancing the ability to explore more quickly and easily with the ability to boot the Persians off our continent quicker. I think if we kick off the Persians fast enough and stick to Republic, we can get to a point where the Lighthouse wouldn't be a huge help in a relatively short amount of time. The thing to keep in mind is that we haven't done enough exploring yet to justify a dire need for the lighthouse. Since that's the case, I would rather consolidate our own lands and continue our hit-and-miss exploring efforts than use the leader to build a wonder that still doesn't directly affect our ability to knock out the Persians.
That was kinda hurried, hope it made sense.
What do you think? 10 or 20 pages?
