I looked at the map and came up with 3 ideas. First it's important to note that you DO have iron.
1. Click IW. Don't even mess with ag/ah. They don't bring you commerce and you have forests for days. Just preroad and prechop everything and make a go of it. I personally gave this a go last night and did manage to take out two cities including his capital. There were heavy losses and I'm not in a good position, but it's certainly possible with decent luck, you'll just be playing crazy catch-up after that point.
2. Beeline your second city on stone and try for TGW. While TGW can only reliably be built on deity if your capital has stone in BFC, if you WERE going to rely on a second city bringing you stone, TW and Myst are actually the best starting techs for this. After Masonry go Monotheism, not even joking. The holy city gives a 40% bonus on espionage, and lets you run OR asap for more failgold from the stone wonders and to build a couple missionaries to prepare target cities for tech steals. Should be able to make it to cataphracts, just save all the forests so you have some way to build them.
3. Combo! Open settler first heading to stone and steal a worker off Pacal to mine/road to stone. You can win TGW north of 95% of the time with this improvement. Build a wall w/ stone while teching archery, then add a few archers, and you can farm GGs with both IMP and TGW's bonus. Use these for a bunch of CRIII swords and use the gspy to get back into the game economically after you kill Pacal.
Ideas 2-3 kinda rely on map knowledge, but #1 is pretty honest. You'd have to assume you have iron, but in game I think I'd make that assumption out of sheer desperation here, as you're more likely to have iron than beat holkans with chariots.
) could lead to some crazy funny plays too.
