I hope you all noticed the importance of the decision the next research goal sets!
potential goals:
1.) improve commerce (and growth) (-> go for (agri) - TW -
pottery )
- our research will mainly improve with cottages, because there are no high-commerce resources close by (besides the gems, but we need IW to chop the jungle first)
- river-cottages give initially 3 commerce which is good...
- CERN does not have a great growth-rate -> granery and a rice-farm would help a lot
- makes good use of fin and exp-trait (early river-cottages and cheap granery)
- rice-farm improves CERN's growth rate
- farms (esp. at the other rice) will give our second city a very solid start
2.) race for religion (and the oracle) (-> go for Meditation/Polytheism -> Priesthood)
- gives us more culture, +1

when adopting religion and enables religious civics
- ... with the problem: religion will be founded in capital ... don't need culture there ... have no religious civics to use...
- I would prefer founding a religion in our second or third city so we don't need a monument there (missio with foundation only after conf. and christ.; build missio needs monastry ... lots of early hammers)
- we won't be able to get a decent free pick from the oracle, because that would require pottery or writing
- religion/oracle now will delay economic improvement and our expansion
- don't need the happiness right now, because CERN grows slowly and with the ivory and 1 or 2 warriors we'll have enough happiness until we build a ballcourt (lots of workers and settlers won't give CERN the time to grow too much...)
- HUSch said, that he believes that SANCTA went for myst. first... they are creative (-> don't need monuments)... so they are probably planning to go for a religion (and/or a WW). Their research is better, so they can outtech us to the first religion and they get a ~2-3 turns headstart. ... we might loose reli-race, because we have to gamble on their tech-project (medi or poly) ... at worst we invested 10-12 turns into an useless tech and not get an religion...
3.) go for horses (-> go for agri+hunting - AH)
- hunting will enable our UU -> we are save from barbs for some time, but we can't build warriors any more (warriors are cheap happiness in cities (MP) and explorers)
- can improve the rice -> better growth for CERN
- ivory-camp, rice-farm or pigs-pasture in second city give it a better start
- see horses ... we don't have copper...
- don't think this path is good for us now...
4.) go for iron
- see iron
- we don't see copper right now...
- chop the jungle on the gems for a huge commerce tile
Every path takes about the same time... (~20 turns)
I think we should go for pottery (+agri) now. This will improve our growth and our commerce.
By the time we have pottery, we probably are just founding our second city. So that would be a good timing.
Then we can go for a religion (and maybe for the oracle if nobody shot for it before). This way our 2nd or 3rd city becomes holy city and we tech a lot faster because of the first cottages. -> speed up religious path
After religion+priest we can either go for writing or IW or hunting+AH ... depending on our 2nd/3rd cities' requests.
(maybe we should try to omit some of the basic techs as long as possible without loosing too much potential in our cities, and priorize alpha instead in order to get these techs via trades?)