Rock or Marble?

Stone means you will lessen the harm that building the mids could do to your expansion plans. That's why I think it's so important here. I still think mids are really really powerfull, although that doesn't mean I actively look for it every game. In fact, if I have no stone, I will only build it if it somehow falls on my lap (lots of trees, great production city, AI's are slow in building wonders an so on).

That's true, and I don't build them always either. However I'm playing LoR mod right now, and the government civics unlocked are a huge bonus in keeping the empire intact!
 
I'll probably say stone (although it's a tight choice), but just because you can usually have a chance to beat someone to TGL if you don't have marble. AI's delay Aesthetics, so you have more control. But for an expensive early wonder like the Pyramids, you often don't have that advantage. Plus stone allows you for an early Maoi and a fast Ox (which I find to be a fairly expensive national wonder).
 
Between marble and stone, I'll definitely quarry the stone first in the early part of the game. But I'd gladly trade stone for marble later on the game usually to get hammer discounts on Taj and Sistine.
 
I'd take stone. I love the early 3 stone wonders, Stonehenge makes me half-creative, GW let's me ignore spawnbusting and Mids allows for early city development. The early game is the most important part of the game, and getting a good base set up is much easier with stone wonders in place. No military needed to spawnbust, settling is a lot more lax, and monarchy is not needed.

Bonus to Moai and Oxford is also nice. If they need to be build in low-prod cities, then speeding them up helps considerably.
 
I used to feel that Stone was better, but I don't really agree now that I've been playing more. Sure, the early Stone wonders are fantastic, but the early game, unless you're in isolation or semi-isolation with someone like Mansa Musa/Hammurabi (wait...scratch that, I'll explain later) should be about getting your basic infrastructure, cities, and workers out to improve those tiles.

Sure, if you can fit in Stonehenge or something between city growth for settlers/workers that might not be bad, but the price you pay for those early wonders is in land, especially if you have Imperialistic/Creative leaders near you who will be snapping up land very quickly.

Marble on the other hand is useful AFTER you've gotten those cities out and can figure out what you want to do. Need more GPP? Parthenon. Research/GPs? GLib. Heroic Epic for more efficient troop production to garrison/war. National Epic to crank out more GPs.

Stone later on gets worse too -

USankore is workable only if you're running a religion (not a possibility on some maps - do you really want to run a different religion than happy-spammy Sury, convert-or-die Isabella, Saladin, or Zara Yaqob? Of course, if you have the same religion as them...go for it. But you can't count on religion spreading to you either for that option, and post Optics (which is when Paper is more or less researched) is when other civs are going to be showing up, presumably with different religions.

Spiral Minaret is nice but it's activated by a dead-end tech, and again, you need a religion for it to be workable.

edit: Once ended up on the same continent as MM/Hammurabi and thought I could out-tech MM peacefully to Liberalism. Haha. He put it up in like 800 AD, and I quit right there.
 
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