Here's a suggestion for a few modest changes to Renata's proposed plan.
The most important thing is to skip the mine on the river hill for starters and go for the Silver immediately. That will actually save us a worker turn, and means we can grow to size 8 without fear. It also amounts to using the Furs as much as we are able - note that if at any time we lose the furs, we can go back to Renata's plan at that point without losing step, the GLib will still come in time. The idea is that we don't really need to build aggressively while waiting for Literature, and by sacrificing a few hammers short term we can gain quite a lot of growth and research, as well as hammers long term.
Trading away the Furs
resource doesn't mean we can't work the Furs
tile - so no worries regarding the commerce, which we definitely need. And with my changes to the plan we definitely don't need the Furs short term, not until turn 75 at the earliest. So I suggest we gift it to someone - Washington there too? - to speed up good relations.
I also played around a bit to see if it was possible to get the GLib one turn earlier. Turns out it
is possible, assuming everything works to our favor (we keep the furs, no rounding errors in research overflow etc). But it would delay the second GP one turn, and NE one turn. And if we commit to it and suddenly lose the Furs, there'd be no turning around. I'm putting it up here for the fun of it, but I strongly suggest that we don't seriously consider it.
We seem to have a definite consensus to trade for IW and Maths at least, so I'll start with that right away.
If we find iron in the BFC, I guess a lot will change...
