Right, the settler is for a canal city NE of Chengdu and I'm planning to send that transport off this turn. Morefish will be sending 2 SAMIs and a cossack on another transport to help out with the attack on Roose. I'll make a note to check if an ICBM is required for Guangzhou--we might be able to reach it from a sub if we get into the northern sea--would be a good idea to have one handy in any case.
The delay on Gandhi was to knock down Bombay's defenses. Even at 0% our cossacks only have around 79% odds. Yes, promos will help, as will the nuking.
But I don't want to lose or even damage any units if we don't have to. I'm also waiting out of ignorance over what will happen when we start nuking, and since the results are very likely to be unfavorable I'd rather put it off. I haven't done this before and worry about all the things you mentioned, and even more about the ones we haven't thought of. Granted, my worries are likely overblown, but there's no real rush to take out Gandhi--he's easy to get to and I don't expect to get a lot of use out of Delhi and Bombay, other than freeing up that last hill forest (to be mined) by Broberg and chopping everything in sight. It's more important to me to be able to take out Roose cleanly and then be in good shape to go after Mao right away. However, I'll count up our units and see if we can take out Gandhi before Roose without delaying the latter. Oh, and another reason to wait is we'll be closer to getting Ecology for fallout scrubbing. Yeah, rather lame excuses but putting 'em together...
I'm planning to build a sub in Broberg regardless to use against Churchill's islands so we won't need to haul one over from Moscow. Drafted and built units are being assembled in Novgorod for island hopping, although we'll be bringing some from Cow/Copper, too. You're right that we'll run out of places to draft at some point (although Seaside is pretty near inexhaustible) but we're not far from finishing our teching and we can then crank up the culture slider to give room for another level of drafting. Universal Sufffrage will give us another boost when it comes in about 4 turns.
From the Progress page info it looks like Murky and Xteam will take the top 2 spots but we have a real shot at 3rd. My daily checks show that 5th Element's last save was Nov 28 (1947), Misfits Nov 27 (1958), WhoDat Nov 28 (1944), and Unusual Suspects Nov 27 (1926). Barring the unexpected (massive global warming and starvation?) we should be able to beat all those except 1926--let's hope that upload isn't their last, or it isn't too close to their finish date. In any case, I think we needed to try it this way if we were going to have any shot at a medal. If we fail miserably I apologize, but the alternative 45-turn plan just wasn't looking competitive.