Re: early religeon
* On Emporer, we could easily go for one and still miss it. Judaism we could probably reliably get, but that's a huge delay for worker techs to beeline it.
On Emperor, we'd have a pretty fair shot at one of the first religions, since we start by working a +1 Commerce square (a Corn on the River).
* The benefits of having an early religeon are quite nebulous.
Consider the following: XOTM games are great comparison games, because unlike HOF games, you have several players playing under the same conditions.
I used the successful strategy of hording most Holy Cities to myself in two notable XOTM wins:
GOTM 52: We all chased after Diplo. Here's the strategy that I used in that game:
My strategy and
a couple of more details about my game.
I used a similar strategy to take both the Fastest Diplo and the Gold Medal in a One City Challenge game (what you might call "the ultimate non-Diplomation challenge"), in
WOTM 25. In that game, i wasn't even chasing after a Diplo win, but what I did manage to do was found all religions except for Buddhism, giving me free reign to convert most of the world to one religion.
It may not turn out to be beneficial at all to get an early religeon, at which point we're many turns behind for next to nothing.
Far from it: we'll be well on our way to founding the next religion down the same tech path. Meditation leads to Taoism, Polytheism leads to Monotheism, Monotheism leads to Christianity, etc. Missing one religion by a little bit means that a beeline will get us the next religion; missing a religion by a lot of tech means that we'll have a much greater chance of also missing the next religion down that same tech path.
Dealing with the religeous situation will be important, but we'll have a lot more resources to spare in the mid-game to deal with the situation. We'll also have more trading chips mid-game if we're not miles behind in development.
All of those thoughts sound good until you consider that simply by having ownership of a Holy City, you could trade the world to an AI and they'd still switch back to their Holy City's religion from your persuaded choice of religion, as frequently as 5 turns after each of your bribes.
* The costs are high, and we don't get anything that will replace them.
The costs later can be infinitely higher (i.e. never satisfying the AI enough to stay in our persuaded choice of religion).
* I contend that the best game is going to be one which does not spend time getting an early religeon, but instead gets out of the starting blocks fastest.
But, have hope and faith!
There is an alternative, best-of-both worlds approach:
Tech Agriculture -> Monotheism -> a couple of Worker techs -> Confucianism -> Theology -> Philosophy (and possibly skip Divine Right, as Islam usually doesn't spread that well).
We'd need to make either Hinduism or Buddhism the world's religion, with the other one belonging to our "targeted AI opponent" in a Diplo vote.
This way, we'd POSSIBLY get Hinduism but probably not, since we'd go after it immediately after Agriculture, but we'd COMMIT to getting all of the other religions (except maybe Islam).
As I said before, we'd have to avoid wars until we'd figured out the Diplo situation--in this case, the Diplo situation would depend upon how well either Hinduism or Buddhism spreads across the world and which one we are able to obtain for ourselves from automatic spread.
Don't forget about my stated option of settling 1E. Moving 1E would pick up the Plains Hills square to the SE + SE, would keep us on a river, would allow us to have a Plains River Cottage square (useful for getting "multiples of 4 Hammers" for a Cultural game) by moving the settler off of this square, would keep the Corn, would let us work a Corn from turn 1, and would give us the maximum number of Hills squares possible that we can see (an extremely important point for a Cultural game that is more Wonder-based than Great-Artist-based--note that such a Wonder-based Cultural game just happens to be my specialty in Cultural Wins, whereas a Great-Artist-based game will work less here, as usually you get less Great People in exchange for getting a higher percentage of Great Artists, while our game requires us to get 4 extra Great People).
Moving 1E is less important if we do indeed have 2 Grassland Hills Forest River squares to the E + E and NE + E of the Settler's initial location, as I was under the assumption that we'd have to move just to be able to get 3+ Hills squares when I made the recommendation to move 1E. I'm still not convinced about that square to the NE + E, but E + E is looking Hilly to me now that Mitchum has pointed it out. Still, anyone confirming or denying what he sees would be helpful for determining our capitol's location.
1. Spend some number of turns examining the surroundings to find the best settling location, at the cost of not settling there as early as we could have...
I strongly dislike (1).
With the team discussing things before moving the Warrior, I can't see how we would possibly need to explore so much before settling. Once we've got our strategy in place and have thought about which location would be our preferred location and which would be our backup location, the Warrior move plus a potential Settler+1-more-Warrior move will be more than enough to know exactly where to settle.
4. Settle NW after discovering a windfall of resources in that direction.
(4) can be resolved quickly and easily by moving the warrior NW.
What Resources do you think could be on 2 Plains, 1 Grassland, and 1 Grassland Forest square (the only relevant squares revealed by sending the Warrior 1NW) that could make up for our capitol only have 2 Hills squares, with neither of said Hills squares being on a River? Would 1 Plains Wheat that has no access to Fresh Water prior to Civil Service do it for you? Perhaps you are hoping to find an Ivory on each of the Plains squares? Maybe you're hoping against hope that the Map Designer modded-in a Deer or Horse Resource on the Grassland Forest square? Would a Grassland Dye be enough for you to move? I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, so I hope that I am not coming off that way. I just want to know what would be the most valuable to you, so that if we do chase after this option, we can maximize our Warrior's movement. For example, if you only care about Plains-square-based Resources, then we'd move the Warrior 1N instead of 1NW, to reveal 3 Plains squares that would be in the fat cross of settling 1NW.
Re: Overall Strategy
* REX like crazy...
* Research economy techs, towards Education and Liberalism. Use great scientists for an academy, and to bulb Philosophy and Education.
Assuming that we played a game where we did not focus on grabbing religions, why not go for an Astronomy beeline? Wouldn't getting access to foreign religions be very important? Wouldn't Astronomy help a ton with REXing off-continent? Wouldn't Astronomy ASAP help us to start getting Open Borders and Resource Trading bonuses that much earlier?
If you recall our practice game, the tech path calls for avoiding Meditation, Philosophy, and Education until after we've bulbed Astronomy, but that path works surprisingly well in most non-Pangea games. It even fits with my idea of a Monotheism beeline, with the exception of letting an AI get Taosim and us putting a priority on spamming Hinduism or Buddhism to the Taoist founder as soon as we meet said founder.
The more that I think about it, we were on the right track with our practice game's Astronomy beeline. Mix that together with a bit more religious beelining and I think that we'll have a winning tech path!
* Once we have universities and oxford, make a beeline for Mass Media.
Oxford is not needed for a Diplo game IF you get early Astronomy. The +25% bonus from early (cheaper-than-Universities) Observatories plays a big role in this approach. My GOTM 52 Diplo win listed above was a game where I did not build Oxford until after I built The United Nations.
* Manage the diplomatic situation as it comes. While being very very careful about it of course. I don't mean make it up as we go along, I just think we can't make most of the decisions until we've actually met a few AIs.
Sort of. For example, we shouldn't Open Borders with any AI automatically. Opening Borders with a few, select AIs can be better decided-upon after meeting a few AIs. But, we can't play a normal game where the UP player just accepts all Open Borders agreements. Thus, we DO need to think about and plan out ALL of our Diplo interaction policies (even something as seemingly innocent as refusing most or all early Open Borders requests) before playing, but I will give you that we can often delay deciding which particular requests to accept (or which offers to make--such as Open Borders--instead of just accepting ones that AIs propose) until a bit later on.
Overall, I think the early turns actually don't have a lot of decisions, while the midgame diplomacy is where we really need to be careful and spend a lot of time making plans.
Hopefully, I have convinced you of the fallacy of this statement.
) and some of us are now leaning toward a Cultural victory. I think that playing Devil's Advocate is a good thing since it challenges our assumptions and forces us to think about the issue from all angles. 
