Here is my opinion on the current situation:
Loosing Istanbul may not be critical, but still a nuisance. So I suggest: make peace with Babylon and take their gold. Wait until the Knight-force in the Novgorod - Moscow area has healed and then use it to attack Bapedi. At the same time our army group in Medina will attack Zimbabwe. And the Knights currently build in Lisbon, Oporto, Gui, Faro(short-rush), Leiria, Sagres and Lagos will form a third smaller group that attacks Intombe out of Leiria. This pincer-attack will wipe them out so quickly, they'll never know what hit them...
The good thing is: the Zulus have already "build their own prison" on that isolated island east of Isandhlwana, so we can wipe them off our continent completely.
From Zululand our Knights can be shipped over to India, and new units being built in our core will finally take care of Babylon, once the peace deal expires.
I agree with ignas on the point of temples: they won't help much anyway... We should only start building temples, when the dom limit is in reach. For now: the only really endangered cities are Moscow, Lyons and Paris. Can we (settler-)abandon Lyons and Paris and re-settle them? I'd like to keep the furs.
And I like DWetzel's idea of starting to build MIs (and a couple of trebuchets). The reason is: there are many small islands, where Knights are not needed: Inca, Iroquois, America, most probably the Celts (don't think they are connected to Japan), Rome, Japan, Egypt and probably some more. (Maya, China, Aztecs?!). On most of these islands MI will be as fast as Knights. On the bigger ones (like Maya Island) we can unload the units, take the coastal city, heal them, load them on the boats again and sail to the next coastal city. If this is done skillfully, it will be as fast as Knights!
Slight drawback: we will have more losses. But this can be amended by mixing a couple of trebuchets into the stack.
Lagos, Oporto, Emerita, Leiria would be more efficient producing MI than Knights. (And also Istanbul and Alcácer do Sal can be reserved for that task.)
The only continent, where Knights will be useful, is the German/Mongolian/Greek landmass. Here it would be even good to have a Knight-Army! (Hope we get another leader soon.)
Research: It would be nice to have Carracks, but Theology, Education and Astronomy is 4799 beakers. Quite a lot without Libs... So I think we should not do it. But how about Invention and Gunpowder? At 50% that can be done in approx. 25 turns, and then we can use
- Muskets to absorb the initial attack
- Leonardo's for an efficient disconnect/connect strategy
Or even do Invention at full speed? The money we spent here, can easily be gained back by doing disconnect/connect. What do you think?
Lanzelot