RE: settler spam
Can you explain the strategy here? I see no use for extra cities with no resources or forests to make them useful additions to our empire. Is this part of a city gifting strategy?
If we settle 1W of gold, then the gems city and the cows city build themselves pretty much - but we still need two settlers. There are options for a marble-banana-possible-seafood city, or a fish-marble city, or a northern wheat city if we want them. We will need some coastal cities for building caravels, and precisely because we won't have any big coastal hammer cities, we'll want a handful that are up at a good size for whipping a caravel or two. In principle, we want three caravel+missionary teams to hit the road very soon after Optics, and some replacement caravels building to take the next missionaries as soon as we get the first gifts off.
I'm envisaging a largely peaceful RL VC, where our victory date is accelerated by earlier AI contacts and earlier caravel+missionary gifts. A war with Toku will happen, but I hope for an efficient defensive phase while we tech up to Machinery, and then a crossbow phase to take Osaka.
They way I see it, we will be building barracks, Axes, and Cats and fighting...probably on both fronts. Our workers are going to sit around and maybe make a cottage (that will go unworked) or re-build pillaged tiles. There's no place to make roads to, and not much else to chop. The workers can't do hardly anything for the coastal cities you mentioned.
That requires that we find metal and tech up to Maths+Construction. That tech slows down the advent of Optics. Why do we need to conquer more land? You usually don't need lots of population to get enough votes to win the usual sort of RL VC. The two AIs we might be able to kill early are those most likely to have a spontaneous Hindu spread to save us time on Hindu-spreading.
In my mostly-peaceful scenario, various of my suggested coastal sites will need to organize their food supply and their handful of Gmines - the sooner the better, and so a collection of workers is useful there. Our river cities will run some scientists for a GPerson or two, but then will need to work whatever mixture of hammers for units or cottages for commerce makes sense.
What exactly is the plan with the Oracle in the East? Is it so important that we rape our land of most forests just to get it out a couple turns earlier? I'm not saying I feel safe delaying the Oracle, but do we really need it in the East?
The east plan was partly hoping to use the Oracle culture to put pressure on Osaka after we capture it, to hope we get to use Osaka as a gift-rort for some AI that still has fewer than 4 cities at the time. That's a bit of a frail reed, though.
Culture-capturing the corn (which might take until about T90-95 in one test I ran) also buffs the city site 1W of gold into a massive hammer thing at about the time we'd like to be building the AP.
Perhaps we need some data on how soon we can build a T62ish Oracle in Delhi, and follow that up with a force that can do serious damage to Toku. We can probably get Osaka in a sneak attack with a pile of axes, but Kyoto will need siege support. Protective and Aggressive is a pain. So are Hammu's bowmen. We'll want to wait until we have BW to find our hoped-for copper before doing extensive testing. We'd also want some data on when he might be likely to DOW us. If Toku won't DOW us for a while, the military approach starts to hurt. We also don't want to build up too fast, lest our power rating discourage his DOW.
Instead of just disagreeing, I would like to test some alternatives and provide my own suggestions, but first I want to understand if Oracle-East is key to our city flipping/gifting strategy...and I'd like to see if we get copper, so I give thumbs up to play that far.
If Oracle-East is mainly to flip the corn, then I'm against that idea. We will soon own that corn city, so there is no reason to have the corn in both cities.
What turn number is "soon"? We won't have Writing until T65-70 depending whether we stop off for AH. We need some feel for when Toku will DOW us (or to hope we can DOW both Gawas before we meet other AIs, so we don't take diplo penalties).
I see the war-monger strategy as likely to slow down our advance to caravels, which allow us both to find out the scope of what we need to do in order to execute our RL VC, and get it done faster. Building the Oracle specifically in the east is largely tangential to this, but I think a culture capture of corn around T90 + Optics is likely to be faster than conquering Osaka + Optics, even if Toku DOWs us exactly when we want him to.
sorry - I was wrong in focussing too much on a loss-free reduction of the 'dirty' overflow beakers from PH. For the overall calculation it is better to follow the original plan = regular binary research BW->PH->TW, this gets us 1
more clean OF after TW.
more than Tribalism, but not so with 4 cities (or 6) as long as our total population is either < 19 or in the range 23...26. 
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or higher, this will mean lighthouse built, thus Sailing online for them. In that case, a new Hammy city may help him to close the gap or we help him by road that only tile next to the mountainous river. In other words, road there isn't a pressing issue.
