Great stuff from krikav and My.
krikav touched on a few major points, you did touch on a couple, but I'll add my thoughts:
1) I don't think I or anyone had yet explain this, but your cap - Persepolis - very early is responsible for at least the first couple of settlers and workers. So the cap will be whipped a bit initially. Then its responsibility is to build that Library and get up a couple of scientists to produce that first GS, which is generally used for an academy in your cap. An academy significantly increases your research and pays off all game. (cap is usually where you place it because ideally the cap will be suitable for and setup up for Bureaucracy, which greatly boosts the commerce from all the growing cottages)
-So, to point, the cap is generally the major producer of beakers for much of the game. At some point like around the time of your last save, it is time for the cap to focus on growth and let the other cities in your empire take the brunt of any whipping needs. I mean that is a major benefit of having the nicely growing empire you do have now, and still growing.
2) Again, you need a bit more focus on city micro - checking what tiles are worked and making sure cities are working best tiles. You will even get more nuanced at this as you gain experience like timing whips and adjusting tiles to max overflow. So, to point, cities like Susa and Parg are working bad tiles. Susa not working fish all this time was really bad. Parg is working two grass tiles when silk was available.
Now
Parg, is an interesting example of a relatively low food/high production site. Great city for settler production, and I'd probably have it doing that and maybe more workers. With deer, copper, silk and that mined PH, and IMP trait, you have setup for pretty fast settlers.
3) Yeah - Dam grew into unhappiness, so that is another thing to be mindful of. Now growing into unhappy is not necessarily bad if you plan on actually using that citizen for a good whipping...unhappy citizen is still the same 30H whipped. On the other hand you can manage unhappy by either adjusting tiles are queuing up a worker or settler to stall growth. Right now, krikav's idea of whipping a settler is good, although you likely will replay this turnset anyway.
4) Dam is probably a good place to chop out Pyramids once stone is settled.
5) Lastly, open borders allows for those juicy foreign trade routes. My did a great job of pointing this out above. Trade routes are very important. Think of them like cottage inside your cities bringing you extra commerce. Internal trade routes are important, ofc, and what you have until you get foreign trade routes connected, which are essentially double the commerce. Trade routes commerce will grow as well as cities grow, and overseas trade routes - cities on other land masses or islands - are even more lucrative.
We have not touched on diplomacy much yet. For one, up to this point you had not met many AI and..well..one we knew would be toast. Generally rule for now is to open borders with everyone the second you get Writing. Not only does this open potential for foreign trade routes (connection from a road or coastal via Sailing) but OB over time gives a diplo boost. Otherwise, diplo is a bit of a complex concept that takes time to learn, so I'll not overwhelm you yet with that discussion. I will say that there are times that you may be judicious about who you OB with, but that is about the relations between AI and AI. (it has nothing to do with this whole scouting your empire thing)
Lastly, I do want to explain an important concept that is often confusing for players. The
icon on maps represents commerce. You get commerce
from cottages, trade routes and special resources like gold, gems,and most calendar type resources. Commerce
is not gold
. That first and foremost is often a major point of confusion especially, I guess, since the commerce icon looks like a gold coin. Commerce is what directly feeds your sliders. The sliders are all about the commerce you earn. Commerce can be turned into beakers, gold, culture and espionage via the sliders. Gold is obviously earned by lowering the research slider. The more you lower the more gold you earn.
Ideally, your goal is to always be at 100% research. Obviously, you are not always in a state to do so. We've already discuss quite a bit about the whole 0% or 100% research thing so that you max gold until you can then fund a tech. So, to point, as long as you are earning gold (or rather gold per turn GPT) at 0% research you are in fine shape. As cottage grow and more worked, as trade routes or boosted, all this gets better and better - i.e., your ability to a) generate gold b) research faster. But, again, keep in mind that you always want to be running 100% research when you are able to do so.
Currency, a tech you will get in the near future, is a very important tech that does a few things that really boosts your research and gold generating power. First, it doubles your the amount of trade routes in each city - 2 trade routes instead of one. With foreign trade routes, which you will generally have before Currency is teched, this is huge. Second, it allows you to trade extra copies of resources for GPT with the AI if the gpt available. Next, it also allows you to trade old useless techs to the AI for chunks of gold - which in turn allows you to keep your slider high. Lastly, it opens the ability to build wealth in cities to turn hammers into gold, which can be really useful when cities may not have anything better to do. (Note: Alpha allows building research turning hammers into beakers)
edit: And a point on units that folks have touched on. Yeah, you can probably bring in some units inside borders. That warrior up N is good for MP in some city. You still want a couple of units hanging up N and NW to prevent barbs, since that area is unkown, but you barbs are certainly not much of an issue now. I don't even recall seeing one all game.
And building more units right now is really unnecessary unless you have plans to use them. And more units adds to unit maintenance. You don't have Alpha and Currency yet so can't build wealth or research. Some cities are still focused on Settlers or worker builds anyway. Persepolis needs to grow and has nothing really to build, other than I think the one settler it as finishing up early. Nothing wrong with starting a Barracks there as a placeholder so that it grows for now, after that settler.
And at least 1 Immortal unit might be fine to build somewhere. You can send him out scouting E into Chuck's lands, but otherwise you really don't need units right now.
With a couple of axes up there busting and protecting stone city, Scout can probably move on and actually do scouting. Move up into Hammy's land and follow his roads to scout out the map and meet the remaining unmet AIs.
-value for your techs. This doesn't mean that the trade is bad for you - it's "free" tech for you anyway. I don't think you need to be very concerned about giving AI something, unless it's a key military tech. But in general, you should be trading a lot. There is no diplo penalty for not accepting their offers, so you can always decline when they pop up and return to the trade screen later. Selling techs for gold is especially good.
