I played out this match for about 8 more hours, and with more modern archers and crossbowman I was able to undo the disadvantage of not having iron/copper, and finally conquer my continent. From that point on, my tech lead was great enough I called it a victory.
I updated my copy of AND to the latest SVN, and started a fresh match, on an Archipelago. Why Archipelago? I like water. And it's like playing on a one higher difficulty level, without the higher difficulty handicap.
Ok, so I started out on a smallish landmass:
Not so terrible a start. No enemies, and later as it turn out, iron was right next to my capital. But I found that I simply couldn't do anything. I spend 90% of my game time clicking next turn due to lack of hammers to produce much. 200 turns later and I barely had the continent settled.
I met lots of other civs with a galley, and basically the one civilization on a decent size landmass (Isabella) settled 10 cities and got way ahead of everyone else. It was to the point where I couldn't research anything unless it had already been discovered by a bigger civ. Any original techs would take 200+ turns to research. Tech diffusion was the only way I or the other civs even could keep up.
I tried expanding my economy and spreading out to other islands, but the sheer lack of production on ocean tiles prevented this from ever outpacing the much larger civs. Even my city growth was lackadasial. It took 500 turns for me to get a size 10 city!
This defies conventional wisdom. Historically, (and even now) oceans were the real food source for the world. Cities only existed on oceans or large waterways. Inland cities were not a thing until later more complex societies arose that could build roads to maintain them. Oceans were the real source of growth (and still are, most of the largest cities in the world today are coastal).
I think part of the problem is old. Way, WAY, back when Zappara switched population to consume 3 rather than 2 food, water tiles were never rebalanced. Water tiles are essentially a desert in RAND. They don't provide enough food or resources to make them worth using, unless you can get some powerhouse wonders to improve them, and even then, they are still not better than a city with a few hills and farms! The River irrigation/Canals mid-game help, but it comes *way* too late. I was already 1/3 the score of the top Civ by the time these came around (400 vs 1200) .
So here are my proposals:
1.) Raise coast and ocean base production by 1 food. This makes them at least sustainable even w/o a lighthouse. A lighthouse then allows cities to grow.
2.) Allow construction of a new "fishing nets" and "fishery" improvement on all coastal tiles. The fishing nets gives +1 hammer. The fisher gives +1 commerce. It provides Allow the workboat to create these, but without consuming the workboat. I suspect the AI can deal with this ok. Playtesting probably required to confirm.
3.) New "Smokehouse" fishing building, requires coastal city & fishing tech. Requires 1 resident to operate (I added a special XML tag for this way back) gives an extra +1 food per ocean tile (not coast).
This will probably need playtesting to get the balance right, but it should make Archipelago and water-maps playable again.
Savegame in question attached, feel free to mock me on how badly the AI is beating me:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/Afforess AD-0806.CivBeyondSwordSave
