Choosing a continents map for an espionage game turned out to be a bigger disadvantage than I had expected. Christianity also went to the other continent, that's 5-0 to them. Managed to finally snail my way to Philo and founded Tao in 400 BC. But of course the holy city turned out to be one of the cities I had planned to gift away and make legendary.

Kind of odd, as it's very close to capital and one of my largest cities. I thought smaller cities were more likely to become holy cities.
But main problem is not religion, problem is that I would need contact with the 7 missing AI to sell techs and keep my slider up. I'm only missing Nationalism and Constitution from my tech target, but then I still need a lot of Espionage slider. Maybe it would be worth it to take a 10k beaker detour to Optics... Nobody has MC yet, so it would all have to be selfteched.
In 400 BC I have 23 cities (half of the cities on my continent), 400 bpt or 500

/turn at 100%, 145 gpt at 0% and 160bpt break even. Forbidden Palace coming in in a couple of turns to help it a bit. I have no idea if this is good or not in a marathon game with no super early rush unit and slow emperor AI.
I'm even considering switching goal and going for UN instead. Not a single ancient start game has been played for the large/emp/mara slot. Should be easy to beat. Then I could head for Optics while taking out the last 2 pathetic AI on my continent without declaring war on anyone's friend. Or kill Ramesses and peace vassal Freddy for free votes. But if I go UN it would have been quite a waste to build TGW and SY in cap instead of the Academy I should have had up a thousand years ago in a UN game.
Then to continue the series of mechanics question. How is the target city picked when you chop out of BFC forests?
In the picture above, the hammers from the marked forest would go to Rostov, which is 3.5 tiles distance from the plot, instead of Ecbatana, which is 3 tiles distance from the plot. Why? Rostov was in my possession before Ecbatana, in case that makes a difference.