Regardless of whether I am the Mole, our Civ needs some help, so I am going to try and play a nice turnset. It would be all too easy to make us lose the game at this point.
Okay, first things first, it seems that some people are being rather vicious towards the decisions of others by way of signs:
Sure, there is a Mole, but most of the players are not a Mole, so let's be a little bit nicer towards each other, alright? Not everyone thinks the same way that you do, so keep that thought in mind. There are much more polite ways of pointing out differences of opinion. Even if I am the Mole, I don't want to see that kind of fighting going on, okay?
We just completed our Pasture, so we can finally start working it. That means that we will finally be working more than a single improved square.
Current situation:
Planned situation:
Notice how we're about to grow to Size 4 but will only have 2 improved squares to work? What we will instead do is whip out a Work Boat. We will be down to Size 3 but we will be working 3 improved squares, which is not too bad of a situation for us to start building and Chopping out a second Worker, followed by Chopping out a Settler. After the Worker but before the Settler, we can complete our second Warrior.
I will set Espionage to a single target by assigning a Weight value. The goal here is to eventually get to see what a single AI is researching. If we don't focus the Espionage Points via this Weighting, then Espionage Points will be spread across a ton of different AIs and they will essentially go to waste. Also, when an AI sees that you are spending Espionage Points on them, they will spend more Espionage Points on you.
Espionage Points work BEST when the AI has spent very few points on you. So, a very strong strategy is to spend zero Espionage Points on most of the AIs until later in the game when you make a lot of Espionage Points per turn, and only THEN spent a lot on a new target, allowing you to catch said AI with their proverbial espionage pants down.
Hatshepsut has spent 0 Espionage Points on us to date, so we know that she knows at least 1 other AI but likely knows several other AIs. So, already we can get a feel for the fact that there are many AIs within striking distance.
We have access to a Horse Resource at our planned second City location, so I think that a much stronger move is going to be building Chariots and forgetting about The Oracle (at least until later).
Right now, we don't even have The Wheel so we can't even connect-up Resources. We don't even have a second City. Metal Casting isn't going to be of use until we have about 6 Cities and Civil Service, while nice to get, won't be terribly useful, as we don't have a lot of riverside squares to put Cottages on.
However, Pottery WILL be very useful, as we'll be able to build Granaries in each of our newly-built Cities, allowing our empire to get off to a good start.
Since we don't have a Religion yet, I see no reason to complete research on Meditation. The sooner that we learn Meditation, the sooner that other AIs will learn it, meaning that they'll build The Oracle faster. If we truly want The Oracle, we should get Meditation and Priesthood after we have at least 3 Cities, to reduce the chances of an AI beating us to this Wonder.
I'm also going to go exploring with our Warrior. We don't really fear the Barbs if there are multiple AIs around, as the AI units will "eat up" a lot of the Barb attacks. In the worst case, we can always put 1 turn worth of Hammers into a Warrior and then whip it, so that we will get 2 Warriors for the cost of 1 population point. That's enough safety as far as I am concerned.
I want to get that 2nd Worker out ASAP, so that the Chop-fest can begin.
We don't really have much else to settle, anyways - it looks like we have mostly desert and worthless plains to the north/northwest! We should think about making Genghis our first conquest target, once we pick up construction, though. I don't like the thought of having a Mongol neighbor.
