Sorry my last update was made several days after I played through, and I was trying to piece it back together from snapshots. It's possible some of the timeline is mixed up or at least not very clear.
1. As far as nuking Gandhi, this wasn't an easy decision. I am biased because I'm a nuke happy lil bastard, and I've been playing only quick speed recently, where nuking the culture guy is a pretty common endgame. In this game it definitely would have been possible to load a few rifles or infantry and raze a city. Meanwhile I could have beelined for the Internet and tried to pull off a space win. In hindsight this would probably be a smarter approach, and I have a bunch of saves, so if I end up losing I might go back and try this
There were several reasons I was uncomfortable with this though.
- I thought Gandhi was going to get the culture even earlier than he did. It's hard to predict because the AI isn't that smart, and the numbers bounce around all over the place. But I really thought that I might have to rush ICBMs and hit him before I could get subs or factories and stuff.
- He had made a dpact with Darius, and Darius despite being smaller was quite stronger (tech leader). I didn't want to end up fighting a war against both of them with conventional and outdated units.
- AIs go for cultural stupidly, and usually do it in all of their cities. So for all I know I could drop a bunch of people on his city, raze it, and then find out he's 15 turns away from getting culture with his 4th city.
- The only person who ended up being upset about nuking Gandhi was Darius, who was already going to go to war because of the dpact.
Most importantly though I'm a warlord and I usually don't go for space. To each his own, but I value dom/conq victories much highly than anything else. There was also no guarantee I'd win the Internet race, and if I lost I figured it was game over.
2. I have no idea what they were doing, honestly. It's not clear from the screenies, but they both started plotting while we were pleased, and Toku started plotting while we had dpacts. (Soon after I got a dpact with Darius). I figured I was pretty safe, although I didn't know whom they were targeting. They both plotted for a bunch of turns and then canceled them. They had worst enemies with the peacemongers, so I figured maybe they were going to attack the other continent, or they were going to wipe Shaka the weakling. I'm not an expert on the mechanic though, and I don't really know what they were thinking.
3/4. During the GA I was running what I showed in my last post, to maximize my specialists. I hadn't run specialists in this game at all up to that point. I just had the two priests from the oracle. The first was settled, the next was used to start the GA. My goal was to get 5 more GP for two more GAs. The artist you see me going for is from Bulawayo, which was the Moai city that bordered zululand. This was for my third GA. I had already gotten a scientists from one of the cities, the capital was either going to pop a priest/eng/merchant. So I wanted an artist to make sure I could get the last GA, and it made sense to run culture in that city. The zulu were creeping back onto my lake tiles, and pushing culture could also free up a few tiles for kuwaduzko to work.
During the last turn of the GA I switched civics abruptly.
I was extremely torn all game about what civics to run. On the last turn before the GA toku signed dpacts with me, so I signed that and then felt good enough to run free religion. This civic switch made my relations better with the other continent. I was still going for fission as quickly as possible, so I wanted all the tech strength I could get, and I was even able to make a few trades with them.
6. Hammers were a big issue, and while I was able to get my research caught up this was primarily by building cottages. Even with US this doesn't add up to a lot of hammers, so when I closed in on fission (and traded for assembly line) I built several more workers and converted a lot of unused tiles / anything smaller than a town to workshops. I still ran US for the rest of the way though, as I had a decent amount of towns and there wasn't really anything else good to run there. Also I planned on turning off my tech tree completely soon after fission, and using excess gold to buy diplo points or rush buy units. I was originally thinking of putting IW in Seoul, but Seoul had a late start on infrastructure, in large part because it was building the third GP for the GA (and this was after my 2nd GA had finished) so it was running a bunch of garbage specialists for a while. In the meantime I built IW in kwadakuza, which was nothing but production tiles so it was fine, until Japan's culture stole the food
I ended up just putting the heroic epic in Seoul. Not a big deal either way, and I didn't have any other monster production cities. The rest were mostly hybrids, with a few towns and workshops.
5. Outsourcing Manhattan wasn't the original plan. But once I saw Gandhi was going to be a little later than I had expected, and I didn't have uranium it made sense. (There were several turns where I had finished fission but still didn't have uranium, because Monty wasn't able to trade until I traded techs, and I needed to settle the oil). That meant I had to trade fission to Monty at least (so he would trade uranium), and I traded it to a couple others to backfill up to rocketry (so I could build nukes). Darius ended up building it immediately, and I didn't have to worry about awkwardly building it myself just in case, but I was counting down the turns it would take me to finish it and then rush buy ICBMs in time to stop Gandhi.