Pre-flight Selling Currency around sounds like a good idea. Let's get the AI cracking on researching MA techs or Republic for us. Unfortunately, there's not too much money to be had. Egypt gives us 54 gold + 9gpt. India can't offer more than 37 gold + 1gpt, but I take it because he's right next to Egypt. Nobody else can offer more than 5 gold, and I'm too much of a miser to sell a tech for that little.
I discover that Hiawatha is willing to give us peace and his entire treasury (47 gold) for Currency. After thinking it over for a bit, I decide to go ahead and take it, as our dromon fleet is still too small to do much damage, and I'd rather be able to spend our GA on infrastructure. Unfortunately, that loses some more war happiness, and now Adrianople is unhappy. I discover that I can hire a clown without delaying the market, so I do that rather than bumping the lux slider a notch.
SInce we have a lot of cash now (600 gold) with no immediate use, I buy a couple of embassies, with the Hittites (because they're close) and the Egyptians (to help keep track of what's going on in that part of the world, and Cleo is the cheapest of that group).
Here's the current state of Hattusas:
The Hittites are a couple of turns from the Status of Zeus, which will hopefully help them contain the Spanish.
And Thebes:
Take a close look at that screenshot. That's just hilarious.
Anyway, after half an hour or so of looking things over and doing deals, I decide to find out what this key marked "Enter" on my keyboard does....
1 - 330 BC ...not much, apparently.
2 - 310 BC Adrianople market->library. Caesarea dromon->dromon.
OK, now we have a bit of a problem. A Spanish galley appears to our north; with the GL, Isabella can sail straight across. We're not terribly ready for a war with Spain, but I really don't want to share our island with anybody. After consulting with the team, the decision to go to war is reached. So much for peacefully building infrastructure...
So I declare war on Spain and bombard her galley with the one available dromon, which does one damage. Unfortunately, I can't block the path to unloading the settler on the northern tip of our island, if that's her goal. We'll just have to hope she's going somewhere else for a turn or two until more dromons get there.
We don't have enough dromons to risk a suicide run, so I start a couple members of our southern fleet on the long sail through Iroquois and Hittite waters to reach Spain. Hopefully they'll get there in time to do some good.
IT - As I was hoping, the Spanish galley turned around and set sail for home.
3 - 290 BC Varna aqueduct->dromon
4 - 270 BC
Engineering comes in. I set research to Mono at max, but I also have to up the lux rate because Varna is unhappy now (and Nicaea will be in a couple of turns, when its duct finishes), so it's due in 20. Our prebuild for Sistine's currently has 29 more turns to go, so we may have a bit of a timing problem here.
5 - 250 BC Adrianople library->harbor. Caesarea dromon->market. Nicaea aqueduct->dromon.
6 - 230 BC Varna dromon->market. Haven't seen any sign of the Spanish since the DoW, and we have enough dromons to deal with any immediate situation, so going back to the plan of building infra.
IT - Abu demands Currency. He's way too far away to be a threat, so normally I'd have his emissary's head returned to him in a basket, but pretty much everybody knows Currency at this point anyway, and I'd have sold it to him if he had any cash at all, so I decide it's not worth the hassle and give it to him.
7 - 210 BC Adrianople harbor->courthouse - we're losing 7 commerce per turn to corruption here, so it should pay for itself easily.
While I'm thinking along those lines, I decide to change the market builds in Caesarea and Varna to courthouses as well. Corruption will be better when (if?) we ever get to Republic, but they should still pay for themselves, and markets aren't much use to us while we're running max research.
Now that Adrianople has a harbor, I upgrade the two random curraghs we still have hanging around.
8 - 190 BC Nicaea dromon->dromon.
9 - 170 BC
10 - 150 BC
The Spanish war has been pretty much a dud so far. But the two galleys I sent via the scenic route are one turn away from Spanish territory now, and two more dromons just reached our northern fleet, so now we have enough that it might be worth sending two or three of them on a suicide run across the gap. So we should be able to start doing some damage. I think that taking this opportunity to blow up some Spanish improvements and slow Izzy down a bit is probably a good idea.
Incidentally, Spain is still at war with the Hittites.
The AI has been no help whatsoever on the tech front - they haven't researched a darn thing. And I think we've reached the point where even if Republic does come in soon, we should wait for our GA to end (9-10 more turns) before revolting.
EDIT:
One more thing I just remembered - the Spanish started building Sun Tzu's on my last couple of turns. So that's another potential threat to our Sistine's prebuild.
And a roster check:
eldar
Mach
dman
Minute Man - just played
Bede - up!
Tubby Rower - on deck
A-K
woo hoo
at me almost to the point of 
. 
