@silverbullet: Nah I think he meant his "quote". I said I'd try to remember and he "quoted" that I will remember or something like this.
Rusten, good point on ABC. I often go aesthetics but here it might be less effective. OTOH it depends on the AIs we meet. If the others are shaka & friends, ABC clearly better, if there is MM & the club, aesth might be better.
Not sure about sailing. Sailing unlocks lighthouse we don't need atm. We'll have to spend our early production in athenes on settlers/workers and WBs. I like to scout the coast with one WB. We won't be building the lighthouse early as we have plenty of food and aren't going to settle more cities on the coast atm. Here too it depends on the surroundings. But to block Just, it doesn't look to me that we'll found coastal cities. I hope we can delay blocking Just (meaning he has more land even further west) as jungle cities early simply cost a lot and waste many worker turns.
You also suggest currency before CoL, rusten. Any particular reason? CS will be very important, it spares us monuments for example and we can turn athenes into a 100% specs city. Currency gives more trade routs, the ability to build wealth, to trade gold and unlocks markets. None of these things is that important now I think. If we don't settle coastal cities, it'll take quite some time until we connect them and even then, they'll only generate 1 commerce each. Markets aren't likely to be built, we'll need our hammers for units. I definitely don't want to be axerushed. Also the start doesn't look like we'll run into money problems caused by overexpansion. And if we should, we still can hire merchants instead of scientists. What am I missing?