Unusual tech rate

[coanda]

Not quite what I expected for my first game on emperor... 860 AD and I'm working steadily towards Civil Service, so when I finally met the other serious players (Izzy had been chatting with me all along, but from her score it was pretty clear to me she'd gotten choked into just a few cities and was losing), I expected to be badly behind in tech. Surprise surprise, I'm apparently... leading...

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

I know why my tech rate was so terrible - I got lucky drawing Hammurabi, got overconfident, didn't account for Emperor maintenance costs, and took too many cities in my initial vulture rushes, had 15 consecutive turns of riots.

I'm wondering what was going on at this other continent (connected by coastal water) to slow their tech down that much though!

Also, for any veterans here... I had a kinda weird situation this game in that I had a continent of semi-isolation (after I killed off my neighbors) where I'd only met Isabella. If I'd had a coastal city, I'd have sent out a work boat earlier to contact the rest, but I was too poor to afford another city until fairly recently... which means I had precisely one trading partner, but that partner was in contact with the rest of the world. I opted to trade with her like crazy to try and keep up in tech, but it meant I ultimately picked up a bunch of YHTWOWE negative diplo points with Alexander (and possibly the rest... I'll know when I meet them). Is that the right move, or should you generally just play it like isolation and go without trades until you meet everyone else?

 

[oranje willem]

You can only get a trade route with a city if you know its location. Just wait with open borders untill you scouted at least 1 city. Furthermore, even if you were badly behind in tech, you have so much land + you are on an island that this game is really easy from this position.

 

[coanda]

Well, I found out why the other continent teched so slowly... it consisted of four civs. Jewish Isabella, Buddhist Alexander, and Hindu Sitting Bull and Tokugawa. That's got to be some sort of record.

And yes, the game was really easy from that point (and, besides two hair-raising lucky fights in the early BCs when I got a bit reckless, really easy before that too). But I'm wondering more in general with this sort of situation. r_rolo has a nice guide on isolated starts, but this isn't really an isolated start.

If:
(a) you have contact with only one other civ,
(b) you suspect that civ has war enemies (either you see their score dropping sometimes or you notice them losing cities),
(c) espionage points from that civ indicate they know further civs beyond that, and
(d) for whatever reason, it's not practical to make contact with those other civs for at least 50-100 turns unless they happen to meet you...

do you go ahead and trade techs anyways - even though that means you're probably pissing off a much stronger civ you haven't even met yet - or do you just hold off on trades until you can meet everyone? Or is there no clear guideline in this case, and do you just have to judge based on how badly you need those tech trades?