WildPony
Warlord
Lighthouse for me is about totally dominating the sea primarily before Navigation and vs. a human enemy, not ai's and gaining a game winning advantage during that time... an advantage thru leveraging steals and super trade and forcing the enemy to defend every city that puts you in the drivers seat to get all or most other wonders you want including Magellans. Upon Navigation, the guy without the Lamp can then kill your vet triremes or vet caravels with non vet Caravels... u can still dominate, but not as completely as with vet triremes vs. non vet triremes. So the domination of which i speak all happens pre-navi while there are no bigger ships to sink yours... and let a man try sinking vet triremes with non vets. It's just plain ugly. As a rule, if i really want to sink a vet trireme (which i almost never want to do since it is so cost prohibitive) i have 3-4 non vets lined up in case the first 2-3 fail... which often they will.
The next level of domination Lighthouse can bring comes if you can reach Steam Engine before somebody else reaches Magnetism, but that won't happen very often vs. a strong human opponent.
Bribes i am not thinking about since most human games i have ever played have been 'no bribe", but in that case, yes, u want to keep your vet triremes "with occupant(s)" and your vet Iron Clads doubled up
.Good point about using Lighthouse to help set up embassies to replace Marco's, but if it's 7 ai civ's, 4 caravans is cheaper than 7 dips, not to mention how much quicker and simpler it is. The fewer the number of enemies civs, the more sense physical embassies make over Marco's.
) experience vs. high level human opponents, Vet Triremes vs. non vet triremes is where LH dominates the most completely, not Vet Caravels vs. non-vet Caravels. Pre-Navi Lighthouse Domination is where many games are won. In a typical game with Lighthouse, i will steal 10 techs before Navi and some of these leading directly to navi. One game versus a very strong opponent, he had a 6 tech head start to Navigation (mason, math, myst, pottery, seafaring, astronomy) and had two other techs. I saved up 8 dips off his shores and made all 8 steals in the same turn (to add a little drama to the occasion 
. If you know how powerful it is and just dislike it, that's ok by me, but if you dislike it because you don't know its power, i would like to help enlighten you a bit. Players that love trade are generally folks who have discovered the full potential of it and revel in seeing many trades of 500 -1000 or more gold PLUS 500-1000 or more science throughout the game (primarily high ocean cities to foreign cities on separate continents). 
.
After all, when one gets deeply involved with a particular game I find that most of the 'narrative' of events happens largely inside one's own head; that is, we tend to retroactively invent justifications and pretexts. For example, when an AI nukes a city that was theirs the previous turn, we might justify it by venturing that the city was working on a weapon which would change the balance of power (similar to the Manhattan Project) and that its falling into the wrong hands was unacceptable at any price. Of course, when they nuke their own citizens repeatedly, this pretext is on shakier ground! The point I am trying to make is that we 'imagine' the game such as to suit our habits and preferences, so anything the game lets you do is in a sense 'fair game' for a leader. I think it may boil down to the difference between real-world capitalists and socialists. Whilst I enjoy nurturing huge, happy populations and justify my wars of conquest to myself in terms of the global revolution, others enjoy building a minor nation in terms of population which is nevertheless the dominant world power (analogous to the real-world United States) through sheer force of economy, and these players perhaps justify their wars in terms of a cost-benefit payoff, or 'democracy' (economic oligarchy) promotion. In Civ the latter (the capitalist path) is undoubtedly the finer art, as evidenced by the glorious SSC victories chronicled elsewhere in CFC. I am not disputing that, nor that playing in this manner woukld provide a greater challenge than my normal style. I just simply prefer the nothing-but-a-huge-population approach, and find that rushing more than ten howitzers a turn is well within my means. Also, when playing with the MGE engine I sometimes finds that where you have c. 200 cities a bug kicks in which really messes up trade. (The commodities supplied and demanded change from turn to turn and even between the trade advisor and the city screen. So you produce a caravan thinking there is a big market, then when you cross-reference the cities listed in the supply/demand screen with their city screens the intel. is completely wrong.) I don't know if this bug has been mentioned or patched, but I found it irritating enough to give up trade for one game, and felt so liberated from what I perceive as irritating micro-management that I have never gone back. I now only use freights for wonders and blocking AI railways, peninsulars etc. So just to reiterate, I am well aware of the power of trade, I simply can't be arsed with it, as it is not an aspect of the game I enjoy. Many thanks though for your kind offer to enlighten me to the trade game; it is good to know that people are so eager to share their tips and techniques. 
. 
. 
. 
