First off, a slight diversion:
We don't have any elephants, but we do have camels.
More scouting around Carthage.
Apparently, we're fairly powerful, but so are all our neighbours.
Although we're building up our military, we can still try to expand our empire peacefully.
Looks like the Persians have another city.
Since Sedentary Lifestyle obsoletes Culture (Neanderthal), we have to build as many Neanderthals as we can while we still can.
We encounter Brazil, led by Hammurabi! Also, those barbarian canoes decide to not attack us, for some reason.
Frederick doesn't intend to leave his cities undefended. Also, the Aztecs have started researching Sedentary Lifestyle, as seen on the scoreboard.
Unfortunately, our scouts suffer some setbacks.
Fucking locust swarms. Why is sending in the military the best way to defeat them, anyway? It doesn't make sense.
We continue assembling the army. Having your production center on an island is a pain.
I guess our luck with the barbarians didn't last very long. But who cares? It's just a canoe. Although I guess it is a bit significant...
After all, that canoe was the last unit to die in the Prehistoric era.
Since we got to Sedentary Lifestyle before anyone else, we get a free technology! What tech do I pick?
Continuing from that, we can found a religion! Naghualism won the vote by a decent margin.
Say hello to our new holy city!
Of course, we can't build Neanderthal Warriors anymore. They're all in the NSA now.
We can adopt Divine Cult as our Religious civic now, and Naghualism as our state religion. Or we could go research divination for Prophets. I'd rather not keep Folklore, but we can keep it if you guys really want. That means no state religion, though.
The main benefit of Divine Cult is the stability, which is good when your capital is on an island giving every city on the main continent Colony penalties. It's also required to build some buildings.
Also, here's the tech tree:
We're currently researching boat fishing, but we can go for anything you want.