Egypts player comes in with a full discussion of the game. Given their central role in the story of the game, this adds some great value to the discussion.
The rest of this segment will be written from their perspective.
Receiving Egypt turn 0 I hope to take advantage of Egypt's high population tiles for low consequence city reduction. This means a greedy high city count build (along with Egypt's many safe city spots and good wilderness spots) is viable. For fun, I intended to open by gathering mining and medicine for the infamous "green wheel" epidemic spam build along with Assyria who seemed to indicate that they would also partake in that build, greatly increasing its effectiveness.
Turn 6 - 7 I begin cautiously filling in the flood plain intending to fill those city spots last to minimize pre engineering flood exposure but unfortunately am met with a flood the moment I have 15 units on the flood plain (and thus take the maximum loss).
Considering that Hatti and Assyria are my only impactful neighbors (considering the long term peace between Egypt and Nubia) and that they are both pulling ahead of me at this point, and in combination with the fact that my trading has sucked and I will not realistically be able to pull on their coat tails I decide on a long term build pivot to a raider type build where I raid the cities on the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Theoretically both victims would have a decent number of purchased (and wonder of the world given) 9 cost cards that could drastically improve my economy while hampering theirs, something which could potentially lead to a long term recovery
Turn 10 / 11 is spent recovering and saving to purchase navigation, clothmaking, and military. With this purchase I begin operation "honorable raider" where I invade, then offer to retreat if a ransom is paid. This is ideal from the raider perspective - trade goods are still stolen, and those cities can be rebuilt by the victim, only to be raided again. If the ransom is paid, the Egyptian economy is boosted. If the ransom is not paid, Egypt's vast armies stay on shore, using the foreign lands as a staging point for further invasions of the Eastern Mediterranean. This further harms the victim and provides some superficial gain to Egypt. This is framed as a "holy war" against the player who is furthest ahead (which it arguably is) and Egypt's shores are flooded with praise from land near and afar.
Turn 13 the Ransom is paid and aggressiveness shifts towards Assyria, a prompt withdrawal from Hatti is led with hopes that Hatti can quickly rebuild and then be raided again (if they do not pay a ransom).
At this point I am still thoroughly losing and make it known to the world with hopes of less calamity targeting, this is quite successful and until the end of the game I receive a drastically lower amount of calamity targeting than normal.
During this time I consolidate and build cities saving hard for a final turn jump in score, which I manage to do, jumping from about 21 points in trade cards up 14 or 15 points in the final round. Unfortunately I purchased regression in the final round. Technically I could have known it was coming up and lost 5 AST for this mistake (oops).
An unlucky early game led to an effective pivot to a raiding build. Luckily the pivot happened early enough that the build was still lean (that is, there were not too many irrelevant expensive tech cards purchased that were not useful for raiding). Being "honorable" has allowed for even more lucrative raiding, by adding the element of ransom extortion. This is is highly reputation based (mirroring reality) and I hope to expand on this reputation in the future to increase the effectiveness of the raiding build. I believe a lean raiding build can compete with meta Wonder of the World discount hording builds in a coastal map.