Just submitted my first win after a month trying to beat Deity; thought I would share the strategy I developed. If you want to follow along with the log look here:

http://hof.civfanatics.net/civ4/game_info.php?entryID=645

It's not a complicated strategy. The settings are the most important part. Start on a Balanced map on Future era with Gandhi, marathon speed. Set the minimum # of AI opponents and choose you favorite push-overs.

Future era/ marathon gets you a 1440 AD start date, a revealed map, all techs, 3 settlers and 3 workers. Because you have all techs you get to set your civics first turn and with Gandhi’s spiritual trait you avoid the anarchy that slows the AI down. Once you found your first town turn science down to 0% and set culture to whatever you need to keep your people happy.

The rest is just a modified chop rush. You are going to build 8 cities and between 30-40 workers. The number of workers varies, but I have tried this enough to say that 8 cities is optimal. More slows down development and less provides too little production.

You should be running under Bureaucracy all game and your capital’s production is very important. The bottle-neck is the Apollo program and must be finished quick. Build up your capitols population by making farms, a few extras if it doesn't have any food resources. You can convert them to production later. As you chop extra workers in your smaller town move them to your capitol to improve it. If you are growing fast enough, you should focus on fully working your capitol before the other cities. Build a theater, factory, and coal plant rushing with gold when possible, then start Apollo. Once it is done, go to your other cities and speed their growth the same way. Don't forget to build the space elevator somewhere.

You production queue is theater, factory, coal plant, observatory, lab.

Once Apollo is built and you finish labs, start churning out spacecraft parts.

It's just that easy. :)

(P.S. I lost about 6 or 7 games before winning the first and have won 2 in a row now. It's kinda easy once you get it down, but tricky to learn.)

Cool!

I can't see your game because it's not published yet, but I suspect it's possible to beat your finish date by starting in an earlier age. Still, this is a great way to grab some of those open spots. :)

Oops, didn't realize the link wouldn't show up for other people yet. Hopefully it will get published soon. Some info about the game: it was a huge map with 6 opponents and the win was in 1616 AD.

I expect that date to be topped, but I think it will be someone who micromanages a future start better than I did. But, I haven’t had the time to do a lot of experimenting yet. That’s one of the reason I posted. No one on the HoF seems to be using anything but ancient starts, and I wanted to show that a later era start was practical to get others to try it and post their results.

I have tried modern though and can say that I doubt a modern era start will ever beat a future, the time it takes to build cottages, get them to towns, and research all the necessary techs is too long. I am guessing industrial will be the same way, but some of the earlier era’s might work.

My first attempt was using classical. It had a lot of advantages over ancient. You start with all the tile improvements except rail roads and plantations, you automatically found Judaism a few turns into the game, and on marathon you start in 1800 BC ready to research iron working or alphabet as your strategy dictates. The problems I encountered were that the game would go one of two ways. I would either Praetorian rush and wound all the AIs to the point that I would be working not to get a domination victory, which IMHO isn’t a real spaceship victory since I was just milking what should have been a Dom or Con victory. (Also, Praet rushing only seems to work well on smaller maps) Or I would focus on growth and get fairly advanced quite early, but the AI’s would be even more advanced and beat me to the spaceship in ridiculously fast times.

I didn’t have a lot of time to experiment with optimal growth though (a huge map on deity is a big time investment), so I would love to see some other people play around with this and see if they can get it to work.