...and what did I do wrong ...or right? :D

Here are some screens of what I did. The starting spot and my first scout move, followed up by the state of the world 100 turns later with insight into my three cities and the demographics screen plus the techs I researched.

Commerce situation seems quite good this time but how to overcome my lonelyness :(

I also grabbed stonehenge since it was quite cheaply available in just 12 turns with chopping... building some chariots now for fog busting and researching sailing for ships to look around for some neighbours :undecide:

The territory in Prague and Vienna looks very underdeveloped. As far as I can tell, you have one cottage between the two cities combined. How many workers do you have? I'm guessing it's not enough.

Isolated starts are difficult. If you can manage to keep up a decent research pace, it can be fantastic -- no competition for expansion and no threat of war gives you a lot of time to work on infrastructure. But it's very easy to fall behind when you have nobody to trade with and minimal happiness resources (only furs as an early luxury).

I would say your priorities are, in no particular order:


Optics for contacting other civilizations
Monarchy for wineries
Calendar for plantations (incense)


You can mostly ignore military technologies (and unit building) except to the point that it's necessary to hold back barbarian incursions. Getting a religion wouldn't be a bad thing in theory, but in practice, I think it's probably a distraction from your other more important research tasks.

Take your time expanding. Build as many good cities as you can afford, but since you have no competition, there's no hurry until you start meeting other civilizations.

There's a little bit of land peeking out of the fog in the southwest. Make sure you explore that as soon as possible. It could be the corner of another continent, which would help you immensely.

You have both stone and marble (eventually). That might open up some options via wonder building. I'm not sure though. I usually don't build many wonders, and I imagine that in an isolated Emperor game, you might have a tough time winning any of those races even with the resource bonuses. I'm sure the Great Library would help, but that's yet another research diversion that just might not be practical given your need for overseas contacts.

I most often try to get the pyramids and bulb to astronomy under these circumstances (if you can't reach AIs pre optics and have easilly accessible stone). It's getting a bit late if you want the pyramids though, enough that you might have to settle on top of it, which would give you a crap city, perhaps you might as well let it go.
I would get the marble+GL though, be disciplined in running scientists and hopefully you can be the first to philosophy so you get a religion for running pacifism and bulb astronomy from there (you need to delay CS for this to work).

Oracle is preferable to stonehenge in isolation. Don't build a barracks so soon. Maximize your cottages tiles.