Starting out, I had some vague idea of going for domination and building enough tanks to bankrupt my economy, but I couldn't not play the salty start for culture. A combination of the Liberty vs. Tradition thread and a desire to play Russia for Order led me to use a strategy I haven't played in a while, and I don't think I've ever used it above Emperor with anyone other than Brazil and Polynesia. So I went full Liberty, ignored Tradition entirely, and won with early Archeologist/Museum spam instead of Wonder whoring. Actually, it wasn't that early or very spam-like this map because I went for too many Wonders and I was embroiled in a significant war right when I wanted to go full Indiana Jones, but no one else spammed early this game so it worked out. This start was forgiving enough to cover up for me not feeling too sure about all of my decisions, and my general gameplay is much stronger than the last time I tried this on Deity so I still won.
I opened scout/scout/shrine/monument/scout/6 settlers. The last scout was because I hit two archer upgrades and brought one of the originals home to kill barbs, plus a quick delay got me to 5 pop after hitting a timely pop ruin. I was able to build settlers in 3 turns each once the tile improvements were complete. I was still too slow, with Hiawatha settling near Lake Victoria on turn 25 before I finished my first settler. I plopped down my city 4 tiles away and bought the Lake. I might have expanded to 8 cities just for giggles, but on turn 48 I got a making cities too aggressively/covet lands double DOW from Hiawatha and Pocatello. I probably could have taken a couple cities from Hiawatha, considering they were 10-13 strength and my odd pot shot did some real damage, but Pocatello was apparently the instigator and actually brought an army to the party. The terrain was very defensible, and after I carved up his attack force I got a nice peace deal to help make up any ground I lost.
I didn't get any early worker steals other than from a CS, but the double DOW allowed me to successfully enslave a large workforce in time to have tiles ready when I switched to growth after I built aqueducts. Barbs were really helpful this game, and I got a ton of CS influence freeing captured workers. In general, I had good CS quests but got jammed up with bad WLTKD and spy craft luck.
I had the Liberty finisher timed for a turn 72 something, but Petra was gone and I only needed 10 turns to build the NC, so I sat on it until the Renaissance and snagged Sistine with it. That was the only Wonder I didn't get beat to until Eifel Tower, with Shaka beating me to LToP by 4 turns and messing up my Uffizi rush gambit. I didn't have any happiness issues due to solid lux trading and early mercantile CS alliances. I put 3 policies into Aesthetics, finished Liberty, 2 into Rationalism, then finished Aesthetics and added Order. I didnt pick any direct tourism boosters, but I leveraged the factory build speed to keep up production in my expos and the science boost to justify skipping labs in most cities. The production boosts helped across the board, as did the easy happiness.
It was almost turn 90 when I finished the NC, but I still got Education on turn 107. At that point, I had 7 cities all equipped with aqueducts, workshops, and coliseums. I bought 2 unis and built the rest. I mostly bought in the capital only to keep it ticking along on expensive wonders, national and otherwise. I focused my gold on tile purchases and city-state happiness, hard-building almost everything.
Things were really humming along when Pocatello declared war a second time on turn 148, and I nearly lost a city. The ungrateful jerk didn't realize I had kept Shaka from rolling him by blocking with spare workers/units, but once he trolled me with a city I didn't see coming (he ninja'd the settler into position via water) we were on a war trajectory. I had to rush buy walls and a castle to survive, and things were dicey until my scattered army arrived at the point of attack. I lost all of my existing melee units. The fallout was I didn't time up Oxford, finish my schools before I had to switch over to the World's Fair, spam archeologists effectively, or a whole bunch of other things that would helped me finish this game much sooner. After stealing one of my cultural CS allies early, Venice did a number on me by stealing one of my mercantile CS's in the middle of the war. The same turn, Pocatello rolls the other cultural CS. Suddenly I'm at -12 happiness (I was tight anyway due to not getting ideology happiness when expected) with rebels in Red Square while the Red Army was busy setting up fire-traps for Pocatello's muskets. I was able to hold the lines and recover, but I lost a lot of momentum and took white peace when offered. I lost over 10 turns of growth to unhappiness, and had to stay on production tiles for a while afterwards until I had some breathing room. I was left in a place where Oxfording the Internet seemed like the strongest play, so thats what I did. After all of the war and happiness shenanigans, I ended up with the Internet on turn 203.
Shaka went Autocracy after me, then Hiawatha followed me into Order. After that, Freedom was the flavor of the month because Theodora had a big early influence lead on me. My guild timing was relatively late compared to my usual Tradition games, but I made up for it with artifacts and blew past her. I flipped Shaka to Order before the game ended, so it was a hard Freedom/Order divide. I had 7 DOFs going to end the game, but my relationships were strained because of it.
Once I had the Internet, NVC, won the IG, and rushed airports the next turn, the hardest part was getting my GMs into place. India and Byzantium were the runaways, and I got a pair of GMs mired in CS's before I took a step back and figured out that 20% of 4 GM's would bring Gandhi in line sooner than watching my GMs do nothing for turn after turn while surrounded by CS units. It's a little late to mention this, but I got a solid internal religion going with DF, Tithe, Happy Temples, StP, and RT. The wide play steam-rolled into enough faith for 3 GMs. I popped a 4th naturally, and immersed Byzantium in Russian culture to get at India by proxy. I could have sold a city and finished in the 220-230 range, but I save that for desperate situations. Youll see the Louvre is in my final screen shots, but the Exploration opener was one of my last policies and that was built after turn 220. I added the PT around T210 too, and almost all of the late game Wonders were built by me in the last few turns or under construction in various cities. If the game had gone longer, I had a good shot at having 6 self-founded cities with Wonders in them.
My final thought is that I strongly dislike Pocatello
a lot.