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In vanilla, sub 200 was the goal. The best civs were India (more cities) and Siam (more scientists). A few people posted walkthroughs, all the way up to Diety. I don't recall any claims of getting there significantly faster on >=Emperor

City border expansion will cause a random roll if two tiles are equal. I'm guessing the +culture difference from switching Tradition with Liberty changed the timing and disrupted the RNG sequence.

To the posters playing on Quick Speed: If you could prefix all of your turn counts with 'Q', that would clear up much of the confusion. i.e. "I finished my National College on turn Q22.

There is also an achievement for switching several times between two conflicting policy branches. When you switch from, for example, Piety to Rationalism, you have one turn of anarchy and all of the benefits from the Piety policies are disabled. If you later switch back to Piety, it costs...

Conquest is fun because it provides the most novelty. Players want to improve their empire and constantly get more money/research/production/stuff per turn. You can do this by growing vertically or horizontally. With vertical growth, everything is the same as the previous game. You get the...

Load a game where you are completely dominant. Build tons of ships and gift them to city states. Go to war.

My selling 3 cities on turn 32 to buy 4 Horsemen to go rampaging is beyond broken. Even with the Horseman nerf, 4 horses and 5 warriors will wipe the continent if you deploy them that early. The wonderbuilder AIs haven't even built Spears by then. I'll be the first to admit it's not even...

Paying the happiness penalty for another city is still worthwhile. A size-4 city with colosseum/library/uni running 2 specialists + 2 farms is food neutral with no policies or techs, and it generates 18 beakers for 2 unhappiness. Adding 2 population to an existing city with library/uni will...

The fact that you don't need a Library to build a Wat is a much bigger deal. Siam can skip straight to the Wat. Getting 12 beakers AND 3 culture in a size-2 city with one building is pretty insane, especially since it only takes 2 allies to feed them because of the UA.

Science does not come from population, it comes from specialists. You need 4 population to match the beakers you get from one specialist. Rationalism bumps that ratio up to 6:1 (4.33:1 with library) Science specialized cities should not concentrate on food. That is the least efficient way...

If there is a barbarian hut near a city-state, don't kill it. Wait for the CS to ask you to do so.

This was my final pre-patch game.

A few interesting bits: - Below size-10, there is almost no change to the food requirements - Previously, the exponential term surpassed the linear term at size-11 - Now, the linear term is not surpassed until size-66! My biggest city before was size-90. Now I can get to size-120 with the...

I just (finally!) did a 181 turn Deity spaceship with Siam. This is my first time to do it on Deity, but it is tainted by my abusing absolutely every exploit. I have to admit, I was getting desperate to get this in before the patch. The start went extremely well: 2x grass+cow start, AH on...

The infamous "build a navy" exploit.

At Chichen Itza, if you stand about 50 meters out from the base of the Grand Pyramid and clap, the resulting echos from all the steps get combined. The actual echo you hear is a mimic of the call of the Quetzal bird. It's utterly astounding to hear. The sound is completely organic.

Warrior-line promotions always get saved for Instant Heals. Combat capability now is far more important than combat capability later. This is especially true for the first few exploring units. Finding the ruins/opponents/city states/natural wonders sooner is much more important than a...

Another tip when doing this: Let's say the AI has 4 swordsmen. Two from its own iron, two from you. When you DOW, those units have a -50% until you kill two of them. What you want to do is wound two of them, kill the other two, and then go back and kill the first two. With careful planning...

Build tradeposts on hills near puppets. Since puppets have a gold focus, this will curtail their growth and keep them from using up your available happiness on extra population with low marginal value. This also lets them crank out the +Happy and +Money buildings faster. If your puppets are...

Farms are not free. There is the opportunity cost of not working a mine or a tradepost. There is an even bigger opportunity cost in growing your cities. The happiness needed to support more population could be used more efficiently by supporting a new city instead.