Thought I'd go for a diplomatic victory this GOTM, as the previous 3 had all been domination wins.
The general outline of my strategy was as follows:
- Expand rapidly to establish a large commercial base and population
- Minimize non-essential techs on the path to mass-media
- Generate 2 great engineers to insta-build the UN
- Befriend half of the leaders; weaken (or eliminate, if convenient) the other half
Goal 1 was the most urgent, the others would need to wait until I was well established to really begin pursuing in earnest. In a couple of practice games, I found that, generally, expansion just wasn't fast enough absent forest chopping. As such, I decided I would gamble a bit and head toward the heavily wooded rockies. This paid off in the practice games, as I typically only lost 3-5 turns at the beginning in exchange for 3 workers and 2 settlers in the first 1500 years. This time around, I moved my scout into the west first only to come face-to-face with a solid wall of mountains. The question then was "north or south?". My general srategy was to follow a river and look for a plains hill, with a couple of floodplains, and maybe some gold or silver. In practice games, I found that if you settle on a gold vein in a plains hill next to a river, your starting city produces 2F 2H 3C. This was my ideal starting spot, but finding it proved difficult.
I decided to head north around the mountains and saw a reasonable spot next to a river and some cow. It wasn't a plains hill, but the clock was ticking and I needed to settle soon. So, I established Moscow in the forested alcove to the north of the starting location with access to cow, sheep, furs, and a fair number of grasslands adjacent to rivers. I immediately began research of bronze working and queued a worker. My scout headed into the rockies to scout future city sites and pop some goody huts.
A little aside... I managed to pop
0 goody huts in my game. I really don't know how that happened. In all my practice games I typically popped anywhere from 10-20 huts. It didn't help that my initial scout was eaten by lions fairly early on and I had to scramble to replace him. Still, all I really wanted was a little gold to fuel deficit research, but even that was not forthcoming. Reading through the other posts, I feel especially unlucky. I don't know what the final impact of an additional settler, or worker, or even 100 gold would have been, but I would imagine it would shave off at least 10 turns.
My scout happened upon the future site for St. Petersburg, a plains hill with a gold vein on a river, surrounded by forest, floodplains, and more gold. I should have gone to that spot with my inital settler, but hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. My initial build order in Moscow was something like worker, chopped worker, chopped settler switched in while also building a scout, chopped worker, chopped settler, then granary, library, and a handful of archers for defending my rapidly expanding empire. My expansion typically went like this: After chopping a settler at a city, one worker would break-off and follow the settler to the new city site. The city would begin immediate work on a worker followed by a settler. The worker would chop one forest for the worker, then the two would chop two forests for the settler. Then, the process repeats. This allowed me to settle two cities every 12-15 turns or so. All the inital cities were on the same river, so building a trade network was unnecessary. After building a settler, the city would begin normal construction of granary and library and the one remaining worker would start establishing it as a contributing commerce city (I planned to build exclusively commerce cities).
My inital expansion capped at around 10 cities around 500BC or so, confined exclusively to the western third of the map. My only real other goal in this expansion was to find some stone. I planned to build the pyramids and hanging garden in one of my cities, and stone was essential.
My tech path was fairly simple. Bronze, Agriculture, Pottery, Writing, Alphabet, trade for all other ancient techs. After that I headed for currency for the extra trade-route yield and, more importantly, the ability to trade for gold. Since I recieved no money from goody-huts, I had to come up with some way to fund my deficit research. What I wound up doing was trading techs at a slight disadvantage, but then always adding a small monetary price-tag as well. It kept the income trickling in at a decent enough rate that I didn't have to drop below 90% research for the majority of the game except during the gap before currency (which, given 10 cities before 1 AD and no holy shrines I found a little impressive). After currency, the priority was metal-casting and machinary, along with Code of Law, for an eventual CS slingshot (though not much of a slingshot this game, since I really could have researched it faster the traditional way). This was all in order to setup for Printing Press and Astronomy, which would then lead down the path to Mass Media. The main reason I waited so long on the Oracle and CS slingshot was because it took the AIs forever to research down the religious line. I probably didn't have the opportunity to trade for priesthood until 800 BC or so.
I was a bit dissapointed with how Moscow turned out. Even with the Beuracracy bonus, it only produced somewhere around 70 beakers. I was accustomed to over 100 beakers and sometimes as high as 150 from most of my practice games. I took solace, though, in the fact that delaying CS didn't have a very large effect. Besides, my other cities were really starting to come into full-bloom. The cities down in the southwest desert had crazy potential, I only wished I had settled down there sooner than I did.
Shortly after conquering a barb city in the southwest corner to finally acquire stone, I chopped the pyramids in St. Petersburg. They had already been running an engineer from the forge for a while now, but they needed to start ramping up Great Engineer points. Following the pyramids, I was fortunate enough to acquire marble from Saladin (I think) in exchange for copper. This allowed me to quickly chop the national epic and the hanging gardens in St. Petersburg, bringing the toal GP points per turn to 16 with a 72% chance of an engineer. It also meant that I was free to start employing scientists in other cities, as they no longer had to worry about catching up to St. Petersburg.
On the diplomatic front, things progressed fairly naturally. I intended from the beginning to ally myself with the founder of buddhism, as I find it typically spreads to a fairly significant block of people. When Monty founded it, I was a bit dissapointed, but figured at this difficulty things would still be fine. I grew more concerned when Monty refused to spread the religion, and had to eventually take matter into my own hands (fortunately, it had spread to me). I built a couple of Missionaries and sent them toward Saladin (the only person without a state religion at that point). Before I got there, though, Saldin converted to Buddhism; a little bit of luck had benefitted me.
As it turned out, I never had the opportunity to switch to a religion. Monty and Napoleon kept jostling back and forth for second place in population, and I couldn't be certain which would end the game in second. So, I had to befriend both, differing religions and all. I went about building good rapport with Monty, Napoleon, and Saladin through resource and tech trading, and eventually a couple of wars against America (didn't even notice which leader it was) and England. If worse came to worse, I planned to shift to their favored civics toward the end, but that would come at a fairly high cost and I would rather avoid it.
By 500 AD I'm 1 turn away from Scientific Method and my science-base is growing rapidly. I start switching underdeveloped cottages over to farms and employing a lot more specialists (which I should have probably done sooner). I think I'm on pace for a pre-1000 AD victory, but we'll see how things go. The tricky parts will be ensuring I get the second engineer, establishing Friendly relations with all three of my targets, and optimizing my research output. My goal is around 700 beakers per turn by the time I'm working on Mass Media. I'm hovering around 300 right now, but at the pace it's been accelerating, I still think it's do-able.
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yramids 
I am impressed at those early conquests with the horse archer rushes. I will look over those games and practice using the tactic. Most of my wins are Domination. 
This is because the majority of my workers were either building roads to get troops to the frontlines faster (often building roads just outside the enemy city while at war with them) or chopping for more troops. There wasn't a ton of trees around but by moving that first city north I could chop the areas north and to the west of it to still get some ok yields.
She razed my workers and then I wiped her out still cussing my stupidity in 1750 BC when I captured London.
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I received from Jove in the celtic 100K culture-game, I would find very 
to beat Jove in this one.
I have no strategy, I'm just kind of playing and we'll see what happens. I think I'll end up launching a spaceship in the 1900s.
