Here's the first save, 502 AD (was there a 500 AD? Might have missed it).
Note that I am playing with the Mega Civ Pack as well.
Here are all the setting at game start:
Never opened WB, not even once!
All those resources are the totestra script working with the slightly increased spawn rates I modified in the bonusinfo.xml, so everyone should have roughly the same chances.
Started out as the Venetians, in the middle of a nice continent with the Apaches to the west and the Celts to the east. Somehow got Axemen before anyone else, so I decided to send a nice surprise to my neighbours
The Apaches had been colonizing like mad, and drowned my axemen in a tide of archers.
The Celts on the other hand lost their second city to my exploring axe... and the next turn I was given control of the Celts themselves!
(As the Venetians, I had built a couple of wonders as well, boosting my score).
So with such a desperate situation, what did I do?
Undo all the insane choices the AI did, and slowly start building up a guerrilla war against my former civ.
A couple hundred turns later (epic speed), I had a couple extra cities on the farthest coast from the Venetians (that I never managed to make peace with, but for some reason they never sent anyone to finish me off), and started cranking out Gallic Warriors.
These guys are powerful! +1
over the normal Light Swordsman, +25% hill attack (and there were a lot of hills in this area!) and a free Combat 1 from Boudica's Aggressive trait.
So I started sieging cities. 5 or 6 Gallic Warriors, with 3-4 catapults for lowering defences and then "archer bombarding" (most of these catapults I had captured from the Venetians themselves!
).
The AI couldn't mount a decent defense and I had conquered all but one of the Venetian cities... and then I got to control the last one, surrounded by a dozen angry Celtic units.
So I reloaded the previous autosave and made sure to stay in anarchy and raze cities to avoid making the score grow too much... yeah, it's a bit of an exploit but that was really a doomed situation.
So a few turns after I eliminated the Venetians (I was kinda sorry, but it was also awesome. I might turn it into a story in the future), I was given control of the Dutch, on what seems to be this map's main continent.
It's huge! And populated by pretty much all the civs.
The Dutch again were being terribly mismanaged, but had really good foreign relations, so for the last couple hundred turns I've only fought barbarians and been expanding peacefully. There's so much space that there's still plenty of free land.
I'm still missing out on a few wonders however, since my cities spent a lot of time simply growing and building infrastructure.
But I did manage to get to Optics, make a few Caravels, and get the circumnavigation bonus.
I'm at the top of the scoreboard now, so either the Apache or the Celts are still ahead of me (possible, I have yet to find their continent), or the xml global define to change number of times the High to Low option changes your civ isn't working. Probably the former however, I did leave the Celts with several cities and wonders, so they might have gone on and kept up the score lead.