This map and loss were painful. I'll probably try again, but only after everything isn't fresh in my mind and I'm not so sick of clicking. Domination is definitely my weakest VC, and I'm better starting my conquest with bombers and infantry than composites.
I was tempted to move one tile SE to get the salt in range of my cap, but after I thought about it giving up the deer and sheep in the first ring wasn't worth it. I was thinking domination from turn 1. I hit a culture ruin right away, and went liberty. My problem with Attila is usually not getting high level horse archers, but making enough of them fast enough and having the population to support that production. I dunno, I didn't have enough gold for all of the unit rush buying I wanted to do later so maybe I should have sucked it up and went honor.
I also stepped on a Ram ruin, and took Addis really early. I started teching pottery for a granny, and just went ahead and finished the tech and the building before I built an archer and then 7 HA. I went with the liberty worker before the settler, because I had enough pop in Addis to be unhappy but at full production. I stopped leveling up on Harar and wiped out Ethiopia around turn 50 once I saw Washington moving troops into position to attack. Meanwhile, I got a DOF from Rome! Not that I thought that it would last long, but at least I got a little TR science. I also settled my free settler on the wine on the coast to the North, and nearly had a HA out before the war with America started. I later used one of my extra GG to steal the nearby whales (and oil as it turned out.)
Once Washington attacked, I sat on my side of the river and picked off his troops, then moved in for the kill finally finishing him off around turn 70. Rome was a PITA due to terrain, and I waited for optics to finally make the push through the pass so I could swarm with several HA at once. I also built a trireme and sailed the stupid thing into the ice wall in the north first, then came all the way around to cap crappy city Rome founded by the NW on the CS island. Rome even planted a troll city right by my cap while losing the war! So at about turn 110 I'm looking at a barren continent full of crappy cities wondering how far ahead everyone else is. My cap had 6 pop when I picked up the Liberty finisher, so I went GS and decided to make New York my science city. I planted the GS and hard built the NC there while sending it trade routes and growing it. I was thinking Observatory and multiple pastures, and it had growth potential on par with Washington with better production. I built Machu there to help with gold, and I got a late religion. I went with messenger of the gods as my pantheon when I founded, and at one point that was giving me 26 of 150ish science.
I met everyone about turn 130, and I was only 8 techs behind the leader Denmark. Denmark had crazy gold going, and actually spent it on city-states. He had every single one, and several hundred influence on each. Assyria had the strongest military, Edinburgh, and was denounced by everyone. I denounced him too after he attacked India, and was friends/trading with everyone else. My tech stunk and my strongest production port city was in a bad spot to get boats to the front, so I didn't attack until almost turn 190. Once I got the war started, my real problem was that I didn't send enough ground troops to hold the territory I was taking. I liberated the Celts, captured Delhi and used that city as my beachhead. I provided frigate support to Mumbai, which kept Gandhi alive and distracting Assyria. I think I could have won this map if I had gotten more riflemen to the other continent in time to hold Assur when I could first take it. After a while, I just started capturing it and holding it few turns while I pummeled troops from the sea, but I couldn't hold it from the sea because the terrain only allowed 3-4 ships to fire most turns.
So I was on shaky ground, and things got worse in a hurry. I never caught up to Harald's 8 tech lead, and looking at the graphs later I saw his military score start to sky rocket as soon as I attacked Assyria. He made a real armada of battleships. Theodora decides to join the fight against Assyria, and Harald quickly decides that it's a good time to beat up Theodora. Theo starts losing cities to Harald, and then Assyria snipes one from them from her and I'm assuming got electronics because a few turns later, he goes right from Galleass to Battleships. He opened Exploration, so all of a sudden I'm losing slightly damaged range/logistics frigates to battleships I can't see in one shot. I was working around the peninsula and taking cities while pushing with riflemen/artillery and liberating Celtic cities, and all of sudden I'm halted in my tracks and retreating. He adds a few GWB to terrorize my artillery.
At this point I can see Harald's fleet in action, and it doesn't look good. He has a lot of battleships, and Theodora is losing fast. I hit plastics to get infantry to match Denmarks, rush buy a couple research labs in my bigger cities and upgrade my surviving riflemen. Then it's over to Electronics and battleships about T245. Only 8 of my 18 frigates survived, but I have Assyria finished by T255. Nineveh was awesome with Petra (desert sheep with stable, fertilizer, Hunnish UA, etc. is 4F5H) and could have cranked out a bomber every 3 turns or so, more with a food caravan to grow it a bit. Now it's time to size up Denmark, only to realize after a few turns of infrastructure building for the last push that he is producing 800 tourism on me after bonuses.
After cracking Assyria, Harald's military score was about 4x mine even after upgrading everything, and my score wasn't skewed by having a lot of ranged units. About turn 265 I just gave up, and clicked next turn until he won on 272. I just didn't have the military to fight his, at least not in the time frame I needed to. It would have taken me to turn 300, at least, the way things were going.
My culture was abysmal most of the game, so I went order after Harald did when I saw that he was already familiar. I had more production than gold, so I probably got more units from Order, but Autocracy would have better enabled me to produce the units on the other continent in a critical mass at the right time. Because I had full commerce and Big Ben in New York I probably should have bitten the happiness bullet and gone for the cheap units.
Looking back, I should have bribed Denmark into the war against Assyria. I also stopped building units after the standing army tax was passed (Denmark was targeting Assyria at the time) and built banks, and I should have just kept up my push. But I was down to like 35gpt. I also probably built too many HA based on what others have said they did, and later not enough riflemen. I'm sure I didn't grow my cap enough, but taking a city so soon without any luxes developed really killed my early growth. Unhappiness came and went as a growth problem until I had my continent under control.