Early game for wide on a specific ocasion

Hi, my account here is new, but I read this forums for some time now.

I think I'm an average player, I currently play on King and always play tall.
After a match against an AI Greece that played wide and gave me a hard time I decided to try it and I found that playing wide when alone for a wide terrain is fairly easy since there isn't much punishment for little mistakes, but I've found that playing with your capital surrounded all over by other cities is a challenge.

So let's take this hipothetical example: I'm playing Germany wide and warmongering surrounded by CS and civs.
What's the best course of action?

What I have tried:

Techs: Husbandry>Pottery>Archery>Lib>Philosophy
Building: Scout>worker>settler>granary>2 archers (by this time I'll probably have 1 or 2 more warriors from furor)
Social: Honor
Religion: Craftsman > Happiness per city/Pagoda

Is this the "right" course? I've been finding people say honor is a no go, while others saying that it's viable, while people saying that spamming archers might be good. I'm lost.

Honor usually combined with liberty.

Basically scale 1 point in honor originally. so you can see and take barb camp easy, then put point in liberty for faster economic development, then put 2 more point in honor until happiness form honor, so you can garrison your stolen barbarian units. then finish liberty.

What to do after depends on what you current game plan. If you plan to fight finish honor..

Sorry for the long time I took to answer. I'll try that next time I play.

Just one more question: When taking cities in a row while walking into the enemy's capital or something like that, should I keep placing a unit guarding the taken cities?

I keep doing it and I don't really know why, just an obsession I took from Civ 4.

why you need to guard them? but more often then not you might want to raise them, depends of there location and your happiness situation.

You meant raze?

Anyway, as I said, I don't know. In civ 4 when you had troops in a city, it diminished unhappiness. I guess this became an obsession. haha