Well, as part of my move up to monarch, I'm giving much of this early game strategy a thorough testing to see how I should do it. I understand that at Monarch, certain things are less likely to be facts for this Emporer+ strategy, but I'm assuming it will just mean I have a little more wiggle room to make some mistakes or steer off the path a little bit. Please, somebody correct me if this is a bad assumption.
First shot was with Hannibal on a continents map and three other civs. It seemed to be a perfect shot for this to work, but I had a couple issues. First, lack of resource-food in the BFC was a problem. I had floodplains, (and gold!), but nothing good to eat. I was too slow to understand this problem and cottaged a couple floodplains rather than farm them, which ended up with me taking way too long to get to the happy cap and start the worker/settler pump.
Second shot I fixed the first problem, but this helped create a second problem. This time, I aggressively settled right across the middle of the continent, effectively sealing off the entire northern hemisphere for me, but the lack of room to expand, close borders, and clashing religions of the other three civs had them building military faster than I was able to do with my expansion blast. I also failed to choose a particularly good production site with my new cities. Somewhere around 500 BC, ALL THREE other civs had other things on their hands right now, and I was low man on the power chart. Oops, I think I know what was going to happen next.
Attempt three was on a tectonics map, and this time with Lincoln. Lots of good seafood, so I took a brief diversion with a start of workboat, worker, warrior, workboat, warrior, archer (whipped), archer (1 turn due to overflow), archer, then the worker, settler (etc.). Note that the whip was not a big deal, as I had a Crab, two Fish (only one with a workboat on it), Corn AND Sheep in the BFC. As you can see, I could pull in 20+ food per turn with a size 4 city. This was certainly going to be a good place for the NE.
As this was going along, I noticed that no other civs had made their way to me, but assumed they were on the other side of the giant mountain range, and I would find them eventually. Nope. ISOLATED. Heh, that really puts a damper on this test. I was going to play it out anyway, because this was an awfully big continent to have all to myself, and I was curious to see if this REX strategy was going to make me competitive when I finally found the rest of the world. Sadly, my hard-drive suffered a catastrophic Unmountable_Boot_Volume blue screen of death error, so I won't be playing out that game either.
I will report back once I'm up and running with attempt four.