Lust for Gold

It's perfectly possible, given this sort of start on Prince, to take the Cuban Isolationist approach and go for BudHinJewism in Madrid. Based on the assumption that you go workboat first and only work water tiles initially, and on the assumption that the AI tends to prefer Buddhism as an early religion, a research path of Meditation > Polytheism > Masonry > Monotheism is very likely to bag you all 3 early religions.

After that went well, however, I then got a bit carried away. I squeezed out a second city and built the Oracle to bag CoL and Confucianism, then popped the first prophet from Madrid for Theology and Christianity too, giving me 5 religions founded in my first two cities.

The main problems with this approach were that going for 5 religions instead of just 3 stunted early growth even more than usual and left the empire in an extremely weak and vulnerable state. Given that, the best idea seemed to be to allow the AI to invest hammers and time in founding plenty of other cities on the continent whilst I churned out missionaries to keep us one big, happy familiy all united under one true faith, and relied on the positive relationship modifier from religion to keep me safe. This was working pretty well until I built my second shrine, which took spread of one of the other religions out of my control, prompting one neighbour to convert and declare war on the same turn, which pretty well derailed things unfortunately.

On reflection, 5 religions definitely seemed like too many to shoot for. I'm used to playing on small maps due to having a PC that isn't quite powerful enough to run CIV and the increased continent size and city number meant that I was never going to be able to spread all of them everywhere by 1600 (especially as it gets progressively harder to squeeze subsequent religions into cities). I was also far too cavalier with my attitude to military. Normally I favour a bit of warring, but neglected that to my detriment. It would have been a much more sensible approach to let the AI invest hammers and time into founding cities and then liberate them with axes. After all, as far as shrine income's concerned it doesn't matter who actually owns the city.

One city, 5 religions (Missed Judism deliberately, Christianity by 4 turns), 4 shrines: 24/15/14/6 = 59 gold for Shrine income.

Basic approach was Spain on a Lake to grab the cheap religions, then running priests to score Code of Laws and Civil Service. Took a GP break for an academy while working up the tree. Lost too much time working up towards Divine Right for no reason at all, then switched the city over to a production configuration and started spamming missionaries. Spent most of the game parked in Pacifism trying to squeeze the geepeeze.

Eventually, I put a settler on a galleon to start a spam factory on the other continent, but didn't get there in time for it to matter.

Failing to build the Oracle was a big mistake, both for the lost tech and for the free prophets. I also could have sped things up with more judicious tech whoring.

I may take another swing at this, without including Polytheism in the main run.

63, with one additional conversion on the 1600 AD turn.

Closer, but I think the statistics are telling: 230 turns, and I only managed to build 57 missionaries, which must be part of the problem. There's room for about 25 cities on the continent, so I ought to be able to hit 75 in gold without Astronomy.

Skipping Hindu didn't help much here - Mansa grabbed that, Julie Judaism, Vicky eventually scored Islam. I managed to keep everybody except Mansa Buddist most of the opening, and when I finally cut over to the other continent, Asoka still didn't have a religion, so was able to convert him as well - although he wasn't willing to help on his own.

I've got a few ideas left to try for one more run

28+24+15 = 67 is the best I was able to manage 1CC (although this time I culture grabbed a second city. Since I wasn't willing to punt the three points, I kept it.

This run, I just focused on OrgRel and Drama, using the Oracle to pick up Alphabet and score some useful techs along the way. I managed to prevent holy war by converting Mansa in time. The other continent arrived with no religions - everything founded locally. Just not enough commerce to get things going though.

I got thumped by Victoria who was an era ahead of me. Ouch. I still have hope that I can take Mansa's Buddhist city before 1600, and I'll have to because everyone has converted to Buddhism.