After many, many failed attempts at translating all of my immortal-level warmonger strats to deity difficulty and watching them all fail horribly, I decided to go for a completely peaceful space victory. I picked Willem because of his unique building, Dike, combod with his Financial Trait can turn marginal coastal cities into late game powerhouses. I figured this would make it easier to get enough productive cities to contest space without having to try to conquer any land from deity AIs.
The plan from the beginning was to fish (heh) for a good peninsula map and box off as much land & coast as I could, go for early currency to finance peaceful expansion, then spam coastal cities and try to Lib Steam Power for dikes everywhere.
This start looks promising already, with flood plains, wet corn and river gold. Since my plan is to get steam power for dikes, I need to settle along a river or the coast, which rules out SIP. I decided to move 1W to settle on gold. I lose the option of working the square but gain the bonus of +2 commerce and +1 hammers in cap. Not a bad tradeoff, esp since once I get printing press, a river town would produce almost as much commerce as a gold mine would, anyway. Also, there's clearly an extra floodplain there in the fog. I got lucky and found cows also in the BFC.
the map turns out to be an almost perfectly rounded peninsula. This is exactly what I need. Most of the peninsula is already fogbusted just by the third ring of my cap, so I decide that I don't need archers this game and that I should just grow out while building a lot of warriors explore the jungle to the north. I find horses to the west but take my sweet time to settle it because priority #1 is to box out the AIs.
I settled the 2nd city along the river far to the north, and the third city even further to the north and a bit to the west, completely walling off my peninsula from any possible AI encroachment. I didn't focus much on Great people early game, was too busy building settlers, only popping two gps before liberalism, both relatively late (one to build academy and the second was supposed to bulb education but it turned out to be a great spy (8% chance) so I used it for a golden age). My capital was building settlers non-stop almost until civil service. I actually managed to found a couple more cities in the jungle to the north, picking up rice and dye, plus I got a random island city before I got boxed in, then I started filling out my coasts.
My original plan was to lib steam power but pacal was getting uncomfortably close to liberalism... when I saw he already had paper and philosophy, I decided that I wasn't going to make it that far and ended up just libbing printing press in 620 AD. Then I traded for most techs I needed to be the first to economics, switching to free market & free religion during the golden age.
I still didn't have a religion at that point, and in fact, never converted to a single religion all game, because I had met five AI's so far, and they all each had a different religion, and I didn't want to piss any of them off. Luckily, the two closest people on my continent (Pacal and Louis) both have hereditary rule as a favorite civic, so I go some points with them that way. I was pleased with everyone but friendly with no one, which put me into "We fear you are becoming too advanced" territory with almost everyone for most of the mid-late game... That's fine, I don't want to give you guys my techs either...
I got lucky on war declares... they all declared on each other rather than me, since they hated each other, since they were all different religions for most of the game. I tried to keep everyone at pleased but it was almost impossible to get anyone to friendly with all the wars and "You refused to help us during wartime". At one point I got Pacal (who was way behind at this point) to friendly by gifting him a bunch of techs, then I traded him for democracy since I needed emancipation and didn't want to self tech that myself.
Despite never using it except on barbs, I had amassed a somewhat respectable army of infantry & machine guns, plus railroad to move it around quickly, so i figured I could have fought off the typical boneheaded AI coastal invasion from Carthage, if the AIs do what they typically do for sea war: unload a stack of about 8 mostly obsolete units at a random city, possibly all of them being artillery, then suicide them and forget about you.
Once I got astro, I found an island to the west with two barb cities on it. I self-founded 3 cities on the island and send a bit of my army (an artillery and some infantry) to take the barb cities... When industrialism hit, it turned out that this random island was my only source of aluminum. Lucky! I ended up with 19 cities total, 17 self founded. I also founded mining inc.
Completed the Apollo program in 1540 and then slowly teched towards victory at ~2k tech per turn.
My empire the turn after I launched my space ship in 1804:
Close up view of the mainland:
