I dread this. Currently you can make a decent-sized early military force to defend your cities, and have a good chance of defeating those huge mobs of units the AI rushes you with in the first 1/4 of the game. But only because they did NOT pillage all of your critical improvements. You could afford to back up your defensive units to good tactical tiles around and behind your garrisoned city, and hold them off without getting wiped out by their superior numbers- not anymore, since you can't afford to let them fill up most of your civ's tiles and pillage the crap out of them. And now, if you actually do manage to defeat those huge mobs of units (which will be much harder since they can pillage-heal now for extra staying power), you will end up with a ruined civ where it will take a bunch of turns to get back out of starvation mode and many more until your city(s) are actually moving forward and becoming productive again.
If you get into a war early, you better be ready. You'll want tactical land in front of your city, so you can defend there, or a city with improvements behind it until you can get a force ready later. Once you get engineering, you can start building forts in front of your cities to hold off the enemy better, too, making it a nice target tech, leading you by or to aqueducts and lumber mills for more peaceful civs, catapults for aggressive strategies, c bows and forts for anyone, and the newly useful Great Wall.
So, as hard as it is to start out, build up, and work feverishly to get an edge in the game now (on higher difficulties, anyway), once you have one or (often) more enemy civs bum-rushing you throughout the early game, you will be spending far more time just repairing pillaged tiles (presuming you survived, which will be much less likely than before the patch) than actually getting anywhere positive. If this kind of cycle hits you early, you may as well just retire and write off the game. The civs who are not getting this kind of punishment will rapidly break out and runaway. Whereas before, you could actually survive such BS from your neighbors if you played well, and have a chance of winning.
Work on your diplomacy. I'm normally a king player right now (but ready to move up), and I have a win on Deity under my belt. It was a silly diplo win, bribing all the CS's to my side and declaring war. I had just industrialized at that point. I had Mongolia as a close neighbor and good friend throughout the game, and the first DoW on me wasn't until about 100 AD (and Alex was soon denounced by half the known world for that). Playing well is more than just army placement. Diplomacy is a big deal too.
So, to survive these repeated pillage-healing bum rush AI civs, you would absolutely have to put a massive focus on building up vast quantities of your own military, to cow your neighbors into not attacking (and pigeonholing you into the victory condition of conquest, as right from the start you've had to cripple all other things for the expense of military buildup), and to be able to have enough units to prevent your enemies from even setting foot on your lands- as any significant enemy intrusion onto your lands will now equate to tile pillaging and instant economic depression and disaster within your civ, that will take a long time to recover from. And you'd have to invest in a LOT of workers, just to be able to repair pillaged lands and also be able to improve new tiles at any decent rate. So when will you find production time to build wonders? Culture/science/religious buildings? Again, you'd be locked into one and only one build option for the majority of the time- military units/bldgs.
Do you do this to the AI now? They are terrible at keeping workers so should be put at more of a disadvantage than you, and I believe they get bonus growth, meaning any food you take away hurts them more too. It's just not all that effective. If they stop to pillage lots of tiles before taking a city, they probably gave you more turns to prepare for their attack than had they just moved in, and they hurt themselves when they take it.
And all of this, again, is based off the idea you can't handle diplomacy early on, when it's easiest to make people happy, you picked city sites that didn't allow for you to defend out front, AND you didn't build your improvements on the other end of your cities first, and even if you don't do any of that, the AI is going to stop to pillage tiles instead of attacking your city and units, allowing you to get in free hits. And you should probably be able to kill 1 unit per turn...if you can't deal at least 25 damage, rethink your strategy.
So if you don't go total military/conquest from the start, at the expense of all other ways of playing, then you lose, game over.
Sure sounds like fun.... NOT.
This is only true if you ignore certain things you can do. If you never build forts to help you hold forward land after the patch, maybe. If you can't handle your diplo, maybe. If you can't plan your cities, maybe. However, if you are willing to look at how the AI acts and plan accordingly, I imagine you can play many different ways.