Well, I just submitted a victory for this one (1818AD). A long hard slog, as some not-so-great general once said.
I had tried and failed this 4 times before, and let me tell you that is a painful experience on epic speed... giving up after 1000AD each time. Generally I found that Hatty and Darius are just red meat for the rest of the civs out there. For this reason, I finally turned off vassals, to avoid having to face the combined might of 3 or 4 civs at once after Guilds. I also found that using the default cylindrical world wrap ensures you have two fronts to fight on... not a good thing when you fight like I do. So since flat wrap is allowed for this map type, that's what I used to good effect.
Gold in the start, but lots of riverside cottages is what kept things going.
In all of my failures, Gilga seemed to be the monster to beat, being far away and unable to do much about. Even with tech superiority I (and my vassals, generally weak pegs) couldn't match his (and his numerous vassal's) sheer numbers.
But in this game, I felt like Skywalker when he hears Obi Wan Kenobi's ghost whispering "use the Force, Luke"... except it was more like Sun Tzu Wu whispering "Use the traits, Swede". So I set out to settle as much land as possible before making war.
So I started the game on one side of the field, with Darius close by, and the other civs (all 5) all bunched together on the far right side of the field. In between was settled by the barb nation, which made some nice cities for me and were a good source of GG's, XP, and cash. Do NOT biuld the Great Wall in this one... you'll definitely want experienced units to field when the real fighting starts, not to mention a good Heroic Epic. And you'll probably capture it from Hatty or Darius very soon anyhow. I settler spammed quite a bit at the beginning, then captured a bunch of cities from barbs, and was the largest civ, and the most tech advanced civ for pretty much the whole game. I then killed Darius while Gilga was busy taking Hatty's cities from her. Those four were in wars the whole game (Gilga, shaka, Brennus, Ceasar, -- Hatty was out pretty early. Darius about the same time to me.
I slaved a lot more than I am normally comfortable with, and used Police State (thanks to Darius' Pyramids) a whole lot too.
I was lucky enough to catch Gilga when at war with Shaka (those two topped the most powerful list). When his armies broke, it was ugly, with me and Shaka racing to see who could get the most. It was about 60:40 in Shaka's favor (after he sat out the breaking of the army part, and just went in for the mop-up). Friendly with Shaka was nice, because I needed time to get ready to take him on. He got grens before me, but I got cavs and rifles and cannons, which he never got any of. But still, he had a monster stack of 60+ knights, muskets, grens and trebs that I wasn't going to fool with. Fortunately, Rome was his target, and he left his backside open. I had 5 core Zulu cities before he got that stack back, and took peace (which I used to heal and reload). Fool him once, shame on me, fool him twice, shame on him. Yes, he kept Rome as his worst enemy and sure enough his WHEOOHRN was aimed that direction. He moved his stack east, and I sucker-punched him again for another 5 cities. This time his stack (now Cuirs) were able to retake one city, but broke themselves on the walls of Ulundi against highly promoted machine guns and cavs. The rest was mop-up. Meanwhile to the south, my second stack mopped up the old Egyptian cities and I get domination victory. Brennus and Ceasar were at war most of that time... nothing to be bothered with.
Glad its over... and I didn't have to nuke anybody.
Unlike what Game 1 is turning out to be.
Anyhow... that makes 7 for me (assuming its accepted). The SB game should be next if the nuking goes as planned. Then the two I dread most... deity and AW. That should keeep me busy for the next couple months.