Correct you cannot win before T10, that's why all those records are tied. Probably something to do with preventing a loss from not settling in place.
Those records are all about score. In order of importance:
- How many cities
- How many techs (goody huts)
- Map (you can check at the beginning to see if you get a good RNG tiebreaker here or not before continuing)
Cities are most important. I know the top marathon/deity/conquest record had 3 cities and a tech.
This makes for incredible luck, you must spawn close to the AI, get the early worker steal dragging out the archer, the AI has to have quickly built its second city, you win the battle for the first city, you know where the second city is, you win that battle. To top that all off, you need to pop at least 1 tech from a goody hut, either on the way to the enemy or with your settler (founding city not walking to hut). I recall the record actually had an incredibly low base map score. It's a grind of tens if not hundreds of thousands of games.
Edit: It's also locked to vanilla not BTS. This is because you need the city defender to be baited out by the worker steal. So you know need to win two low odd battles without healing in a row, not three.
