Feedback on my Domination Victory path (Japan)

[Dark Paladin X]

Okay, I've playing a bit of Japan with Domination victory and I want to hear some feedback on some of my decisions and what I did right and what I did wrong. Here are a few details:
-I only allow Domination and Cultural victory and barbarians and city states are disabled.
-Just as I thought I had an entire continent to myself, Shaka Zulu happens to be nearby in another continent. As usual, this son of a decided to denounce me and settle cities near my territory. As usual with Shaka, he declared war on me. Luckily I prepared an army beforehead and decided to take all the cities and he settled in my continent (although I decided to puppet all of them).
-Washington asked me to declare war on Venice and Poland, which I happily complied (since I am aiming for Domination victory anyways). Apparently, he later turned hostile and denounced me when I was taking Venice (which I did manage to capture). IT also doesn't help that I was stealing his technologies since he's scientifically ahead of me.
-I have a policy of if someone denounce me, I respond by denouncing them back (it's eye for an eye approach).
-Poland manages to capture the Shoshone capital for some reason.
-If anyone asks about the city names and the name of my religion, I'm an anime junkie.

Anyways my next course of action is attacking Washington because: 1) son of a who is far technologically advanced them me, 2) he's probably close to cultural victory, 3) This guy ask me to go into wars with him and I happily complied, then decides to denounce me and turn hostile. I know this will be a David vs. Goliath kind of thing, but I hope it's worth it.

Also, in the attachment, I added a save file of my game. Tell me what you think of how I did and what I need to improve on.

 

[joshua43214]

I am not sure where even to begin.
You did some things right and well, but most of it is, well, lets just say very sub-optimal...

Rather than write a huge wall of text detailing everything, I recommend you watch this video from Moriarte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErFVlM9bw8&list=PLfKwXAFHm6fJVAvEk9nBtN4x86hgc9S0P
This is a Deity level Oda domination game, and you will learn everything you need to know from watching it, and it is fun to watch

Other notes,
Why did you conquer the city states?
no ruins and no barbs hurts you more than the AI
You need to scout. Seriously, you really really need to scout. Shaka and Washington are deeply inland, with huge empires, and you have no idea at all what is between your and their caps.
Turning off victory conditions has a negative effect on the AI, they have no clue what to do when their chosen VC is missing.
Did I mention you need to scout?

 

[Dark Paladin X]

I am not sure where even to begin.
You did some things right and well, but most of it is, well, lets just say very sub-optimal...

Rather than write a huge wall of text detailing everything, I recommend you watch this video from Moriarte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErFVlM9bw8&list=PLfKwXAFHm6fJVAvEk9nBtN4x86hgc9S0P
This is a Deity level Oda domination game, and you will learn everything you need to know from watching it, and it is fun to watch

Other notes,
Why did you conquer the city states?
no ruins and no barbs hurts you more than the AI
You need to scout. Seriously, you really really need to scout. Shaka and Washington are deeply inland, with huge empires, and you have no idea at all what is between your and their caps.
Turning off victory conditions has a negative effect on the AI, they have no clue what to do when their chosen VC is missing.
Did I mention you need to scout?

The cities I've captured where once own by the AI, not the city states. And even if I turn the city states and other victory conditions on, I would have conquered them anyways to prevent the other AI from getting diplomatic victory.

Also, I'm really bad at handling barbarians. I even tried raging barbarians onin prince difficulty and it was a pain in the ass (barbarians make it difficult to exapnd for christ sakes).

I turned off ruins and city states because I don't want the AI to get early game advantages on religion, science, population, etc. For example, AI meeting up with a city state early will cause them to get some early gold faith food advantages etc.

 

[ravenmagus]

I turned off ruins and city states because I don't want the AI to get early game advantages on religion, science, population, etc. For example, AI meeting up with a city state early will cause them to get some early gold faith food advantages etc.

As a warmongerer you should be able to deal with barbarians pretty well. Just be sure to escort your settlers with a warrior or even a scout. If you're planning to open Honor you absolutely need barbarians enabled or it becomes extremely bad.

You get the same bonuses with city-states. City-states are a pretty big part of the game, so I'd recommend leaving them enabled (it's really unfair to civs like Siam or Greece to turn them off).

Also, keeping ancient ruins enabled will help you work on your scouting, which sounds like something you need to work on. The AI's not all that good at finding all the ruins - you can often find a ruin just outside their capital if you scout early enough, even passing by their scout on the way. (If anything, don't enable ruins because YOU don't want the early bonus. The ruins can range from useless to gamebreaking.)

 

[joshua43214]

This is why you build scouts.
Turning off CS's hurts you a lot. Yes you are denying the AI, but your are hurting yourself much more. Besides, on Prince getting allies with all the CS's is something that is pretty easy. You should never conquer them, make friends and allies with them. If you DoW 2 CS's you will take massive diplo penalties from them.

Barbs area pain yes, you just have to bring your warrior home ~T25 to protect from them, and then build a few archers to hunt them down. CS's will give quests to kill their camps, and they do a good job of slowing the AI down from spreading by capturing their workers and settlers.

You will have much better games with plain old barbs, and CS's.

EDIT: This is all besides the point though. The major issue is your gameplay in general, not being #1 in everything on Prince at T400 is because something went sideways before T100. This is why I recommended the video rather than write out a big wall of text