1. Play one of the leaders with FIN + some other useful trait.
2. Raging Barbarians on a huge pangea with 3-5 other civs max.
3. Get the Great Wall and Pyramids asap, even if you have to chop every forest in sight.
This often works to give you a stupendous advantage if you don't have a lot of other competing civs, so I usually play with 3 others. (with a lot of other civs, barbarians production is too low to help).
What happens quite often is that at least one (rarely 2, and like 1 in 500, all) of the other civs get wiped out by barbs fairly early on, around 2000 BC or so.
Then the barbs start to build tons of cities, making it almost impossible in many cases for the other civs to expand easily. Since I have GW, I don't have to worry about much of an army for a long time. In fact I often don't have anything but a single warrior or archer per city until I can get Infantry.
By that time I am usually decades ahead in tech, so I can fairly easily take the barbarian rifled cities out, but the AI apparently find it almost impossible - in many cases I have seen it where the AI civs just go "flatline" for hundreds of years.
Fairly often the first inkling that the other civs have that I might have other designs on them is when my modern armor and gunships move in...
2. Raging Barbarians on a huge pangea with 3-5 other civs max.
3. Get the Great Wall and Pyramids asap, even if you have to chop every forest in sight.
This often works to give you a stupendous advantage if you don't have a lot of other competing civs, so I usually play with 3 others. (with a lot of other civs, barbarians production is too low to help).
What happens quite often is that at least one (rarely 2, and like 1 in 500, all) of the other civs get wiped out by barbs fairly early on, around 2000 BC or so.
Then the barbs start to build tons of cities, making it almost impossible in many cases for the other civs to expand easily. Since I have GW, I don't have to worry about much of an army for a long time. In fact I often don't have anything but a single warrior or archer per city until I can get Infantry.
By that time I am usually decades ahead in tech, so I can fairly easily take the barbarian rifled cities out, but the AI apparently find it almost impossible - in many cases I have seen it where the AI civs just go "flatline" for hundreds of years.
Fairly often the first inkling that the other civs have that I might have other designs on them is when my modern armor and gunships move in...