Finally found time to play some Civ 4 again. Thanks for hosting the Nobles Club Series, I really enjoyed playing this map!
Settled on the ivory and teched Agriculture->AH->Wheel->Pottery->Mining->BW. Postponing BW this long was probably not the optimal choice, but I was afraid I would never get anywhere with my techs consindering the low commerce of the start and the bad starting techs of the celts. Started with a worker and went for 2 settlers at size 3. I placed my second city in the southeast to claim the nice river (for commerce reasons) and to block off Ragnar.
My plan to settle my third city 3 west of the capital was thwarted by India, who settled right at my border. In hindsight, this was not too bad beacuse it made me go for the horse/pigs spot instead.
Having secured the horses, I decided to go for a HA-attack on india. This was mainly because Asoka kept tempting me with workers right at my border and didnt really defend his city. Given his weak defenses, I figured waiting for construction was a waste especiallly considering my weak research. Things took a bit longer than hoped for, but I managed to take Vijayanagara by 550 BC.
By 225 BC, I had captured 2 more cities and made peace for techs (if I remember correctly, he gave me metal casting for it).
At some point I switched into budhism, mainly to try to keep ragnar from attacking me. He was busy fighting other people however, mainly Mansa. Having Ragnar as a neighbor proved helpful here, he was a real crap magnet and got dowed by egypt 2 times, who kept bribing in Mansa. Egypt was the most dangerous AI during the most part of the game, things would have taken a turn for the worse had she gone for me and not beaten on Ragnar.
With the idea of going for a cuirassier rush, I teched to Nationalism but soon realized that there was no way I could win lib, tech pace of the game was just too rapid. Egypt won liberalism by 560 AD, but at least I got the Taj Mahal. I got out 2 great merchants and teched to steel. My rational behind going steel over Military Tradition was that I was afraid of people getting a very early rifling, cannons are viable longer than cuirassiers in my opinion. Getting to steel and assembling an army took me until 1080 AD, I upgraded ~25 trebuchets to cannons and attacked egypt with two stacks while her main army was in Ragnars territory. At that point of the game I was rather scared of egypt, she had three vassals and kept teching like a maniac. Too bad she went for the wrong techs to defend from my attack
Taking her land proved a lot easier than anticipated, her stack was destroyed by Ragnar and I could just capture her cities. The only downside was that she wouldn't capitulte due to her vassals, so I took her out completely. She even built the Kremlin in her capital 2 turns before I could take it, thank you Hatshepsut
Hammurabi on the other hand capitultated without having to capture a city,so I continued straight for Ragnar who was the greatest threat to my victory. I took his first city at 1350 AD and rolled over him with cannons and rifling, like egypt he was a lot less problematic than I had thought.
From that point on the game was basically won, Joao gave me the most trouble out of all AIs in the game and kept dragging out the inevitable until 1550 AD, when he finally gave in.
My statistics after winning the game:
I also want to show you my capital, which became really awesome and had to do most of the heavy lifting research-wise:
Although I had a very nice Deity experience in BOTM recently, Deity is still pretty new to me, and I'm not at all comfortable on the level. Everything you do has to be "all in", so turning around now, 40 turns later (too late) or something, wouldn't go very well. Blink, and there are longbows and 60% culture.
I didn't play the previous Brennus game, because around that time I just moved up to Monarch and was not very comfortable with the new level, so I decided to skip that one and play some off-line games with FIN leaders instead. But now I feel more at ease at Monarch. So let's start the game 
3
, a slight research boost before BW and Pot. But the Celts have no Fishing, thus the lake becomes less appealing. Settling on Ivory looks better than SIP for the Celts.
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. But this city might give me some unwanted GProphets 
. I was already traumatised by GProphets in NC 260 
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Some surprisingly bad luck have come to your game 
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: 
, compared to 50 exp for the leaders who are neither CHA nor AGG.
