My Gupta strategy (first time tried in eunuch level):
With the new revision, you no longer have to make the Vedas but Ayurveda which makes the UHV much more doable. ( earlier Vedas would be completed 2 out of 3 times before the Gupta spawn by some Indian civ ). So the UHVs are :
1) Build Ayurveda, Kamasutra, and decimal system
2) Have 36 turns of golden age.
3) Ensure no non-hindu civilization in Persia and India after 1150 AD.
First moves :
In every game I've played, the Mauryans get wiped out by the Guptas once the Guptas spawn in Bengal. The starting stack is enough to conquer all cities up to Delhi/Indraprasth. I had to whip out a few catapults for an unusually strong garrison at Delhi though.
My first targets are : Pataliputra, Varanasi, Delhi, Bhubaneshwar. Sometimes there are minor cities founded around Himachal Pradesh North East of Delhi. I conquered that as an afterthought. It wasn't a completely useless city, but I dislike the idea of building a city there as it takes up some of Delhi's BFC. Bhubaneshwar may sometimes be taken by the Cholas sometimes independent. A short war with the Cholans won't do lasting harm, but its not a good idea to push southwards and overwhelm them even if you can. Most of the Gupta game focuses on north and West India in any case.
What you have to keep in mind playing the Guptas, is the Chalukya spawn. They start off with a large amount of troops and have a large flip zone in the Deccan. If they start off at war with the you its a tough task putting them down. So its better to avoid taking any cities which would be targetted by them, chiefly this is just Vengi or any Western or Central Indian city.
Goal 1:
The only real challenge in the UHV is the first goal IMHO. Usually some other civ starts off for one of the three projects for the Guptas. In my first try I lost Kamasutra to the Vietnamese. What I did was to beeline for medicine and get Ayurveda first. Kamasutra comes with literature which would be in the tech path for Ayurveda so techpath wise I could cover both project's tech requirement.
My first mistake was to build the Kamasutra in Varanasi which didn't have much production instead of Pataliputra which was my production centre throughout the game. What advantage it did give however, was that I could build the other projects while working on Kamasutra in Varanasi.
Till around 600 AD I was just conquering North and West India while building the main Goal 1 projects. While I was at it, I built the hindu and Buddhist shrines. This helped my economy and helped later on in goal 2.
Goal 2 :
Goal 2 requires 36 turns of golden age. Technically this means 3 golden ages given the Gupta's UP. The first can be had by training a priest from either Pataliputra or Varanasi and a Scientist which you'd get from the decimal system. This gives you the first 12 turn of Golden age.
The next can be had by similarly training 2 Great Persons, 1 priest from Varanasi or Pataliputra, 1 Merchant or Scientist and one free engineer from either Blast Furnace or that other Great Engineer giving tech.
The last Golden Age I got was from the regular 2 UHV goal. After fighting off the Delhi Sultanate It came to me around 1200.
Goal 3 :
Its a much more straightforward goal than the first one, but not as easy. The wording of the UHV is "No non-hindu civ *after* 1150 AD" this means that it should click only *after* the Delhi spawn. There are two civs who could challenge you for this goal one is the Ghaznavids and the other would be the Delhi Sultanate. What I did was prepare for a military contest and kept building elephants, crossbows and the Gupta's UU the bamboo bowman ( a most effective UU in my opinion ) .
When the Ghaznavids spawned, the Gokturks had control of Gandhara/Afghanistan which was previously mostly under Hunnic rule. Funny thing that happened was, the Ghaznavids and their huge stack of death didn't move out of Ghazni even though they were at war with the Gokturks
. Similar oddity happened with the Delhi Sultanate.
Even so, I turtled in my North and North Western cities training bowmen, crossbows, arbalests and elephants to fight off the impending Delhi spawn. To deal with the barbarians, I rushed the building of the Great Wall. That is necessary to conquer cities while some distance away from your Western and Northern Indian cities. The Gokturks took up some of the barb rush. The Chalukyans absorbed some of the Rajput barbs.
When the Delhi sultanate did spawn, their capital was at Bharuch ?!! and they didn't have a very large stack. Just one camel rider , 4 islamic missionaries, and a few bowman. I steam rollered them with my large stacks. I had settled one city in Rajasthan, Mandapura. That flipped to the Delhi Sultanate and that is where the biggest fight was put up. But I won at the end with sheer numerical strength using a stack of cavalry, elephant rider, and arbalests.
Taking Bharuch was no problem nor did the Delhi Sultanate put up much of a fight in the other flipped cities. This is obviously a bug in the bare 1.3 version and I haven't tested the Delhi sultanate in a game yet to know for sure.
By the time I had to fight off the Delhi Sultanate, I had a huge army, and was the most technologically advanced nation in the world. The Ghaznavids vassalized to me as did the Burmese. Because of that, I could convert the Ghaznavids to hinduism. When I vassalized the Ghaznavids they were at war with the Gokturks so it gave me cause to take out Alexandreia Archosia which was their's at the time. I gave it over to the Ghaznavids ( but they still didn't move their stack out of Ghazni O.o ) .
So with this vast empire stretching from Gandhara/Afghanistan to Burma/(Bramhadesh
) and from Indraprasth/Delhi to Vengi *( which I conquered with ease during a brief war with the Chalukyans when they DOWd me ) I sailed smoothly to a comfortable victory in 1224 AD and a score of 5104.