I've not yet compared saves with TA at various points. I think elitetroops wants to do it
Things we could improve or did poorly (big picture):
It's not going to be a very long list as we played a pretty good game -- but there were still some problems.
I'm not going to mention the AD years, because we had already dug our grave then. These were the critical big picture mistakes as I see it:
I think even for a longer game we should've had our first GA sooner. I remember us thinking this during the game a while before we started our GA, but at that point it was almost too late. We should've had the first one without MoM. We finished teching even before our second golden age was finished I think (at least if we skipped things like MT) –
embarassing and a huge waste of resources!!
In this particular game I think not getting an academy at all was better. It was not a big mistake in itself, but at least we should've found a way to generate our 2nd GS sooner (or use 2nd GS for academy instead of 1st). Reason being that the surrounding land was sooooo rich which resulted in the insane pace of the game. At ~800 BC we were in a position to realise this due to our scouting and capturing of the Pyramids+GL. We should've altered our plans. This goes into the next point →
- GPP – too little too late
We talked about bulbing CS, guilds, banking, etc in the early stages, but little of this happened in the game. Bamboozled by the ridiculous speed of the game we were teching so fast that there was no time to aquire the GPs to bulb the techs with. If we had made other plans for Paris then this city could've helped produce many of the neccessary GM/GS instead of running cottages. If I were to play again I'd use Paris for GPP, and in that case the academy is poor.
- Workers – too few too late
I remember noticing this clearly when I returned from Ukraine. We got our workers much too late this game. As a result it took way too long to get workshops planted everywhere and our forests were standing idle for centuries. This really halted our production. I think we should've added workers before we finished off Germany. Without workshops we couldn't keep up production while also getting GPP (and this game required both). Not having the required workers meant a need to remain in slavery, and this pushed back our GPP. Looking back on the game it's sickening how little we used specialists considering that we had representation all along.
So for next time I'd say we should aim to be even more flexible. Plans are fluid and can be tweaked. Reconsider plans whenever given valuable new information. Coming up with a long-term strategy is absolutely necessary, but we should still question it often. We did alter our plans at points this game too, for instance ignoring Portugal and striking Egypt first, but there's always room for improvement. Economically I don't think we changed much throughout the game.
I thought this post was going to be long, but looking at it now it still doesn't look half as long as XTeam's posts.
Should of listened to Elite more at this point. 
