Glad to hear u are on your way to a diplomatic victory. My guess is that you've possibly already won this game by now.
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No, not even close! I'm only partway through the second age!
TBH, with the successful exile of the Frostlings over the course of about 5 turns (I hit them on multiple fronts), the game has already reached the grind-y "I've won, but the game doesn't know it yet" stage, where mostly what I'm doing is shuffling Stewards round the boondocks, foresting, chopping useful buildings, and then mining/irrigating those towns' tiles while setting them to Wealth.
I'm currently also shipping a substantial stack of elite units over to the island I'm sharing with the Lizards, in the hope/expectation that Morgor will shortly do something stupid, and try to take that town from me. I want to take his 2 towns, plus a third island-town that's closer to the other continent, then make peace again.
I'll gift that 3rd town to the Andori (or the Naga), to ensure that they have somewhere to retreat to if Hyreil (who's currently running distant second to me in land + pop) ever decides to roll over them.
How did you manage to get almost all of the free building Great Wonders?
I "allowed" the AI-Civs to spend their shields on them — on my behalf!
(Mainly the Ossirians, IIRC: you should have seen the 2-bit Jungle/Marsh town where she
somehow managed to build the Gardens of TQ! No idea how, that town can't have built anything else!)
Only missed out on the Clafestian Mounds(? The Free-Windmills GW) because the Hobbits built it, over on the other continent.
...which reminds me, I still can't trade any resources with the Hobbits, Naga, Andori, or Lizards (Or Frostlings or Dark Elves — but that was
my doing!), because no-one seems to have built their Harbour-SW yet. Being completely unable to trade makes improving the AI-Attitudes, and hence a Diplo-vic, much more difficult to achieve.
Sooo... it might be worth having a look at that building's requirements to see if they might reasonably be tweaked to encourage the AI to build it earlier (e.g. make it cheaper, or have it produce Veteran sea-units, or some [more] Culture, or only require a
single Trading Post, i.e. in that town).
What is a Cxx[x]xC settlement pattern?
It's shorthand for the so-called "optimal city placement" (OCP) pattern, where each town ("C") is founded 3-4 tiles ("xx(x)x") away from its neighbours, allowing it access to (nearly) all 20 tiles within its FatCross with minimal/no overlap.
"Optimal" is in scare-quotes because this pattern is actually grossly
inefficient in gameplay-terms. Since the ability to work the full 20 tiles is usually paywalled behind a late-game tech/building (Hospital in epic-Civ3, 'Duct in ToC), founding so loosely means that around half the tiles owned by any (AI-)Civ will not be worked during the more/most important (early) expansion/ consolidation phases of the game.
That is why I generally found my towns at CxxC, with
maybe a bit more space (CxxxC) around my capital and FP-town. When I play epic Civ3, I'm usually happy to let most towns top out at Pop10-12: generally only my capital, FP-town and some/all 1st-ring towns will ever be given Hospitals (if I haven't already won the game before I learn the optional tech of Sanitation!).
While the problem is mitigated somewhat in mods where Size1 and Size2 settlements have been given higher pop-caps than in the epic-game (e.g. Pop7 and Pop13 in
ToC, vs. Pop6 and Pop12, respectively), that only goes so far — because you still need some means of keeping all those people happy (or at least, not rioting!), preferably without ruining your economy.
Only in CCM and RARR is OCP actually useful/efficient, due to several factors:
(1) Settler-scarcity encourages the human player to grab as much land as possible with each new Settler
— CCM Settlers are only available via Palace auto-production (one per 20 turns, IIRC) for most of the first 3 ages
— RARR's Settler-type units are (very!) expensive (Pop2 + 30s, or Pop1 + 60s)
(2) Substantially adjusted .biq settings mean that towns reach size-caps earlier (or not all!):
— CCM Size1 settlements reach Pop10, Size2 reach Pop99 (Size3 does not exist, to avoid population-pollution)
— RARR's tile-yields are similar to the epic-game, but
towns require 3 food per citizen and irrigation is not unlocked until halfway through the second era(!) so towns built on Grass/Plains will tend to stall out at Pop2-3 in the early game/ while still running Despotism (only towns with substantial bonus-food resources can grow larger)
...and both those mods have many additional changes to the mechanics, to accommodate these limitations.
