I settled in place and focused on getting the 3 luxury up and running, so I could earn some early money. I wanted the Floating Gardens, so my capital could grow as fast as possible. But I also wanted a second city to grab more luxuries, so placed it nw to get gold, silk and later marble.
In policies I went for Landed Elite as early as possible. This is a tremendous help against the aggressive ICS like behavior of some of the AI. After this I saved up a bit on culture, because I had an opportunity to take advantage of 3(!) early RA's. And even with a failed Great Lib (damn you Napoleon! - he beat me to GL, StoneH AND the Pyramids!), I still managed a 84 turn Astronomy (my record before this was 95). After this I started on the path towards Free Speech. And with the 100% culture bonus policy, both my cities are on double culture.
I have also focused on early Temples and cranked out 2 GA's for some +4 culture improvements. I did find the El Dorarodo natural wonder, but the general area was empty of both lakes and luxuries, so I have to create my own wannabe El Doradoes
Normally England always hate my in any Civ game, but in this one Lizzy is overly friendly, but Cathrine hates me for "trying to win the game". Bismarck did hate me, but then I lucked out and freed one of his workes, so now there is just love!
The plan is to stay on friendly terms with as many civ's as possible, so I can keep earning full value on all the nice luxuries. As long as I'm allied with a fair amount of CS's and keep a small army, then it should be ok. Though most of my early Jags are dead to some random barbs, so I have to be careful with the rest.
Next goal: get some Patronage policies and then befriend cultural CS's. For research I'm building Porcelain Tower to get a GS to crack open Archaeology (to get early Louvre and Hermitage), so I need to start the long wait for Navigation. I have some more RA's line up, so I need to time those as well. Btw the RA optimization trick still seems a bit gamey to me, but that wont stop me from trying to use it. It is definitely a bit tricky to use and requires quite a bit of planning, so maybe it's ok.
Oh - I've also experienced the "2 turns left" on an early tech changing into giving me the tech on the following turn. Strange, but I'm not complaining too much