I rather like izzy in this game...
Anyway if you crowd the map this much it's going to happen. It even happend to the player on occasion, and I kind of like playing from starts like this as long as I'm not on immortal
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I'm afraid Isabel got slammed on this go-round, first by the Aztec then by Musa.
I confess I played this non-stop yesterday. My wife commented once that I'd barely moved in the last two hours. Frankly I hardly stirred all day, I was so absorbed in it. I had Hattie and Cyris on the west and NW flank, respectively, and Asoka on the E/NE. Catherine was a short distance away to the east. Asoka DoW'd Catherine and asked me to help out, and I agreed because she was "taking the Michael right out of me" to use one of my friend's phrases. Asoka had a running feud with her the whole game and eventually knocked her off her perch and into mediocrity. I suppose I helped a bit before I ceasefired. I crossed through Indian lands to the nearest Russina city (a former barbarian city, Estruscans), and basically let Asoka's stack soften up the city, then took it for myself after his stack vanished into the void of fog. I never figured out what happened to it. Just one or two small remnants running away is all I ever saw. (One approach to Estruscans was dark to my units for those few turns.) After I secured the city I went on and rambled around with my knights in Russian lands, destroying farms and mines that were unprotected. Catherine had grenadiers to my knights but never attacked me with them, choosing instead to squat on her most important resources. I withdrew my knights because I was overextended. My effort was only a small nibble of the Russian empire but Catherine had everyone on her case in this game, like a hippo in piranha waters. She survived to the end but as a lesser force.
I overran an Egyptian city with culture, rare for me, but Hattie never DoW'd. Eventually I discovered that she was beelining her tech straight to the spaceship. She had a huge starting advantage but I sequenced things right and eventually caught her. Cyrus had the same idea as me, waiting only for the hab module (whichever one it is that requires genetics, my mind is still foggy this morning after a late night), but I found the city where he was building it, stationed two spies there, and watched the countdown. I stationed my other two spies in my own hab-building city. I had the lead on him so I didn't have to try any sabotage.
A number of firsts for me in this game. When Montezuma and Isabella were going at each other, I kept supplying one side or the other with technology to keep them at odds, and I think it helped prolong their war. They were both far away from me so the consequences to me were minimal. I also had to keep adapting throughout the game. I had a bad start in terms of growth, so I nurtured the home city along then REX'd as fast as possible to grow the borders. In the process of doing that I slipped into a cultural expansion mindset, bartering for technology and keeping my neighbors friendly. That worked until I discovered that Asoka had SAMs and I still had cannon and knights. I kept up my cultural pressure but somehow tightroped through lean times. I'm playing on Noble, which is tinkertoys to a lot of you I know, but gives me all I can manage. I'm a slow learner.
Question for you all... I've not had the Asoka AI very often, and don't know much about him. He was a good friend to me throughout the game, even when I put tremendous cultural pressure on Lahore (organic culture growth, no culture bombs). But he walloped Catherine repeatedly. Is that the way he is?
/eh, long post, sorry about that
Not that I'm complaining about the setup in this game. I just barely survived through the Middle Ages, but am currently enjoying a Renaissance of sorts. 
