I would say go for one or two religions and not more. If you are lucky the rest of the religions will go to different players and they will have at best case a long holy war, at worst case they just wont trade techs with each other.
Religion is the single most important aspect to diplomacy, leaving the AI in clumps with the same religion is invitation for them to boom (at least as best the AI can). Example, my last game, 3 continents, huge, with 14 civs. My continent had like 5 religions, one continent had none, and the other had 1. My continent was a bed of fire as everyone would declare war on a whim. As a result, later when relations were found with the rest of the world, our continent had "stunted" its growth by early conflict. The continent with 1 religion with no wars was busy booming away. The only reason I was able to win this game was that I had converted and created a very strong ally by doing anything the russians asked (they were next to me). After years of being their ally I was able to make them permanent allies (I had actually just enabled this to see what it was like) and then we shared all our techs, so we could basically research 2 things at once.
Of course I dont really know what your start is compared to the rest of the players, but your focus should be almost entirely on commerce, especially after initial barb clearing. Then a beeline through techs for a space race victory.
