Tough game so far. Didn't play particularly well. I really, really struggle at standard deity. I know where my mistakes are with hindsight - on Immortal I can most often get away with the occasional sloppy play, but here it tends to snowball.
Settled 2N on PH. Then N for gold, rice and corn. Then E for stone and further north for marble/copper. After this, I ran into trouble, misjudging my expansion / tech rate kinda badly. Ended up crashing without Writing and Pottery, partly because it seemed like Monte would DOW me circa 1800 BC and I had to spend my last cash on a panic switch to Archery. He ended up attacking SB, after walking his stack right up to my border first. After the crash, my workers literally had nothing do, and cities nothing to build. Also, managed to lose a city to a barb warrior
mischief
, in a botched attempt to block HC later on. Resettled that one, but HC did sneak in some crap cities into my territory. I previously had two settlers waiting for 20+ turns to complete the land-block, but had to make sure I finished Writing first.
Plus side: Monte and SB are beating each other up pretty good. I have 9 cities and most likely 2-3 more. I'm kinda sorta close to digging myself out of the financial hole.
Minus side: HC is a bit of a monster, though I should be easily able to get him to friendly (bit behind on that). I'm really, really behind in tech. This could be ok, but hard to say at this point - should be clearer in another 20-25t or so.
I was planning on elepulting Monte from early on, like Yamps, but had to more or less give up on the idea due to the miserable tech pace. Really unfortunate, as he's looking totally weak.