Domination for Charles Magnum of Holy Rome, 1675ad. Not a particularly fast date, but I'm still very happy with the result considering the lack of experience with archipelago/islands map types.
Settled 1E, no need to waste those nice elephant hammers, especially with hunting as a starting tech. The brief scouting session in the home island showed how poor it was. No food outside the BFC other than the lonely fish in the NW. Eventually I put a city in there but it wasn't a priority since there were no other resources than the jungle elephant, and to fully utilize that I would have needed iron working. (Without AH, I couldn't see the horse there.)
Tech and build path in the beginning
1. Fishing (switched the worker to wb when fishing finished, then finished worker, seemed like the optimal way.)
2. Agriculture (Finished in time for the worker to improve the rice, just to get that fast growth in capital.)
3. Sailing-Mining (Built warrior and then galley. Galley scouting the SE revealed the fish island.)
4. Wheel. (Just to connect one elephant to capital for happy cap, and building the road to stone.)
5. BW-Masonry (After I built a couple of settlers, I wanted to play it safe so built lighthouse and its greater version immediately after that.)
6. Pottery-Writing-Math (After TGL built library and then partially chopped pyramids.)
Cities
Second city to the fish-copper island, which later provided a culture bridge to Cathy's island.
Third city to Mansa's island, next to gems and rice. A nice place to have a foothold to the island.
Fourth to Cathy's island. This was (or I'd like to think that it was) a smart move since it effectively stopped Shaka's expansion. Looks like this angered him a bit as he later made a trireme/galley kamikaze against my frigates.
After REXing to 2 other bigger islands, it was just necessary to fill the empty places. Should have utilized the imperialistic trait better as I had only 7 cities by 1AD, and even worse building infrastructure for those was painfully slow. I never seem to learn to build MORE WORKERS.
Wonders
TGL - 1360 BC:
Probably a little too early, but Mansa was nice enough to give his world map for free.
The map provided me the information about SB's and Wang's lands so I immediately got the foreign trade routes from them and spared me from tedious scouting. Also early build made the chances of getting a great merchant pretty good. Trade mission provided many turns of 100% science.
Pyramids - 750BC:
This was definately too early because I barely had any specialists. Should have built something else, maybe stonehenge before this.
Oracle - 500BC:
Originally I decided not to pursue this, but by 750BC nobody had built this so I decided to give it a try. With the help of tech trade from Mansa and Cathy I managed to get machinery from oracle. Would have prefered CS but without COL it wasn't possible.
Taj Mahal 1300AD:
With a great prophet, a double golden age was the perfect time to build cavalries/frigates/galleons.
I don't recall building any other wonders but I missed the mausoleum and great library by few turns. At the end of the game though I had all but 2 wonders that were built during the game.
Mid-Late game
I left the seers alone just because I didn't want to ruin the tech trading relations. I doubt it would have been wise even to capture those workers from Mansa, since he was a big provider of techs throughout the game.
It never even came to mind to use espionage, but without a great spy it probably wouldn't have been very wise anyway. I kept them sufficiently advanced to minimize their tech trading with the other major civs.
Still though managed to research CS 125BC, and got paper 100BC. After this almost straight to astronomy. Should have gone here directly to education, but
I thought it would be better to find that third seer and the rest of the civs to fully utilize TGL and tech trade options. This was a mistake as it took forever
to find Boudica and on the top of that she refused to trade with me (not that she had anything really important). Also I was going after that circumnavigation bonus, but I didn't realize Boudica already had satellites. Not cool.
After education (720ad) it was just a long route to chemistry, rifling and military tradition. Maybe cavalries was a overkill and delayed the victory significantly, but it was rather enjoyable to crush the enemies with little or no loss.
Wars
With advanced units there was no need for any massive SODs, so utilizing two teams of frigates and galleon filled with cavalries (with medic III units) it was a fast and easy task to crush them all. Frigates took the city defenses out in no time so the combat odds for cavalries were very good most of the time. Probably lost only about 5 units during the whole campaign.
Elimination order
Shaka-Wang (who only had 2 cities during the whole game)-Joao-Zara-Ragnar-SB. All but Wang were vassalized. Sitting Bull was a stubborn fellow though. During the last turn I conquered 3 cities, the capital was gone, in fact the whole main island of his was gone, but still he didn't want to capitulate. Strangely though eliminating a few nearby caravels made him change his mind.
Creative setup and a fun game once again, so hats off to kcd.
I wonder if anyone visited Humbaba's hut...
Although I did a decent job of expanding in the mid-game, I think I was too far behind by that point. My peak bpt was around 6000 beakers as I was running about 40 cities using sushi/mining. I think my Oxford was around 1300 AD or so -- very late. I traded for some techs off of Mansa but it didn't even occur to me that I could steal techs from the seers 
Other AI's also declared on me - Ragnar in 1690AD, but I took a bunch of minor cities from him and gave him peace. After I launched, Wang Kon - who was pleased with me since 600AD (but WHEOOHRN even before that?), and had like 70% of my score power, decided to try his luck against me and my defensive pact partner Zara (who had double my power?) 
Very late in the game I was able to steal 2,5K gold from MM's treasury.
.
mister srad... ). One thing I did stupidly was packing NE/Mausoleum in the capital (together with GLH - 1680 bc- and great lib): I got 3 artists in row waiting for education 
At least I started 5 GAs tx to those random GPs for some civic fun 
