Well, first of all the game I've been playing is on Emperor, so no worries SirPleb. I had started a comparable game on Deity, but back before the # of Civs was finalized, so I hadn't used the required 8 AI. I may eventually play a Deity one through with 8AI, though it would be a few weeks before I could really even start!
I was just using this Emperor game to test some Impi resource denial strategies, and ended up with almost the perfect start, so continued playing. As it turned out, the only other Expansionist Civ was the Americans, and they were on a seperate landmass. It is a Huge/Pangaea/8AI map, but the Americans and Aztecs had about 1/5th of the landmass off on their own continent.
These types of games take 100's of hours to play, I'm at 1450AD, and just waiting for my automated workers to finish each turn takes close to 10 minutes on a 1.33GHz/512MB RAM machine (all animations and moves turned off). I have finished the conquest at least, which took a long time as I had well over 400 military units most of the time. If I had known we could reload to determine the domination point sooner, it probably would have made about 2-5k difference in the final score, but oh well. I had
really cut expansion short, just to be safe. I would say I've played about 150-200 hours into it already, though a lot of that was because I didn't start automating workers until about 500AD. The terrain and city improvements left to do will easily eat up another 50 hours. Then it should fly by.
I usually play about a half hour to an hour, then switch to another game. Even had to take breaks during some turns as they were so long, mostly before I started automating the workers. On a side note, I certainly have learned a lot about Zulu/African culture and mythology from looking up references for city name ideas! No "New" or numbered cities for me
As far as the strategy, just massive settler expansion to about 40 cities and tons of scouts getting huts for the first bit. I was able to outpace the AI expansion because of a settler from a hut about 20 turns in. On Deity, that would never happen, even with 2+ settlers. Because I had more cities, I was able to renegotiate peace treaties with the AI Civs, demanding 1 or 2 cities every 20 turns. My first 30 or so "conquests" came that way. Those cities did the pop rushing of Impies while my core expanded peacefully. A couple of those cities had nearby Iron, and they just rushed out Swordsmen. I also set up temporary Horsemen pop rushing camps next to several bonus food sources which could rush a unit every other turn. By 500BC I had begun the conquest, though just tenatively. Around the end of the BC's I had built up to about 100 each of Impi and Horsemen, and let loose the flood gates.
It was constant war until 1200AD from that point on, usually producing about 20 units every turn, and maintaining a unit count of 450-800 not counting the 200+ captured workers. Just to put how many battles were involved each turn into perspective, I got a leader every single turn that I didn't already have one active from 300AD till 1200AD. "Mpande" made his appearance 8 times, accompanied by several other leaders who's names excape me. I now completely disbelieve any claims to having 2 active leaders at the same time, at least post-patch. Now the French are stuck on the island I dubbed "Madagascar", surrounded by privateers and Frigates, while I figure out just how many cities I can build.
The screenshot attached is
after I had disbanded 150 Knights and 200 Impies, the rest are mostly workers. It also doesn't include any of the captured workers. Madigascar is on the lower left/right, just at the edge of the screen.
