About the level I normally played at too - Prince I think it was then, first 'hard' level; the equivalent of King in Civ V. I was admittedly being a little flippant; certainly it's possible to win peacefully in diplo victories, it's just neither as common nor as easy as treating diplo victories as domination victories you get slightly earlier through the UN.
But then in no Civ games have the victory conditions ever been separable enough to really make for validly different strategies, with the possible exception of Civ V due to the difficulty of getting a culture victory without heavy specialisation in culture techs - expansion is always superior to building up, since the extra slots give you more units, you can have more tech buildings, and tech underlies every victory condition (UN and Apollo Program are both high tech wonders, tech is essential to win domination, you can only get cultural victory if you tech to enough Wonders fist to install them in your three cities) - and because the old diplo victory condition was entirely based on your population you benefited from, you guessed it, expanding, not to mention annexing enemy cities.
Ah, I see what you mean about national wonders - yes, that is annoying. I usually only go for the national wonders for the buildings I was going to build everywhere anyway (like libraries and, especially as France, monuments). No, these things weren't compulsory to unlock things in earlier games, they were only mechanically compulsory - no city gets anywhere without a granary, a library wherever you could place one was as fundamental as it is now; markets were in fact more fundamental both because of the need to divide commerce between taxes and research (with research always getting the lion's share of the slider) and because of their value in controlling ill health. These days, national wonders aside, a market or granary is only needed situationally, in cities that are specialised for particular production or located in areas that benefit particularly from them. In earlier Civ games, where happiness was managed at a city level, every city needed a set of happiness buildings - at the national level in Civ V, any happiness building anywhere in your empire does the same thing, so unless you actually need a lot of them you don't need to duplicate them in every city. etc. etc.
again.
