If you want to build your empire up before going to war, I'd agree with Catherine. Creative and Financial are both traits that make things easier for new players (Creative makes your new cities grow their borders right away, and Financial gives you a very flexible advantage that will help throughout the game). At easier levels you'll still be able to found religions without starting with Mysticism, just not one of the earliest religions.
If you like to get into early wars, I'd suggest Julius Caesar. The Praetorians blow away other units at early technology levels and you can conquer some neighbors and build an impressive empire by the time they become obsolete. Once you consolidate your conquest gains, the rest of the world will never catch up to you. For this a fun setting is a custom game with a tiny pangaea map and all 18 civs. All the civs will have 1 or 2 cities and you can pick them off at your leisure, hopefully about half of them before Praetorians are obsolete. Alternatively you can do a continents map with 2 or 3 continents of 3 or 4 civs each, and take over your whole continent in the classical era, and have an advantage in later eras while the other continents squabble internally.
Either way, you can take advantage of the fact that chopping trees near your city gives you hammers. You can start researching bronze working and building a worker, then use the hammers from chopping trees to build more workers and settlers, and give yourself an early head start. Another helpful strategy is to beeline to researching alphabet as soon as you can afford, then trade techs with all the AIs. Since you'll be the first to have it, they'll be eager to trade, and you can fill in all the early techs you skipped and then some. Just dont trade alphabet itself, or you'll have tech trading competitors.