The main problem in this game was Hiawatha. He was a huge, HUGE technological runaway and he was so far away that I really couldn't stop him. For most of the game he was 20-25% above the tech average which is INSANE. He hit Industrial around 120, Modern on ~t140(!), and Atomic on ~175(!!!!!!!). He finished Apollo on t202 and Hubble on t220. I know Hiawatha runs away sometimes but wooooooow...
Anyway, I actually settled on one of the floodplain Cottons instead of the hill after looking around and seeing a lot of Hills in the area. I felt it was a good tradeoff for being able to settle on a luxury.
I ended up opening with 3 cities Tradition. This was some horrible land and I really couldn't justify dropping a 4th city anywhere. I considered going west near the Silver since I nabbed Desert Faith, there was an Oasis there to farm near and a mountain for an observatory, but William was expanding hard up north and Babylon can be a very pissy neighbor(indeed, he spent much of the game fighting Austria) so I didn't think it was worth the risk. My cities are only 20/14/14; one of the things with Deity is it's really hard to grow your cities if the AI decides to just, you know, murder all of them.
I got the second religion and got Tithes + Pagodas. I also nabbed the Hagia Sophia after enhancing and was able to just spread my religion EVERYWHERE; this was a very strange game for Deity because there was little AI interest in a religion.
I wanted to be aggressive and go through Askia and stop Hiawatha from running away too hard, but William and Patchuti would not get off my back and I spent a lot of the game just holding them off. I was finally able to get them both to back off and Patchuti actually ended up AFRAID of me which I haven't had on Deity in a looooong time.
I was finally able to go after Askia. I took three cities including Jenne with Caroleans + Cannons. About this time Austria comes to me and tell me that William is moving a sneak attack to my capital so I decide I need to wrap this fight up quick. Then Hiawatha swoops in and takes Tombuctu and Gao in 4 turns
. It was at this point that I decided my only way to beat Hiawatha was going to be to just eat everyone else and try to capital snipe Onondaga. I got a sizable peace deal with Askia and ground down through the Dutch after rebuffing their attack.
I was able to take one of his cities and then hold there until I hit Infantry and that's when I started pushing. I had a mass of Medic + Siege Caroleans upgraded to Infantry and was able to take 100 strenght Utretch(which he actually retook briefly) with only a little Artillery backup which got wrecked by Battleships and Bombers soon after. At that point he pulled some Battleships in and started bombarding me on my way to Amsterdam along with a wall of Artillery. By some miracle, I was able to chip at Amsterdam enough to take it with Siege infantry.
I knew I couldn't hold it with the shape my army was in so I got a small peace deal and went to push into Babylon. I liberated Rio and took a couple of cities from Babylon. I've blown the crap out of a lot of his army with planes but he has plenty more. I went ahead and bulbed Advanced Ballistics and was preparing to nuke his huge army near Akkad(which was 35 pop and was going to murder my happiness anyway)...when Hiawatha backstabs me. I'm actually holding him off pretty well because his main force came down south, which is a crowded choke point where some of my CS allies are holding him off and my Infantry down there are so well promoted that they can go toe-to-toe with Mech Infantry. However I've decided to hold onto the nuke to see if I need to use it on him. Amsertdam thankfully had Big Ben so I can buy the nukes much cheaper.
Policy-wise I've done Tradition, Patronage-(Philanthropy->Scholasticism)Rationalism(Secularism+Humanism) and Order->Planned Economy. My cultural CS allies got killed off so that's slowed me down a bit even though Amsterdam had Cristo Redentor.
My takeaways so far:
-Holy crap this map is HARD
-I love Caroleans even more than I did before and that's hard to do
-I don't know how people manage without siege units in this game. Catapults kinda suck, you can SOMETIMES get by without Trebuchets, but Cannons are just so vital to a push at that point in the game. Taking down a 70 strength and two ~80 strength cities of Askia's with 4 Siege promoted cannons was so invaluable.
I have this idea: since water maps are generally easy, we can 'invite' all notorious warmongers into game (Mongolia, the Huns, Russia, France, etc.) and find out if tiny pPolynesia has a chance of survival..
.
It's more like deity+
I really feel like I've made a huge accomplishment just by doing as well as I am and I think I've actually made some progress as a player. Even if I lose this I'll still be proud of myself. 
