7665. Pangea map, old, wet, warm, Sumeria + all scientific except for Babylon.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/81969/start.JPG
As you can guess, I made 3 settler factories out of this. Popping an SGL and building Pyramids helped a lot!
My basic plan was to expand with ToA until I get near the Dom limit or until I get to education and have to let it go, get to rails and hospitals and keep growing cities. Do a fairly wide spacing close to the cap and near ICS further away.
I got another SGL later (don't remember when) which I used for ToA.
I hit the dom limit around 800 AD, I think, and hovered within 5-10 tiles of it the rest of the game. Somewhere early on, Bismark was in my way, so I wiped him out - I frankly don't even remember it. Maybe one of the other civs took him out.
I had a war with Korea to take some space I wanted from them, and Persia and I clashed a little. It was a very peaceful game until around 1800 when Byzantium (who I had been supplying with tech for silks, and who I had gifted several cities to keep under the Dom limit as I got better land) built Manhatten project!!
This lead to me creating spies and finding out that Byzantium was building ICBM's and spaceship parts. They had bombers, some TOW and a bunch of Mech Inf.
I had stealth bombers, radar arty's and a stack of about 30 modern armor.
It wasn't much of a fight.
Much of the next 20 turns were war turns, and I kept planting spies and having people declare on me, or people declare on me because I invaded someone they had an MPP with...
Net result was that Russia died and Byzantium and Persia were vastly cut to pieces. Greece, however, became very strong (well, not as strong as me) and started building space ship parts. However, they didn't have uranium, so I let them build.
The last 150 turns or so were all automated workers and hitting the space/return key - checking in on greece every so often to see what was up with their SS, ensuring that I wasn't going to win by domination or culture.
Things I learned:
-Arch is the way to go. Sea tiles (that are worked or not) really help.
-Don't build lots of wonders in one city. I had to dump libs/unis in my FP city, because it was going to win by culture.
-Take out civs early, when it's faster. Of course, on higher levels, you have to go to war earlier to continue expansion
-Pollution sucks. I think I would go for a tighter build in the future. a size 40 city creates a *lot* of pollution until you get mass transit... and 10 size 30+ cities create a lot more.
- keep worker/settler factories running until you are at max pop. That was a big help.
- I gifted a 2 tile island early, because the land wasn't great. This was before I realized about the sea tiles.
- use colonies to get furs from tundra tiles - don't build cities. It's just not worth it...