I took the Challenger saved game. Only now, upon reviewing what the challenge was (Gems moved to a neighbour's capital's big fat cross), do I realise that others did not have an Alex with Gems in his capital... which I ended up capturing without the help of Praetorians (my economy could only handle researching part of Iron Working before it crashed).
I settled on one of the Silk Resources for the extra +1 Commerce per turn in my City Centre.
The map was Commerce poor (well, without the Gems Resource early on, anyway) so my economy was in the dumps for a long time.
I missed The Pyramids even though I had an awesome Chopping plan... they just got built too early for me.
So, I resorted to Cottage spam to keep my economy alive. It took a while for the Cottages to mature, during which time my economy limped ahead.
I eventually figured out that I'd need Optics to meet others, but by the time that I got it, the Chinese already had a Caravel at my shores.
I'd avoided Alphabet (my economy couldn't handle it) so it took me a while, even after meeting all of the AIs, before I could trade techs.
Initially, I was a heathen but later chose Confucianism (Alex's contribution), lost a bunch of trading partners in the process.
Monte and Bismarck were involved in a war so I chose sides... Monte, will you be my brother? Yes, he said, so I captured one of his Cities that he'd lost to Bismarck (and kept it, of course) and then "dealt with" the "Bismarck problem" by eliminating the Germans.
After getting a couple of Bismarck's Cities, I aggressively spread Buddhism everywhere in my empire (Isabella was surely happy, as it was her Shrined State Religion) and I even later spread it to the Chinese.
Next went Saladin to the grave, with a bit of help from Monte. I let Monte capture a City that was being Culturally-crushed by Isabella from multiple sides and that City ended up staying in Monte's hands, yay.
Teching was atrociously slow, even with many Cottages, but I eventually struggled my way to Mass Media. I'd saved one of my few Great People--a Great Engineer--then won on the first vote, going up against Isabella. She loved others far more than they loved her for a shared Religion and I had other reasons for them to prefer me (shared wars, good trading, not trading with their Worst Enemies, etc).
It was a fun game and a neat concept to revisit an older game but at a higher difficulty level. Thanks go out to the admins for making it all possible!
My memory (which may be imperfect) was that Monte landed by my heroic epic city - which was on the coast just East of the starting spot and I upgraded its defending warrior. 
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