The End
Oh dear. It's 1675AD. Here I was, in the final phase of my land grab prior to turning off the wars and making my way to space. I have 27 cities, but war weariness of up to 24 (!) per city means they are all basically capped at size 10. I have Cyrus down to one last city, which Mansa Musa (also in the war) is likely to capture.
But I made the fatal mistake a few turns ago of culture-bombing Persepolis, to try and shorten the war. I didn't realize just how much land that would give me, and now on checking, I'm now only 1% short of domination. A quick assessment of how my borders are going to grow tells me I'll probably have to gift Mansa at least 3 cities to avoid domination. Not a pleasant thought.
I decide to sleep on it.
It's been a hard day (with work, not with Civ
) and I badly oversleep the next day. And I realize after I wake up that there's only 1 hour left before the submission deadline!
Umm. Oops!
So no time to go to space. The only way I'm going to be able to submit at all is by letting the upcoming domination play out.
So, I played a few more turns and domination at 1690AD. Oh dear. To think what my empire could have been like if I'd ended the war a bit earlier and those cities all grew to size 20! Or alternatively, how much sooner I could have achieved domination if I'd actually been trying for it, and so didn't have half my cities still building universities and things.
Anyway
Back to the start of the game
The Beginning
I settled in place. 2nd city went to the NE to claim the copper and horses East of the capital sharing a lot of tiles with the capital. 3rd city to the NW to get the horses. This would ultimately become my heroic epic city.
I've never really used cho-ko-nu's much but have read on the forums that they are powerful, so I thought I'd use this game to try them out. So I basically beelined machinery while expanding peacefully, with the aim of trying to take out a nearby opponent with cho-ko-nu stacks. Hopefully that would give me enough land to attempt a space victory leaving 3 opponents (at least for now) for tech trading).
When I realized that Mansa Musa was one of the opponents, my plans changed: Since he would trade monopoly techs, I figured I may as well wipe out everyone else and I'll still have a spacerace trading partner.
Cho-Ko-Nus are Great!
And wow! Cho-ko-nu's really are powerful. They can even take on longbowmen-defended cities if the cities aren't on hills! Montezuma went first, but he was producing so many units that after taking his capital, I had to stop the war to regroup. Then there was a bit of a panic because Cyrus had a massive army and was in have-enough-on-our-hands mode. But it turned out his target was Genghis. I finished off Monty then joined in the Genghis war. With the quick speed, techs were advancing rapidly so I was fighting this war mostly with knights and cannon. Cyrus had knights, macemen, and towards the end, a few cavalry.
That war was easy because Cyrus had such overwhelming troop numbers that mostly all I had to do was sneak in and take Mongol cities after the defenders had been worn down. But, to my horror, just as I had my troops poised for the final two cities, Cyrus took them both the same turn (razing one of them).
The Cavalry Problem
Now I had a problem. I wanted to go to war with Cyrus because his cities were causing massive cultural pressure on my northern borders. But he still had enormous stacks of increasingly, cavalry. I was just starting to get riflemen online, but mostly only had cannon and knights no match for cavalry.
Then a thought occurred to me.
Is it possible that
..?
Yes!
I waited a couple of turns, and Cyrus piled basically his entire army into his most recently captured Mongol city.
It hadn't come out of revolt yet and even better many of his units were not yet healed.
And that meant no borders - so I could declare war and my CR2 and CR3 cannon would be able to take the city and wipe out the entire stack on the same turn...
That was definitely the sweetest moment of the game. Something like 30-40 Persian cavalry and knights no longer a threat.
After that, my troops returned to the West and slowly advanced into Persian territory, until that unfortunate discovery that I'd taken too much land and spent too much real-life time warring with a submission deadline looming, and the space race was not to be.
, but you get the same 
from buildings, improvements and specialists. That's good 
By the time I took care of Cyrus, Mansa was already building SS parts. He looked too strong for me, so I went for very late space instead of very late domination.
In the end I just wanted it to end it quickly, so I chose culture/settler-border pops instead of total war. 
, and of course my utter incompetence played a major role. That and mapmaker's evil decision to pick two of the worst AI to conquer early. Immortals and skirmishers on hill cities are not nice 
.
