I played out a Challenger Space Victory.
My capital was founded by the Gold Resource... it would have been founded on a Plains Hills square but someone had previously settled a City just north of there (City Ruins), so I went with the City Ruins location instead.
Immortal level Barbs harrassed me to no end... I lost most of my capital's improvements multiple times and while I could "push back" the Barbs, I'd still keep losing my Warriors. Finally, with 2 Warriors stationed on top of a Copper Resource, I was able to get some Axemen out.
I guess that I should blame myself for having wandered with my first 2 Warriors, but it wasn't until the Barbs showed up that I clued-in and verified that we had a Raging Barbs setting enabled. I stole a Worker from China early on but it didn't make it home: a Lion ate it!
Still, without any sort of proper spawn-busting, I kept losing my already-existing Warriors, so I had to keep building Axemen. It wasn't until after 2000 BC that I was able to get out a Settler for City #2.
Of course, when you have a stack of Axemen, it becomes tempting to go after the AIs, which I did.
After founding New York, I captured York. However, I got greedy and went for Peter next, losing York to one of Peter's Archers (against my defending Combat I Axeman, no less), which I then had to turn around and reclaim.
Warring was slow but eventually successful. I got as high as 62.5% or so Land Area, after which I gifted back some Cities to the remaining AIs.
There was not much help in late-game teching from the AIs, even though I liberally gifted them techs. I received Rifling in trade and 1/3rd of Combustion, but that was it: the rest of the late-game techs were self-teched.
I only noticed New Zealand when I got Naploen's World Map in exchange for one of my tech gifts. But, by that point, I was hovering around the 58% or higher Land Area mark and thus decided to let Napoleon have New Zealand to himself.
The lack of Health was a serious issue, but expanding horizontally instead of vertically helped a lot--most Cities were around Size 15 at the end of the game, but they were "large enough" to get the job done.
The Three Gorges' Dam saved me from having to build Unhealthy Coal plants.
Near the end, I had a dilemma: use up a recently-spawned Great Engineer on the rest of The Space Elevator or in a 3-Great-Person Golden Age? Fusion still was a couple of turns away but I only had 1 turn left in my 2-Great-Person Gold Age. I decided to burn him in the Golden Age, which meant a delay on getting the Space Elevator completed but meant that I'd barely be able to research Fusion within a couple of turns... without the 2nd Golden Age, Fusion likely would have been delayed even 1 more turn, meaning that I'd have potentially needed to have delayed the second Golden Age for too long.
As it was, I spawned a new Great Person (a Great Scientist) on the turn that I received Fusion's Great Engineer, but I didn't really need that Great Scientist, so he just got settled in my capital for +1 Hammer, while the Great Engineer ran away to complete The Space Elevator.
I don't understand how you figure out the "30 Latitude" value for a map, but there were only a few squares' worth of Cities at the south end of the map that appeared capable of building The Space Elevator. Of course, my "well-timed, Ironworks will be done just in time to start on The Space Elevator" City was not within the valid area for building The Space Elevator.
I finished about 3/4 of the way through the 1800s AD with what looked like a decent Score, until the "make you pay Score-wise for having taken the Challenger save" algorithm scaled that Score back upon uploading the game. Oh well, at least my local computer's Hall of Fame showcases the Immortal-level Score.
The map was a lot of fun, although it took me too long to realise that it was a map of Australia. "Never trust a Map Maker" and all that has had me be cautious about making assumptions.
The pre-improved Resources were really neat, especially the invisible ones, like the Oil Resources having Wells (well, some of them did, but not all of them, apparently), so that you knew where to find the Oil in advance.
