I played my last game on a medium map with small continents. My first priority was building the Great Library, but my neighbor the English built it first. Luckily, my capital was on the coast, so I built the Great Lighthouse instead. I began exploring, intending to extort huge sums for my maps. After making contact with all civs, three of which were on my continent, I noticed there was no contact between continents. I was tempted to sell these contacts, but then decided to hoard them. Without contact with all the other civs, each civs ability to gain technologies was crippled. I new they traded a lot, but I didn't realize the extent of it until no one made it to the industrial age until the 18th century. Normally, this happens around the 12th or 13th century. This also allowed me to build several of the middle age wonders because I would only be competing against on half of the civs instead of all of them. The continents could not contact each other until the late middle ages, so up until that point I was the only one able to trade with all civs. The funny part was that I did sell my maps for exhorbitant prices, but, even though they new each other were there, they had no contact! The other nice thing about this setup was that I could safely sell my maps to the civs on the other continent without having to worry about them trying to colonize my territory. The Great Lighthouse rocks, though I saw that the patch scales it down a little. I don't think this will hinder this strategy, since it is rare that you cannot find a sea route from one continent to another without actually entering ocean. You may not be able to find those little islands in the middle of nowhere, but that will leave some colonization for the industrial age.
