I took a look too, and man...
You can't have everything on the map, and your city placement is a strategic (and economical) disaster. You defend every point being questioned here in your post, and I don't think you should do that, simply because you won't improve if you do not realise that the points mentioned are all correct, and you are making mistakes.
Again, thanks a lot for taking the time to look and comment.
Although I explain the reasons why I did things, that's not really a hard-headed rejection of advice. All points are considered. I made choices to address certain critical issues, and if someone says I should not have made that choice, then there's a question of how that critical issue is supposed to be addressed. I do have to weigh every response with a certain degree of skeptical objectivity because:
A) it's made with the benefit of hindsight and assumptions about how the order of things played out (see below),
B) there can be a tendency in these type of threads not to give the advice-seeker the benefit of the doubt; immediate tactical needs are weighed against immediate strategic axioms (like picking sopols that will help you in the here and now versus picking one that one won't but will inch you closer to finishing the tree), but nobody else can be aware what the former were without psychic powers,
C) I'm aware that most people have a more cavalier attitude towards initiating attacks (for instance, you would have taken Zurich),
EDIT--I suppose I also dove into Emperor with a spirit of experimentation. That's not respected by a lot of folks because their inclination is to find a formula that works for them and they naturally gravitate to it, hoping to refine it a little bit more each playthrough. If you experiment, you might incure "disaster" or "botch it big-time". Having said that, there's certainly a lot to be said for learning form other people's successes.
Case in point:
You have a deficit, and one worker trying to build a 9 tile road to the west, and 2 workers trying to build another just as long road to the south.
The reason you get so many wardecs early, is because you place cities right next to the AI. On a large map you have plenty of time to get your act together before the A.I. come calling. But with your strategy you seek trouble out, and can't handle it when you basically initiate it yourself.
I did not receive early wardec's because I sought trouble out, although I can see why you it would look that way in hindsight. I stayed at two cities for a long time (which largely contributed to my science predicament). Nebby's capital is right under me, which made our conflict inevitable. Byzantium spammed settlers up to my second city. Napoleon crossed that massive desert to bring an army to my doorstep. I didn't settle near him until after his generous peace treaty. That was an impulse settle, just to keep him from settling across that river and having an easier jump at me. Probably shouldn't have bothered, but then again it didn't become a source of problems either.
As for the long roads, I intended to plant settlers on the way. Basically, set up a perimeter at the juicy spots, then fill in.
I actually continued the game for a while, and was able to fend Genghis off. The real crippler was simply that Genghis was clearly snowballing into an unstoppable monster, and the other civ's seem as unwilling to cross a snow monster on Emperor as they are on any other difficulty.
The advice you and others have given about science is pretty much my big mistake. Even with the Pictish Warrior, it's simply not worth it to keep going down the iron/workshop branch in lieu of Civil Service and Education. With good tech, I could remain small and protect my borders. I'd probably start to get smothered by the other empires throwing settlers more aggressively than me and claiming prime real estate, in which case I'd have to abandon my predilection to avoid warmongering and take them out. There's just no place for a pacifist on this map.
The other biggie is that I would have been much better off with Tradition. The vexing thing about Liberty is that there's nothing in it that boosts income, and simply settling a lot of cities doesn't ensure a healthy economy unless there's a lot of good gold tiles to be had. Trade routes alone don't generate enough income to offset building maintenance, much less unit maintenance. Tradition, OTOH, has two good policies for upping gold income.
Btw, if somebody's interested, I have an early save that I can post.
???
