My strategy in this game was founded on something of a misconception. I scouted around and found vast expanses of land with no chokepoints to block off the AI, which caused me to panic a little bit. Inexperienced at Immortal, I reasoned that there was no way I could possibly try to compete with the AI in a straight land grab since even if I managed to keep in number of cities, there was no way I could keep up economically in the face of vast Immortal level AI maintenance reductions.
Turns out I was wrong about this, as I realised when I saw TMIT's playthrough...
Tech path was AH, Mining, BW and, since I found no horses or copper and have learned to fear AI barbs, on to IW. This gave me Iron in the BFC at 2200BC. So my strategy was to let Gandhi settle lots of cities for me and spread a religion, and then tech up to catapults and take it all by force.
Built three cities then started training units.
Got my catapults and DoWed.
The going was pretty easy as, like I expected, Gandhi was building more settlers, workers and missionaries than units.
This continues for a few bloody centuries until I've taken a decent-sized empire's worth of stuff, including nice things like the Great Lighthouse and a holy city.
By this stage I really need to get some techs, so we grant Gandhi peace on demanding terms.
I knew that this would mean Ghandi's immediate vassalisation to Liz, but that was something I would just have to put up with.
At this point I was reasonably satisfied insofar as my plan had come to fruition, I had crippled one AI and acquired a decent empire, but I knew I still faced an uphill struggle to catch the rexxing, Financial Lizzie.
As it turned out, I began to fall further and further behind in the following centuries.
Meeting the other civs alleviated my problems somewhat as I could whore out what few unique, tradeable techs I could get to try to gradually catch up somewhat. But every time I seemed to get semi-respectable the AI would suddenly jump ahead on me again.
By this stage I was running a very stripped down military as I could not afford to do anything other than try to improve my teching. Shaka had been harassing me for centuries. I ignored him at first as he has no astronomy (although he did make it abundantly clear that he intended to destroy me
), and later when he demanded my hard-earned tradebait tech, Steam Power, I of course had to say no as it was my only lifeline at the time. A few turns later he DoWed and appeared with a puny invasion fleet.
I chuckled at this, but my chuckle soon turned into a death rattle...
Oh crap...is that what I think it is?
And at this point I resign with Istanbul as good as gone. All I have militarily is about half a dozen Janissaries and two or three grenadiers scattered around the empire. Hats off to Shaka for kicking my ass in this one!