After the initial expansion I find myself in a surprisingly strong position. The continent must be pretty cramped because nobody gets a high number of cities. I consider war with HAs or elephants against Mansa, Monty or Izzy, but three barb cities spawned right beside me meaning I still have space for continued (fairly) peaceful expansion once I take them out.
With Monty busy fighting Augustus and Izzy sharing my religion, I only have to worry about one serious threat. So I butter up Bonaparte with the trusty gift city routine.
Craptown is, of course, a desert city designed to create border tension with Spain.
Phalanxes captured and razed all the barb cities, allowing me to resettle in better locations and also unlock the HE.
Things unfold fairly predictably. Monty and Augustus fight interminably. Mansa eventually joins and uses his tech lead and war elephants to crush Monty into submission and caps him.
Napoleon attacks Isabella in 800AD.
My settled GSpy gives me enough to steal things like Compass, Contruction and Theology from Izzy.
I milk Mansa trades for cash primarily, rather than techs although I pick up a few of those too. Liberalism is won, Taj Mahal is built, Mansa wins Economics race, I start building Cuirassiers, yadda yadda.
On getting Lib I switcht to Free Religion, meaning I won't have much to worry aout diplo-wise (Izzy is no longer a threat to me).
Amusingly enough Napoleon manages to capture Cordoba but loses Craptown. I'm offended that he should be so careless with such a priceless gift.
I have an army now and it's time to knock out the only threat on the landmass. I ask for Napoleon to set up a little diversion since Mansa was strong enough to beat Monty.
Then I attack myself.
Ragnar shows up to inform me that he hates me and I'm his worst enemy. Well, I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance too, Ragnar.
He's got a scary ten cities placing him in equal first with me, meaning a massive number of units. He's already WHEOOHRN when I meet him so I assume he has designs on Augustus.
Mansa turns out to be a soft target and the war is pretty easy. Monty breaks away from him so I give him a peace treaty just to simplify matters. Then I wipe MM off the map.
By now Augustus has attacked his old nemesis Monty again. I declare and quickly kill off Monty since I want those cities myself.
I've nearly won now. It's just a matter of killing off a few more AIs. Attacking Augustus immediately is a good idea because: he has cuirassiers but no replaceable parts yet; his culture has not yet expanded to fill up the space left by the now ethnically cleansed Malinese and Aztec cultures; and his stack is in the open (well, in a forest) and is a little banged up.
So I go ahead and do that. Surprisingly he's willing to capitulate after losing one previously Aztec city and his stack in the forest. I kinda had my heart set on killing him off completely, but I guess even my cruel soul is not entirely impervious to his entreaties for mercy, so I let him live.
Obviously Napoleon is next. He gets swept with similar ease.
Sadly I couldn't kill him completely as it turned out that he had another mystery city somehwere and had no idea where it was. So I took peace from him in return for his world map.
So Bonaparte was banished to his island retreat of Elba in an eerie parallel of historical reality. This time there would be no comeback, however
Three guesses as to what I did next.
Before I finished Izzy my territory on the main landmass plus various overseas colonies gave me enough to win.
Shockingly easy map once thing got rolling for the following reason: there were six civs shoe-horned onto one continent. None of them had much land and I managed to dominate the city count on the continent. Ragnar with his ten cities never had any impact on world affairs.