In this game, live or die by diplo. The AI gets massive amounts of land on garbage + small so you have to be careful. Early in the game oracle was used for CoL, which converted monty. Diplo was tense...charlie buddhist, louis/shaka/cathy hindu, monty confucian. I actually used Paya for FR, since that was the only civic I could run and stay alive.
Other than that, the main tactic was to keep bribing the AIs into wars, but try to keep any one from getting out of control. I failed. Shaka capped louis and charlie, but it murdered his tech. He couldn't put up domination because cathy ran away in tech (just behind me), and justinian made a peacevassal bullcrap colony so he wouldn't capitulate...that and I had a 1 warrior garrison that murdered world average power. In other words, I abused the BROKEN CAP MECHANICS that usually plague me, in reverse, by cheesing the system. Go to hell game.
As for me, I had shaka/cathy @ friendly by late game (was in a lot of phony wars with shaka's first 2 vassals "helping" him), and was sitting in DPs with them when they weren't at war (cathy never declared on anyone actually).
Cathy had fiber optics and fusion to go when I won. Internet did very little for me frustratingly, since only cathy was getting any space techs before I'd get them, and I needed 2 AIs for that. Still, my empire ultimately went untouched despite being at war half the time, all the way to space.
