Well, I'll try to give a few tips, drawing from the shadow game I played. I won't go into too much detail, as that might spoil the fun...
Because your defenses are entirely decided upon by the whims of the Computer (i.e. pathetic), diplomacy is
everything. You will need to make friends, and lots of them. To do that, you'll need to trade, and trade intelligently. Try to steer your research (as best as the equally pathetic "recommendations" allow you to) towards techs that are valuable to the AI, use those to keep your tech level up, and build up your relations. Try to determine which AIs you can trade with, and with which you can't, to avoid annoying your potential allies.
Make sure you have some techs to bribe your allies into war, should you get attacked (and you will). Getting the warrior AIs on my side in battle saved my ass more than once.
As I said earlier, I didn't realize rule # 3 was there until after the game. Thus, I didn't pick Confucianism as my state religion when CoL came in. If you do so, I think that will make the game a
lot harder, because of all the "heathen religion" diplomacy penalties. Don't say I didn't warn ya...
Oh, and you'd
really want that iron. That's all I'm gonna say...