IMO Archipelago actually has *too* much water for Denmark to really shine. Denmark's abilities all center around military units that are, at heart, land units. And Archipelago often have too little actual land for land units to matter much. Instead, Archipelago games tend to feature ships, more ships, and yet more ships. Oh.. and maybe two land melee units & two or three land archer-class units.
Denmark really shines on maps ranging from small islands (I think it's called "Small Continents") and Large Continents. They also do well on the Oval map type... although it's a pangaea map type, but they can use the numerous inlets & bays as both highways & invasion routes. Basically, Denmark should hug the coastline, hopping into & out of the water for maximum speed. Their movement pattern is kinda counter-intuitive. Remember, disembarking always consumes only 1 movement point, even if you disembark on a hill. In addition to the obvious movement benefits, their UA allows them to land a siege weapon on a hill, set up, and then fire, all on the same turn. Ideally, Denmark doesn't use archers at all; they go to war with nothing but Berzerkers (many) and siege weapons (several).
Sure. Any victory type is available to any civ, pretty much. Ideally, Denmark will go to war when they get their Berzerkers. But after some conquests, it often makes sense to settle down & then pursue a non-Domination victory. This is especially true if you settled your original 2 or 3 expansion cities with an eye to an eventual non-Domination game. See a good city site adjacent to a mountain? Grab it for your first or second expansion. Ditto for a good jungle site. They can act as typical warlike-domination cities until mid-Renaissance (i.e. build mostly units), and *then* build 'em with infrastructure.
Concur with this assessment entirely.
Denmark has some difficulty on archipelago maps because there isn't enough room to land. You often find yourself needing to attack cities on 5 or 6 tile islands, which isn't enough of a landing zone for your ground units. Double-edged sword is that it also means those tiles are probably occupied, so you'll have to knock them off with ranged ships, and if that's your strategy, you may as well have went with England or a better infrastructure civ (Poland, Siam, Arabia, etc.)
Also as far as victory conditions, any civ can win any victory condition. Recently, I've been playing Deity exclusively and trying to prove that any civ can win any victory condition on any level. A few questions that were brought up in this post on that subject.
1.) Denmark is certainly capable of tourism victory, and the approach this victory shifts dramatically at deity level (at least in my experience.)
On immortal and below, you can follow the same, rinse/repeat peaceful turtling strategy - tradition/aesthetics/rationalism/freedom, pick up pertinent tourism wonders along the way, fill writer/artist guilds early, cross your fingers for dirt culture, get a bunch of artifacts outside your borders, get to hotels ASAP, get your world religion, try to time international games with acquiring internet and concurrently build/immediately fill musician guild and spit out 2 musicians during the last 10 turns of Igames (faith buy extra if needed). Hocus-pocus, there's your culture win.
On deity this doesn't work. Maybe for Babylon/Korea, but doubtful there as well. You'll probably be beaten to most/all wonders, they might pick up most of the artifact sites outside your borders (maybe some inside as well), you might miss a religion entirely and don't want to tick off everyone else proposing it if you do (If he's Islamic and you're Christian, you should only propose Christianity if you have the bombers and he has the swords, not the other way around.)
What I find to be the best strategy for deity is more of a half-focus on turtling/tourism infrastructure and more on a late game all-out aggression. Still try to get the tourism setup with things like aesthetics and, if you can, a few great works wonders in your capital, especially the national wonders (oxford and hermitage). But the VAST majority of your tourism comes from conquest - first from capturing the capital with 20 wonders in it and buying hotels and stuff there, and second from capturing dozens of artifacts. My last game I ended up with 30 artifacts and I think I produced 5 of them, the rest were captured.
2.) Domination victory does become trickier at higher levels, but is doable. For that matter, diplomatic is the same way... potentially. I found that the quicker victory conditions at lower levels end up being harder/impossible at times on deity. Conversely, the long-winded, boring victories at lower levels are the fail-safe victories or back-up plans on deity. Summary:
Immortal and below (from quickest/easiest to longest/most tedious)
1.)domination: get a handful of cheap early units, get good infrastructure for a tech lead, upgrade those units so that rifles are attacking longswords (or utilize some great UU's like impi, Nauressan's elephants, Keshilk, Camel Archer) and bulldoze. Game over in about 150 turns
2.)diplomatic: essentially a science victory like space, but you only need 80% of the techs that space requires. Sure, you need some cash for CSs as well, but who doesn't at that point in the game?
3.)culture: might have an early out with sacred sites, but otherwise need to turn-click your way to the guilds, then turn-click your way to hotels, and then just turn-click until you're influential with everyone. Quite tedious, a snooze-fest, but not quite as bad as...
4.)space: more tedious, you have to fill the tech tree except for 3 or 4 techs, and the most frustrating thing about it is that you could just use your tech lead to knock everyone out or buy a diplo win dozens of turns earlier. It's like an endurance trial.
Deity (from easiest/most reliable to riskiest/most likely to be impossible)
1.)Space: The only victory condition that you can reliably achieve 75% of the time or more without warring. If you have enough of a border patrol and keep them upgraded, you can focus on the infrastructure and use the tricks in this forum to turn-click your way to victory. If things start to look desperate, a war-bribe can get you out of a tough spot.
2.)Culture: see above: while capturing tourism opportunities replaces building tourism opportunities at this level, you can still be pretty peaceful and achieve victory. Usually there's only one or two major cultural target civs, and you can ignore everyone else or even have them help you in removing the one or two civs that are your primary obstacles to victory.
3.)Diplomatic: the problem with diplomatic victory at deity level is that the other civs always have the means to blocking your victory, but fortunately they rarely do. You can't knock out too many civs because then you wouldn't be able to fully utilize the globalization bonus, and since each civ often has 10k+ gold and 200gpt, they can easily each pick a CS, drop 10K into it and remove all your alliances. You just have to hope that they don't. The silver lining is that aggressive civs at diety are often hyper-charged, and frequently a civ or two gets eliminated which you can bring back for 4 extra votes apiece. Still very risky, and there's nothing you can do to stop them.
4.)Domination: When planning a domination victory, better performance by the player (or worse performance by the AI) enables an earlier campaign to take all the capitals. I.E. if you did very well, you may be able to start the ball rolling with a Cbow rush whereas if you didn't have the resources/means of setting up you may have to wait until artillery. At deity, it's usually a later start. The problem then, is not whether or not you can take all the capitals (you can), it's whether or not you can do so before the guy on the other side of the map makes a spaceship. If yo see Neb/Sejong/Hiawatha over there, domination probably isn't an option.