v1.9, Monarch/Normal
Time: 1745AD
Score: 11905
Strategy
First four cities founded using the starting settlers were Voronezh (capital), T'ver (to get the Fur), Tallin (to get the Fish) and Lulea (awesome city location). Having access to Lulea due to Viking disinterest is relatively common, but requires some luck on the starting situation. I waited for Kiev to spawn before capturing for myself, so as not to waste a precious settler.
My early choices for tech research included Meditation, followed by Engineering. Fishing and Sailing can be traded for, and contact with the eastern civs will give access to Calendar and the Aesthetics branch. Engineering early is important as Notre Dame is neeeded to allow your cities to raise the happiness cap enough to really get going during the early- and mid-game.
The first goal as Russia is to amass an army of Workers ASAP. Once Voronezh reaches size 4, it can pump out Workers in just a couple of turns each. The easiest target to steal workers from is Germany (in this incarnation, Barbarossa). But any worker who can be stolen is very much worth grabbing.
The second goal is to grab the best land in Europe, or at least remove the other civs who are occupying it. In addition to the 4x core Russian cities and Lulea, the next targets for cities were one in Poland (Lublin, founded for myself, to work both the Iron and Horses, even though this has a little overlap with Kiev the early hammers are worth it) and then eventually Constantinople. The remaining 3 cities to bring my total to 10 would ultimately be in North America (New Orleans, Chicago and Denver) but that takes a while obviously.
The third goal is to get access to Catholicism. Riding on the coattails of the Apostolic Palace is important, the extra hammers from Catholic Monasteries and Churches helps a lot. For my game, Wien did not have Catholicism (so it was razed) but Frankfurt did. Crushing Germany from the start (sending everything to raze Wien, capture Frankfurt and reduce them to the city-state of Venice, but not vassalising) is the way to go. Frankfurt can pump out six Catholic missionaries one a turn in about seven turns with a combination of whipping and chopping. Hey presto, I had an Orthodox civ (which remained my state religion until I eventually switched to Secularism) with Catholicism in all of my cities.
For good measure, Frankfurt has access to Stone, which speeds up the production of a number of the Catholic wonders. First and of foremost importance for maintaining happiness is Notre Dame. I chop-rushed this in Kiev in about 8-9 turns once I had captured Frankfurt. Later, San Marco's Basilica makes Tallin a powerhouse for commerce.
After the land-grab, some consolidation is necessary. The Mongols' pending arrival requires the production of enough troops to cover each city. I built a Pikeman, a Knight and a Longbow for each of my six cities before eventually making contact with the Mongols in the late 1300s. Free experience, with maximum Great General points for killing inside your own cultural borders! The extra strength of my army encouraged England to voluntarily vassalise around 1400AD. The troops raised to fend off the Mongols were then supplemented with a bunch (5) of Bombards and sent towards Constantinople. I never warred with Byzantium (well I might have captured a worker or two early, I can't recall) and they collapsed as Turkey captured Constantinople/Istanbul. Turkey's units were no match for an army of Bombards and Contstantinople fell to me around the mid-1400s. As an added bonus, the Turks had spread Islam here which enabled me to build the Red Fort and Taj Mahal in Car'grad. Constantinople also already had Hagia Sophia, so I made this city my Stock Exchange location and built Empire State Building here too. After capturing Athens (temporarily) and Konya from Turkey, they were not ready to capitulate and the war was dragging my economy down so I sued for peace. This happened to coincide with a respawn of Persia and Turkey suddenly was willing to become my voluntary vassal.
Yes please. With my assistance, Turkey repelled Persia (who vassalised to the Mughals, my closest rival in terms of technology), and conquered Jerusalem, Mecca, and also Egypt. As they were willing vassals, I could demand Turkey's resources all game without fear of them breaking free. Which I surely did.
France seemed to be more interested in conquering the Netherlands and Italy (which they were quite successful at) than searching for the New World, so I didn't have much competition for Caravels and circumnavigation. The French research rate tanked pretty early due to their large number of cities. The conquerors were used to subjugate both the Aztecs and the Inca. I took some care in choosing which Aztec cities to raze and which to capture/liberate. When the Aztecs finally capitulated, I also liberated the Native (Mayan) cities to them in central America, and the Aztecs blossomed from there into a nice, thriving vassal state. At some point (I think it was several points actually), I warred with Spain and Portugal due to my control of the native American civs. I gifted the Inca a couple of city-raider promoted Jaguars and my trusty vassals managed to do the job on Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro and at least two other colonies in South America.
The key to getting the vassalised native American civs to expand beyond their historical borders is to do so via war. If you capture foreign cities yourself, it can be difficult to liberate them to your vassals though. Better method is to give your vassals the tools to conquer for themselves, declare war on the offending colonising civs and let the rest take care of itself.
I settled New Orleans, Denver and Chicago in the mid-1500s, at around the same time as I liberated Frankfurt to the Vikings. In the early 1600s, I began to build a road across Siberia. Mongolia had collapsed in the 1400s and nobody had ever come through to take their former cities from the Independents. As a result, there were a lot of Independent units running around in Siberia, including at least 10 workers that I glady captured. I chose to build my road to the north of the former Mongolian cities, just in case of a potential Mongol respawn. In 1695, I founded my 7 cities in Siberia (plus Kazan to fill in Urals area with my culture also), unfortunately shaving a lot of pace off my tech research times. But most of the important techs had been researched by this time so I could afford to slow down my tech pace.
Voronezh had built the Iron Works and could produce the Apollo Program in 6 turns and the Manhattan Project in about 7-8 turns. By 1730 I had everything in place for the 2nd UHV goals, except for a city on the Moscow tile to complete the Railway. But it turned out that the Communism goal was a lot harder than I had thought it would be. My four vassals were going to be easy enough to convince to switch to Communism, but I needed another Communist friend and none of the AI civs were anywhere near friendly or advanced enough. Enter Prussia. Their starting army had a mass of Cannons and Rifleman, but was ultimately no match for my Artillery, Infantry and Cossacks. I capitulated them after capturing Berlin and re-capturing Frankfurt, before liberating these cities back to my vassal.
Now that I had five willing targets, the next problem was that I had stolen Millitary Science from someone (England I think) along the way and most of my vassals had not yet researched this particular tech. So I waited about 10 turns through the 1730s for the Aztecs and the Inca to slowly research it for themselves, before I gifted each of my vassals the necessary techs to reach Communism and bribed them to switch. Still not quite done with the UHV, whilst Turkey and England were happy with me to the point of being Friendly, my capitulated vassals were only Pleased with me. So I had to gift a whole bunch of techs to each of them to make them sufficiently enamoured to trigger the 3rd UHV condition. It occurred to me only later that I should have just focused on Mass Media with my own reasearch and I could have saved some turns waiting for my vassals to research Military Science. Oh well, room for improvement I suppose.
Finally, on the last turn I founded Moscow to provide the terminus (or the start, depending on the way you look at it) for my Trans-Siberian Railway and triggered the Historical Victory in 1745AD.
Stability was a problem for me at various stages. I was Unstable for much of the 1500s, with my empire held together by a series of Golden Ages. Each gap between Golden Ages became more destabilising than the one before it. Eventually I built the Christo Redentor and switched to the authoritarian civics, but it was touch-and-go for quite a while in between. I also made maximum use of Resettlement for each of my North American cities and also the settling of Siberia. Without this, I don't think I would have made it to the late game with my empire intact.
Throughout the game, I micromanaged foreign relations quite intensely. I squeezed the maximum possible return out of map trading and commodity trading at every opportunity, by constantly checking with each other civ as to what I could sell them. I remeber that I got a particularly good tech-trade deal (I think I got Paper amongst a large-ish trade) from Byzantium the turn before they collapsed. If I had missed this opportunity or probably any of several other significant trades, it would have certainly slowed my overall progress.