This has turned out to be a very weird game; it was a Small Continent map, but produced less total land mass than I'm used to seeing from such maps; the result was that nobody really had very much good land to expand into, and pretty much all civs were neck-in-neck scorewise for basically the entire game. Darius and Washington pulled ahead recently by conquering their neighbors and a couple city-states, but even now, it's turn 262 and the highest score is 832. I ended up settling only two cities besides the captured Cusco, since there wasn't much other good land worth settling on that continent. China is to the south of me, across a barren stretch of desert, hills, and mountains. I tried to take out her capital, but by then the window for a Bowmen rush was already closed, and since there was no Iron AT ALL anywhere close to my lands, I ended up just leaving her alone. Wu had a nice capital, but otherwise very little good land at all, mostly barren tundra. As a result, I was perpetually at war with her for a good portion of the game. She couldn't touch me, but her sheer mass of units (she led in military for most of the game), plus Cho-ko-nus, made an invasion of her lands more costly than I was willing to invest in. I struggled with keeping my gold up for much of the game, so I couldn't ally any Maritime city states to help boost my population numbers, either.
The sheer strength of my capital carried me through, and I'm on my way to a Science victory. I'm sure a more experienced player could have done a lot more with this start than I did, but I only bought the game recently, during the Steam sale, and I'm still kind of learning the game and moving up the levels (this game was played on King). In retrospect, I should have probably conquered and puppeted the two city-states on my continent, and beelined Chivalry after finding no Iron to take China out with Knights. Since I ended up settling so few cities of my own, annexing Cusco and building a Courthouse to control it directly probably would have been a good move as well. This may have also been a strong game to simply go for a Cultural win instead of Science.
My lands (note the low scores for both myself and the AI)
China to the south of me (her conquest of Ragusa was very recent)
Production in your cities by 10%".
