Should still be possible to win. AI are very flawed and diplomacy always wins the day. You can war before rifles. Starting save?
Lol, have you ever tried diplomacy with 18 Ai's on a Pangea with no tech trading? Yes diplomacy wins, assuming you made the right pick of your Permanent alliance buddy two eras before communism.
Record yourself playing vs 18 aggressive ai on Huge Pangea with no tech trading and no vassals on Immortal difficulty and show me how you survive Giglameshes vultures, followed by genghih's keshiks, followed by Surry's elepult, followed by Tokus Samatrebs, followed up by Justianians cataphracts, followed by izzy's conquisators, followed by the predicigtable triple whammie of Napoleon+Genghis+Shaka CRIII grenadiers and cannons, followed up by Churchhill's redcoat draft and Catherine's Cossask and then Bismarck's panzers..........while devoting half your hammers to triremes, caravels, galleons and frigates lolololol.
Oh yeah, it's not just surviving the continuous onslaught from all four corners of your empire. The biggest threat in the game is that runaway AI, Mansa/Zara/Willem/HP, wonder whoring on the opposite side of the map with 3 bronze age archers in the cities, teching to rocketry and advanced flight, and the only way to stop them is to bulldoze your way through 5-6 heavily cultured AI's in order to reach them over the first 700-900 turns, because in end, it's always Mansa/Zara/Willem/HP that closes the game out and forces me to ragequit (even with a battleship on my fishing boats in the Renaissance Era, I lose 80% of the Immortal Games, and 30% of the Emporer games if I slack off and go trhough the turns too fast. To win on Immortal you really gotta 5-10 minutes per turn after the Classical Era).
You can reoll your start as much as your heart's desire