Phoenicia, Standard Size, King Difficulty, Fractal Map. Didn't change any other settings.
My neighbors are the Arabs and the Brazilians. I get friendly with Arabia early, although Brazil is a bit of a dick. Greece (Pericles) is to the North of Brazil. We're all on the left half of a large curving island that surrounds one of the largest inland seas I've ever seen in a civ game. It is also all one massive continent. I didn't find another continent until turn 80, and I was exploring. On the other half of the huge circle I find Mapuche, England (Victoria), and Indonesia. The Aztecs are on the far side of them but due to the map layout I don't meet them until a full two ages after everyone else.
The plus side of my home continent being massive is loyalty isn't anything I ever have to think about. The minus was I didn't get to (or have to I suppose) play with the capital moving mechanic. I had a lot of room to expand into what looked like useless tundra and snow but turned out to be crammed full of iron and niter and oil. Between Phoenicia's boost, the Ancestral Hall, Colonization and good ol' Magnus I was spamming 4 turn settlers for what seemed like two straight ages out of Tyre. I felt no pressure for early war, mainly due to the my closet neighbor being a rogue state that everyone else was going after and my ability to just grab all the land first. Between Goddess of the Sea and putting all my effort into Auckland (Pericles was really gunning for it too man that guy doens't give up!) I had some really great cities on my coasts.
Brazil's dickery manages to infuriate the world and they pull everyone into a war against them as they attack my allies. I don't bother taking cities as I'm still expanding to my south so I farm them for xp and plunder, but Arabia cripples them and is a great ally for the rest of the game for me. Mapuche then sweeps in for the scraps and further limits them. Former Brazilian territory is now a few Brazilian cities, a few Arab ones, and a bunch of constantly loyalty flipping Mapuche/Brazil stuff. Brazil is so weak now that over the next few ages my loyalty takes all that is left of them, even creeping up in to Greek territory. Once Phoenica takes your city she does not give it back! It's nice.
I found the resource management game a lot more intense and interesting than I expected. AI seems really eager to trade for stockpiles to. I became the world's chief supplier of Horses and Nitre and everyone except Brazil and the Aztecs loved me for it. Later on I actually founded four useless cities just to build oil wells/uranium mines next to them. It felt a lot like a late game colonization mechanic snuck in there. The downside though is that the AI is just as inept at this as they are at everything else. Taking the already bad AI and crippling their ability to build end game units just feels like it is a double whammy against them.
I would have won a diplomatic victory but got to science first. My spies kept everyone else fumbling about. I've noticed that the AI builds a ton more neighborhoods so partisans had their happy days. Also the devs weren't kidding about not breaking promises, the world backed the Aztecs against me when I broke my spy promise. It didn't really make a huge difference but still, it could be awful in a more dicey scenario. England meanwhile didn't once notice that 1k gold went missing every five turns or so. I also blew up a few dams, which is rather satisfying the amount of mayhem it causes.
Climate Change happened without me building any coal or oil power plants. It must have just been from normal factories, although it doesn't say anything about that in their tooltip that I noticed. I spammed coastal barriers and never really lost anything big. Volcanoes were flat out huge buffs in the two spots in my territory they existed. I never got hit by a flood (although one popped up where I had a dam) and while a few gigantic hurricanes popped up they always seemed to go out to sea thank goodness. The worst storm by far was a mega-blizzard late in the game that pillaged almost eight districts and about a dozen improvements.
Speaking of improvements the late game improvement power - wind, solar, offshore, are all really sweet and it does feel a lot like you have am modern civilization going. On the other hand the carbon reclaiming project didn't seem to have any impact on C02, well no real impact, even though I ran it about twenty times. The revamped space race was a bit 'meh' especially as there's only one small space to see how long it has to go, even civ 1 had a cool picture of a spaceship moving through the void to go along with that!
I didn't find the world congress that impactful, the net effect seemed to be city center buildings are always easier to make (the AI loves voting for that) and some religious squabbling that I never pay attention to. In fact my civ literally never even got Mysticism by the time I won (those four civics remain a "clump of leaves" to me), religion can still be safely ignored. I heard the sound effects of a few rock bands but never made one myself.
Oh, and I built nuclear power plants all over and was very happy when one actually blew up. It's something you have to watch indeed!
Overall a fun time and I already feel like I got my money's worth.
