My game plan was multi-phased. The phases are:
- Grab multiple early religions - putting them all in my capital
- Capture another capital and use it for wonders and military
- Build up a solid base, mainly focused on production and commerce
- Out-tech to a military advantage
- Kill all others (except one city)
- Tech / build to space while working on a cultural victory
- Complete UN and time my ship launch, UN vote, domination and conquest with the 3rd city going Legandary
To this aim, I teched Polytheism and Monothesism for both of those religions. I also managed to pop two techs (sailing and animal husbandry) from huts. My Warrior went West to find Genghis Khan. This was the capital that I was going to take so I stole one of his workers, signed a peace deal and stole another worker 10 turns later. This put a crimp in his game and kept him to only 1 city. With my 2 workers, I roaded from his capital back to mine and set up my capital for lots of production. I built a few archers and then worked on the Oracle ... I was hoping to pop another religion. I pulled this off and selected Theology ...
That gave me a triple holy city in my capital. Why triple holy city ... I wanted to generate 3 Great Profits so that I could take care that my economy didn't crash, hence my capital was set-up to take maximum benefit from the Priest economy. I also had some cities dedicated to building missionaries the whole game ...
After that, I built and whipped a sizeable archer army, ran them over to Khan at double speed (thx road), declared war, captured another worker and ...
This gave me a real production powerhouse of a city that enabled the following:
The pyramids were built in the capital, while Karakorum produced the lighthouse, colossus and The Apostolic Palace. With these in place, I spammed cities to fill in the gaps between my to 'Capitals'. One went East to grab the two gems, One just North to pick up horses and lots of ocean (statues that produce water hammers went here) and others just evenly spaced to pick up hills (become military cities) or grasslands (become commerce). Here is my 8th city and also shows most of my other ones. I've also marked (via signs as well as at the end of the city name) them as M for military or C for commerce.
Notice the beautiful city placement on the right ... I left two tiles free for future forts so that I had another place where my navy could swap oceans. A few turns later, Hannibal makes a grave error and declars war ... his swords against my maces ... ok, I'll accept that 'offer'.
