I was able to grab all of the religions (the power of my tech advantage) and so religious Monasteries were a power tech multiplier. I (finally) succeeded in spreading all of the religions to my three cities (the last few religions took a fair number of missionaries) and did build monasteries in nearly all cities. +10% per monastery means +70% if you have all of them. That is almost 3 times as valuable as a library. I also build all of the temples (+1 culture) under the mistaken belief that 3 temples would enable me to build the religious culture multipliers (it didn't).
Delhi was set to grow, grow and grow and then run max scientists. This city is trying to generate the majority of my beakers. Beijing was a mixed city, lots of hammers for wonder production but grassland cottages for some tech. For instance, here is Beijing in hammer mode (3 turns for the Hanging Gardens) ...
Persepolis was designed for a large hammer rich city to churn out units. No cottages, farms instead. I also built forts on forested hills (+25% defense for the fort to go with the +75 forested hill ... +100% ... nice!) to act as a buffer to the expected incoming AI units.
From here it is a fairly straight forward One City Challenge. Great Artists and Generals get merged into Persepolis for the culture and additional XPs while other Great People (Scientists, Priests, Engineers, Merchants) get merged into Delhi. At the end of the game, Delhi was generating a nice number of hammers from the merged specialists.
In my game, there were only 4 AIs. I quickly met 3 but didn't met the 4th for ages. In fact, I made a tactical error by sending out boats (chasing the +1 movement bonus that was probably pointless for my game) and met the last one (Japan). It turned out Japan was trapped behind Korea and had declared war on Korea to try and break out. Korea whipped its butt and ended up Vassaling Japan. This effectively meant that I only had to fight 3 AIs for quite a while. Have you ever seen so many red lines?
I'm going to cover the war part of this game on the next page. Before then, here are my three cities ... Delhi - note the beaker production. I also merged an Artist here to try and balance out the culture production
Beijing - note the +25% culture from buildings ... that is from the UB for China, a replacement for the theatre that gives +25% cultural bonus ... a nice little surprise that I didn't realize during the Civ selection process.
Persepolis - note that I swapped Cyrus' civics to Free Speech (+100% culture). This city needed it while it didn't need the +50% production bonus, it had more than enough hammers to build 1 turn units (ok, 2 turn Grenadiers).
Once I had researched Nationalism (Hermitage = +100% culture), Steel (cannons) and Printing Press (more culture based coins) I turned my commerce to 100% culture and hunkered down to defend my soon to be legendary cities.