At the time of contact with the English, my world map looked like this:
That's not a completely accurate description, as the minimap shows this picture is actually from AFTER I made contact with the English, but you get the idea. My bonus settler has allowed me at this point to have nearly as many cities as the AI (I had 6 while most of them has 7-9).
So I was the first to make contact with the English. I used that fact for all it was worth, ending up with contact with the whole world and about 5 techs if I recall correctly. One of the techs I got was mapmaking, so then it was time for another round of map trades, which netted me more techs and the entire world map up to that point. Some players don't trade for world maps a lot, but I just cannot play without having that knowledge. I tend to trade for an up-to-date world map every 10 turns or so just so my picture of the other civs stays current. Anyway, at this point, I now had all techs in the anicient age except for construction, currency, and the two governments of monarchy and republic. I would find construction in a goody hut a few turns later, which would allow me to trade for currency and enter the middle age only a few turns behind the AI. This age was reached around 1500BC - did I mention tech moves fast on Deity level?
You can kind of see in the picture that I was on a max science strategy, going 90% science. Well that changed as soon as my isolation ended. Now that I had contact with the whole world, it would be much cheaper to go 100% cash with one scientist in a city and to buy into techs than research them myself. For the rest of the game, I would be buying techs, and struggling to find the money to pay for them.
The next event of interest happened in 1350BC when I got my first city across the bay to the west. There was some good land there, with iron to be had, and close enough to be relatively uncorrupted. I planned to put my Forbidden Palace there even this early in the game. Was it a good strategy? Well, there were pluses and minuses. On the one hand, I did turn that are into a nice second core of cities eventually. The downside was that the area to the south of Cattargus, which contained the only horses even remotely close to the starting position, was claimed by the Russians some 5 turns before my settler was to get there. This ruled out any Mounted Warrior attack, but since I was planning on a peaceful game, this wasn't so bad. In short, I traded expansion to the south for expansion to the west across the bay. It wasn't a good move, but it wasn't bad either.
Here is the histogram from 1000BC. It shows both my relative (lack of) power and the rapid spread of the AI civs:
Yes, that's little old me squeezed into that tiny penninsula. You can see I have my three core cities across the bay established. All that land to the south of me was about to be snapped up by the Russian giant. I had virtually no military at this point as I was trying to settle as rapidly as possible. If Catherine had demanded 50g/turn from my little civ, I would have had to pay at this point.
For some time now, my scouts had been tailing a large group of German archers, about 20 in all, that were headed west. I first though they were going after Russia, then me (eep!), before I realized they were going even further west. In 730BC, a war broke out between Germany and Rome. The only real effect of this war was to weaken both of their civs, with dire consequences for them in the future in this merciless world...
