As previously mentioned, I used my golden age to build factories and coal plants all over my starting continent. After it ended and Railroads tech had come in, I turned science off to finance the upgrading of all my rifles to infantry. After a couple of turns of that, I was ready to go again with another war:
Infantry vs. muskets? Yeah, Newcastle's going down. 
(The Financial team had actually just discovered Rifling tech, and while Huayna instantly upgraded all his old units to rifles, Vicky didn't have the money to do so, apparently. Infantry against rifle isn't much of a match either, frankly.)
Naturally the war declaration instantly caused catastrophic unhappiness in my recent conquests:
Look at those food bars! I guess my people would rather starve to death than support me in the war... 
As far as what's going on here, I had a chance to read up some more on how war weariness works, and apparently the rate of decay in peacetime is virtually non-existant. War weariness decreases by about 1% for every turn you spend at peace. ONE percent! That means you'd have to spend a full 100 turns in most cases for it to disappear completely. Seeing as how the average game only lasts about 300 turns, that seems like ridiculous overkill to me. (It does also decay by one point per turn, but losing a single unit counts for two or three points, so that's fairly meaningless as well.) Combined with the fact that taking cities (NOT losing units) is the single biggest cause of war weariness, we have a game mechanic that really is out of sorts. And don't even get me started on how the AIs simply get a total pass on this end of the gameplay with their MASSIVE war weariness discounts, to the point that they're not playing the same game as the human. Nothing is doing more to kill my fun with Civ4 than war weariness. It's at the point where I'm rolling my eyes every time I play, and that's not a good thing.
Anyway... the massive war weariness even before a single shot was fired had to be dealt with somehow. I swapped back to Police State and Theocracy, then imported a couple luxuries from the other continent to take care of it. That dropped the unhappiness from "catastrophic" down to the "crippling" level, but at least the former English cities weren't starving any more. I guess that was the best I could do.
This was more satisfying:
Burn baby, burn! Mwuhaha! 
Here's how I planned to take down the remaining English and Incan cities:
I had a smaller group of infantry and cannon in the west, with the goal of taking out the more sparsely defended colonies in that area. Following the green arrows, I planned to take out the three cities over there and then proceed east to get Burgundian, meeting up with the other group in the east. That squadron (indicated with blue arrows) had the bulk of my reinforcements, since it had the tougher job of taking down the Incan core. I would then need to invade their final cities on offshore islands to the east; fortunately, I had a number of transports and frigates ready to go. If you look closely at the right side of the picture, you'll also see a pair of units on a tiny one-tile island. They got booted there from inside Incan borders when I signed peace, and had to wait out the peace treaty marooned on the desert island! But now I had a ship heading to pick them up and get them back in the action. I hope they didn't think that I had forgotten about them. 
The defense at Oxford was not up to snuff:
Longbows and crossbows? Someone needs to send Vicky some upgrade money! Looks like Mansa's being as stingy as always. Now the redcoat in production, there was a unit that could have caused some problems. Fortunately Vicky was just about dead by the time she was able to train them. Anyone who is slow to invade the southern continent might have some serious problems here - grenadiers get an attack bonus against rifles, but NOT against redcoats!
The situation was no better at Newcastle:
Scratch another city, just a single English one remaining on the map. 
I had not penetrated into the Incan core as yet, and I expected a larger fight there. Huayna did indeed have a lot of units , but the fight was still one-sided. I found the Incan fleet (of caravels, heh) moored at anchor in the Christian holy city of Tiwanaku:
While that stack looks impressive on the screen, almost half of the units were made up of ships that couldn't attack or defend on land. Not the greatest moment for the AI here. 
The ships that Huayna DID send out were being sunk easily by my frigates, which he couldn't counter. Poor Huayna. He was always the weakest member of the Financial Team, and with the help of Vicky stripped away, his territory was ripe for the picking. Aside from a few random caravels out of Mansa Musa, he continued to do his own thing on his island.
Team Financial: Divided They Fall! 
OK, now this was really irritating. While I'm in the midst of this major war against the financial civs, the eastern bloc civs begin sailing settler pairs over and dropping them off in the middle of the warzone. Seriously, what is going on here:
Get your greedy little paws off of my continent! 
Look at how Dacca is crammed in there at the minimal possible distance from Warwick and Oxford. It's not even a very good city - come on, now! Dacca was also a bad break for me, because it meant I could not send my forces over here to the east by the southern route (no Open Borders with those eastern civs). Fortunately I had rails now, so it wasn't much of a detour to go around by the northern route, but still. I have no idea why the AI had such a burning desire to found these tundra cities down here. (I can see the oil, and it's not there! Not to mention the AI no longer "cheats" with invisible resources a la Civ3.)
From Oxford and Goth it was only a short hop across the water to Vicky's final hideout in Vladivostok. I actually had a nasty little battle there when she upgraded the longbow defenders to redcoats, forcing me to wait an extra turn to take the city. But the numbers were pretty overwhelming in my favor, and so Vicky was eliminated in 1795AD:
There goes our first leader from the game. It is now 2 vs. 2 in my struggle against the Financial team (still bad odds against the eastern bloc, but I'll deal with that later). Notice that I also gave Vladivostok back to Cathy. Hey, it didn't fit well with my other cities, and it WAS her colony. Never let it be said that I was a stingy alliance partner! Cathy = 
They say a picture is worth a thousand words...
If that's true, then I just saved about 970 words describing how the Incan campaign went. 
I expected the rest of the war would be mere mopup, followed by another period of consolidation, but the AIs had other ideas. This was major, MAJOR news:
Napoleon and his team are gunning for me! 
OK, yes, I had refused several tribute demands, but I wasn't expecting the war declaration to come right now. Not the greatest timing, for sure. Losing those furs and sugar was a bit of a tough blow too. Fortunately, with Vicky's death the "we long to return to the motherland" happiness had disappeared from her former cities, so I wasn't completely paralyzed by the anger.
Well, the eastern civs have shown their cards and opted for war. Keep this in mind - THEY declared war on ME. Before this game is over, I intend to give them all the war they can handle and then some! They are going to RUE the day that they declared war on me! 
But first things first. I had to deal with the Incans before any aggressive moves in the east could be made. I did take the liberty of razing the aggressive new cities on the southern continent, however:
Burn baby, burn! 
You brought this on yourself, Gandhi!
At the same time that the eastern civs were declaring war, I was ejecting Huayna from the main continent in the south:
Cuzco was Huayna's capital; he had four cities left on various islands to the east. I grabbed my unused units and loaded them up on galleons/transports for the upcoming invasion. Even though there was no alliance between Huayna and the eastern team, their ships were prowling around his final cities too. Expect to see some naval fireworks coming up!
I finally figured out what Nappy's target was in the war declaration - apparently he was trying a sneak attack on Carib:
Yes, the former barb city. It was defended by only a single machine gun, but I was able to reinforce quickly from the sea. Attacking amphibiously along the green arrow, I killed the two cannon and that left only a single cavalry, which chose to pillage rather than suicide against the defender. I quickly killed him too and then razed Dijon to the ground. That was a pretty weedy placement for a city too, but at least there WAS oil nearby...
On the other side of the continent, I spy a small German fleet trying to sneak through the Incan islands:
My own frigates converged on the ships and sank them to the bottom of the sea. 
Unfortunately, there was an even bigger stack just behind that one:
Wow, these AIs don't mess around, do they? There's nothing I can do to stop these ships before they land on Cathy's southeast island next turn, and she only has one or two defenders in each city. With that many attackers, at least one city is sure to fall. 
Even worse, that island has our only source of gems and rice, which I'm heavily dependant upon at the moment, argh! I would put together some forces to land on the island, but that would take several turns at the very least.
And for anyone who thinks the circumnavigation bonus doesn't matter - if those ships were 4 movement instead of 5, I would have had a chance to interdict the ships and sink them next turn. Dang it!
This, on the other hand, was definitely helpful:
I built the Statue mostly for denial purposes; with my civ running Police State instead of Representation, and spread out across two continents, it wasn't as uber as on other maps. But I could NOT have one of the eastern civs building this wonder - can you imagine a free specialist in every one of those cities? Ouch! I was glad that I was able to prevent that from taking place.
As far as my civ's development was concerned, I had finished Wall Street in the capital in 1804, which added almost 70 gold per turn after the shrine and merged great people were factored in. That was a major help, to say the least. I discovered Physics first, but I forgot to switch Cathy off of the research on the final turn, and she actually got the Great Scientist. Whoops. Not as big of a deal this late in the game, of course. I also snuck in research on Fascism here and finished Mount Rushmore in 1808, which was another huge boost. -75% war weariness still had many cities uselessly unhappy, but as jails continued to complete all over the place, I was making a recovery. It was a slow and agonizing process, but I gradually configured my civ over to a permanent wartime state. Eventually all my cities would have full insulation against war weariness. Will the eastern AIs be able to do the same? We're going to find out.
With the help of a Great Engineer, I knocked out the Pentagon shortly after finishing the Statue:
I would have liked to go with Vassalage for the full 10XP out of the gate, but frankly my happiness situation was so bad that I had to stick with Nationhood for the +2 happy from barracks. That and the "None" upkeep cost were the only things keeping me afloat! So 8XP for new units it would have to be, which was still rather good.
I cleared out the final infestation of eastern vermin from the southern continent in 1818:
I had a bit of a tough fight here as well, since FDR had just gotten Assembly Line and upgraded his rifles to infantry. Then he rushed additional defenders at New Orleans with his Universal Suffrage cash! But I had enough units to get the job done, and so down it went. Finally the whole southern continent was mine (along with Cathy's two cities here on the western peninsula).
I thought that the Incan city of Vilcabamba was the last one, but it turned out there was a final remaining city. So I took that one too, and then it truly was lights out for Huayna and his Incan boys:
By the way, look at the name of this city: Bremen. I didn't even notice this at the time, but apparently Bis planted a colony here, and it flipped to the Inca like two turns before I killed the last of their cities. So I razed it too, and that was that. The Germans in the white circle though... there was a settler and two infantry there. They wanted to found on the tile where my infantry is standing, but I fortified there and they refused to attack. Unfortunately, I kept getting an enemy popup message every single turn at Vilcabamba. Argh!
Now that Huayna was gone, I no longer had "yearn to return to the motherland" unhappiness in the captured Incan cities. I might have continued to attack Mansa, but the eastern civs gave me more pressing matters to deal with. So we made peace:
I even got him to throw in Tadmekka in the deal, how nice! Now where's that?
Oho! A city on the Malinese home island! I forsee a rushed airport and the delivery of some tanks down the road. I'm sure Mansa will enjoy that package, if you know what I mean. 
Team Financial was now hopelessly crippled and out of the race. With the resources of the southern continent in hand, it was time to turn to the great leviathan in the east, and figure out a way to win the game before Gandhi and pals could launch their spaceship.
