Victory in year 158 through ambition. Was on the cusp of getting a score victory too since my cities are all rapidly hitting legendary and I'm blocking several city sites I could colonize if I felt like it.
Rome (purple to the west) was the early game powerhouse so I friended them. They spent around the last 130 of 150 years fighting a war with persia (red bottom left), lost two cities fairly quickly then persias AI went to shit. It kept wiping rome units but not actually capturing the cities. Several times I watched them ride units across undefended cities.. Sad since people are talking up the AI in this game so much. Maybe the AI is smarter on harder difficulty levels.
Syria (yellow top left) eventually invaded so I crushed them and took all of their nice cities. Careful unit placement in the ~3 turns of main fighting was key to victory as their army was pretty strong. After that I just had to slowly wade through their respawns being careful to protect/heal my wounded units.
Carthage (white bottom right) i met halfway through the game but never really interacted with. There were heaps of barbarians and tribes between them and me which they never cleared out for some unknown reason. Again, AI stupidity.
Greece (blue top middle) were strong through the mid game but slowly got weaker and weaker. I assumed they were warring someone but wasn't sure who until they were down to 2 cities and I finally met Egypt who had a much higher score than anyone else. Gave me a brief scare as they had so many more cities than me and thought they might outresource me and slowly overpower me or win the race to 37, but they saw the huge army I had massed at my border and I guess chickened out.
I'm going to keep playing for a bit and try to smash my way across the map for fun. I didn't manage to hit anything with my mass of cataphracts yet which I want to try out.
Some key takeaways.
Early game is extremely important. The rush for early city sites can set you up for the future or leave you struggling surrounded by much stronger neighbours.
For this reason starting location is huge. You could get unlucky and have nowhere to go.
The default map seems hard actually since you always seem to spawn in the middle. I was concerned I might end up having to fight wars on 3 or even 4 fronts but it never eventuated. Different map types where you can start with water at your back would probably be very helpful when learning the game.
Rather than having every city do everything (like I did) I think it would be beneficial to specialize cities based on what family you give it to and what resources are nearby.
Leaving scouts hidden in trees in key locations can definitely help to see attacks coming, something I didn't use early on which cost me a city, but later on used it to get the alpha strike on incoming enemy forces.
I have no idea what religeon is for but it does seem like it might be useful for something.
