This will have poor formatting, sorry about that. This is the game summary for Epic 8 from Realms Beyond. This is an Epic speed map with no win conditions, and minimal restrictions (no war prior to 1000BC). I was given Mali, and had the following starting position.

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Not sure about the dual warrior start, although to be honest I didn't notice that myself. I had only recently played a couple civ4 games, after a 9 month hiatus.

I decided that the start wasn't great, with too little food to expand so my plan was to find a good or great second city as soon as possible. I started research on Bronze Working to get the chopping.

I scouted around with my warriors and popped Masonry (good thing I wasn't going for the CS Prophet route). I found the English and Egyptians bottling me in to the south, so I decided that war was the preferred route. However I had to wait until 1000BC to start, per the scenario rules.

This let me build up a stronger force than I might have done otherwise. I positioned myself to attack Elizabeth as soon as allowed (force of 5 axemen I think) and declared on 970BC. Elizabeth fell very quickly, and I had her finished off at 625BC.

I had not attacked Egypt because I was scared of the chariots, but with a big military force and weak economy they were the next target. I built up some spearmen and to manage the fight. I believe there was one spear and two skirmishers in the old English territory, and a stack of 2-3 spear and maybe 10 axemen (most upgraded from previous fights).

I declared on Egypt in 490BC, and wiped them out by 85BC. At this point I had three capital spots plus a good set of extra cities courtesy of these two gracious leaders. However my economy was in the dirt, barely managing +2g at 0% research at one point.

I had a large army, and needed to either kill some off or get some good city pillage, so I continued on towards Mao. I declared on 35AD and ran over a few cities, but was stymied by Beijing with no catapults available (didn't get that until 860AD!).

I made peace with Mao and got several techs in the process, and decided to try some pointy stick research from Saladin as well. I declared on him in 305AD and took several cities. I finally ran out of units to hold my conquest and started to encounter longbows, so I made peace in 560AD.

At this point I had to drastically fix my economy, as I was severely behind the curve. Thankfully I had a ton of workers, so I built up. I also made the biggest error of the game; I left my capital in Timbuktu! Moving it to the old Egyptian capital would have probably cut my costs by about 1/3. I also hadn't done enough exploring ahead of time, or I may have continued after Mao (2 cities left) and Saladin (3 cities left). Apart from that, I cut my tech trading options severely, since Japan is naturally a jerk, and for some reason Mao and Saladin didn't like me very much.

However, with the territory from my conquests I just needed to get a few financial techs and get to par. I decided to go for Calvary for my next push, since I didn't want to have to deal with catapults and feared knights wouldn't be strong enough. I hate to lose units!

I researched into Calvary and started war again against the Arabs in 1544AD and basically finished them off by 1574 (they had an arctic outpost hidden away). From there I declared war against Julius Caesor in 1595AD and tore through him as well. Unfortunately, somehow I lost/forgot my end-game save, so it gets a little blurry here.

I took out JC, and proceeded to turn on the Americans (they had decided to close borders which temporarily halted my attack against JC. I took both of them out (Seattle was left on an island), and came against two Chinese cities, at which point I won a Domination in 1718AD (score: 4148)