Especially I want to know how you deity players set up the game!

I seem to prefer regular map, large land masses as continents. I don't like to move my troops with boats so much, it's so tedious.. I always choose raging hordes and have nowadays started playing deity.

I have much more experience on large maps than small or medium but I played always on small maps for about three months a while back to try to hone my fighting skills. A good strategy for large map play may not work well for small maps and vice versa.

I used to leave the age and humity settings at the default (middle for everything IIR) but then switched to 3 billion and wet (in search of rivers and rivered specials). I've been playing with those settings for several months now.

I am coming round to the view, sometimes expressed, that raging hordes is an advantage to the human player. After achieving Monarchy I pretty well always now go Writing then Map Making. Once you have a diplo built and a hundred gold to your name you find yourselg hoping for the barbs to show up. Meanwhile the AI definately loses cities to the barbs because we all bump into, and profit, from the results from time to time. How this happens so often is a bit of a mystery to me tho' as whenever I see a barb attack upon the AI in the visible part of the screen the barbs get creamed while the AI unit hardly takes damage (I conclude that the barbs don't get their deity attack bonus against the AI) The one time I witnessed an AI city fall to barbs it had a solitary warrior defender which couldn't hold out against multiple crusader attackers.

Similarly, restart civs may be a benefit to the human player. The restarted civ cannot really hope to get back into contention and finding some very weak AI civs is always a plus.

I find effective ship chaining quite a challenging and enjoyable part of the game. And granted that units are merely representational and that each turn lasts a full year or, earlier on, many years I don't consider it artificial. But I must declare an interest. I enjoy trading more than I enjoy fighting (I am hoping that Civ 3 has a more complex trading system) so I suppose I am picking a "cheat" which feeds my preference.

Oh, and I start mining then build a city on top. I'm not sure I've seen that described as a cheat but it does seem rather artificial. Might give that up some day.

Played, and enjoyed, the small and large world maps quite a bit as all civs and with fixed or random resources. Haven't done so for years now tho'. Not much experience with scenarios. Silly, really, but I still enjoy the basic game so much - and constantly find new things to explore in it - that I just can't be bothered to do anything more than press "New Game". Don't you just love those few moments waiting to see what your starting tech is and then what the starting position looks like?

Incidentally, difficult terrain seems to me another concealed benefit to the human player. IMHO small maps are, for this reason, fundamentally easier because there will be more mountains and jumbled up terrain about. The human player will manage this well but the AI's idiotic city location and random land improvement will hamper it badly. On a large world an expansionist AI may have the luck to start on broad plains where the most incompetent city planning department and the lousiest farmers just can't go wrong.