I used the strategy where you slave until someone builds emanipation, then you leave everyone alone (except for tech trades and demanding gold from allies & such) until you build cannon stacks, then march the stacks up to the enemy who has london, edison, internet...

I got a start position at the very bottom with room for 4 cities, then the rest of the peninsula was swamp. Not much gold, though I built my swamp cities to get an alligator monopoly, and slaved my two neighbors. Mexico built all the wonders from emancipation on, and they were at the very top of the map. A bar of land went straight across the middle of the map on that continent, making cannon progress very slow. Not to mention a mountain range in the way, I had to capture a city next to it to build a road across.

So by the time my cannon stacks got there in 2040ad (!) there was a flood which wiped out 9 of my 14 cities. Then my cannon stacks were destroyed by war walker counter-bombard, space plane bombard, plasma destroyer counter-bombard, war walker attacks, fusion tanks... The mexicans were revolting from all the pollution and their capital starved to zero, but then the resulting barbarians charged right in and killed me too, also raining down from space to wipe out my home cities. Soon I lost my remaining cities.

There was no way to win with my strategy in this situation, I think. I guess I can try a different approach, where I ignore the strongest civ and destroy weaker enemies to get more monopolies and their techs, and don't invade until I have a war walker stack, which can take over the world by itself. But I wonder if I would still be too late, and that flood would still be a big problem... cannons just don't seem to cut it against war walkers on cd's mod.

Any help appreciated.