Actually though, I've become intimately familiar with just how HARSH and bitter are the "fruits of over-rapid-expansion" in this Civ4 game. So, while it is TRUE I had destroyed a total of THREE of my rivals COMPLETELY by AD 65, it was also true that I had an empire that I could NOT pay for, and my units were rapidly dissipating like union welders at the Vancouver shipyards in the 1990s. Should razed a LOT more.

If neither of you guys are interested to play it, I'll post some screenshots and stuff

Basically what I did with this one is: (a) made three scouts in a row and beelined for Animal Husbandry; (b) made a worker, and beelined for Bronze Work; (c) rushed a defensive warrior before the worker was done; (d) got my production up high with a size 4 city; (e) pumped out the settlers and sent one of "partially" unescourted (had a scout out there to rendezvous with but had to cross quite a bit of open ground; (f) blocked in the rival who would have got the only source of bronze I could see and made a rush for iron; (g) hooked up my horses and kept pumping out a couple more settlers while my workers were dashing a road down to that remote blocking-in city with the bronze; (h) declared war on my first victim (the Zulu) by about 2200 BC and took them out by about 1500 BC; (i) then started on the next one; (j) then the next one.

Unfortunately as I said, I played it like a C3C game and TOTALLY crippled my empire with too many cities! By 65 AD after my third rival's last city fell (I only had one civ left facing me that I knew of, think that was THE ONLY one) I was shelling out about -150 per turn in total maintenance had a zero treasury and was losing one or two units per turn, with Alphabet Tech taking me about 300 turns to finish!

If you're gonna go ballistic in this game, raze anything that is not crucial.

I'm having to "unlearn" many deeply-rooted C3C habits (such as spacing cities to make sure all tiles are worked, expanding too rapidly, etc.), but slowly am doing so. I originally thought this game was set up to make it very hard to win quick. But now that I'm sort of getting a feel for it, I'm beginning to think that, if you leverage your situation properly, it may be possible to win quick games (on Noble level at least) as easy or easier than in C3C. I like that more, more, more cities is an even more double-edged strategy in Warlords than it was in C3C.

I actually always do this, especially for my first few cities to ensure that they become powerhouses in the late game.  What do u guys think bout this?  Do u guys space out ur cities too to ensure that all tiles are worked?