Saladin of Arabia
I started my first game with everything random that I could in the "Play Now!" setting. While that meant I couldn't really play a random map (I went with continents), I picked nothing else. I honestly don't remember if it was Noble or Prince difficulty level -- Prince, I think.
Anyway, fortune smiled on me to give me Saladin, leader of the Arabians. Saladin is Philosophical and Spiritual, two traits I would not put to good use throughout this game.
I performed some fairly typical early expansion. I founded a few cities in semi-random locations, missing out on some spots I wanted and getting others. My cities may have been a bit far apart. I did manage to claim Hinduism and start spreading it, but I never did anything to get a Great Prophet, so I never had the shrine. Whoops.
You can see some of my early cities and what they were doing here (or you could, if I could get the picture clear.).
Three wars. First one, Alex declared on me, using the "Open Borders" bug. I couldn't see his troops. I lost Baghdad briefly. Ended with the same borders as we started. Hmmpphh. I wasn't going to stand for that. Second one I declared on Alex. Took a few cities, using culture bombs to help claim land and calm resistances. War weariness got bad, so I took a 10-turn breather and finished him off with camel archers, muskets, and, of course, catapults. Minimal casualties in all three wars, except the catapults. And that was the full set of combat throughout the entire game.
Explored and claimed a bit of a distant island. The end-game picture (for the last 100ish turns) was...
All that gold? Great Merchants. I got a handful this game. Built some wonders, used specialists with happiness problems, but never really tried to get anything. Just went by feel.
Could have waited for space. Took backdoor domination/diplomacy instead in 1900 AD for 17351 points. I think I could have backed into cultural, too, if I'd've wanted. I had 3 cities nearing 20K and had turns to spare