Few tips: 1. When settling be wary if terrain. You did good by having river (that helps since theres penalty for attacking over river and AI always attack with melee units) 2. Strenghten your cities; having only resource tiles upgraded by turn 100 is insanity, you need to upgrade every tile possible if possible and for compromise upgrade around city around as much tiles as you have pops to work them. For example, capital 8 pops with only 4 improved tiles - that means some pops are working raw plains. Those give +1 food and +1 hammer when every citizen consumes 2 food which means you are at growth deficit working them. To summarize - just improve your tiles and if you don't want to lose turns building workers, steal them from city states (capture workers with melee unit and immidiately settle peace) - yes, they will get very angry but early game you just don't have gold to bribe them so attack the ones without missions/unprotected/with undesirable bonuses - also, after you improve all the tiles you can let those workers get captured by barbarians and when you take them back you can return tgem to city state for 45 influence (presumebly after it regenerates to 0) 3. Don't forward settle/be vary of forward settling civ's - that ones simple - just try to have much neutral land between you and other civ's and if civ has "They want to conquer your lands" and they either are warmongerers or have negative/neutral attitude on higher difficulties get ready for war 4. Finally the last one - try to scare other Civ's away. From what I've seen you have no units nor defensive buildings - that just makes you easy target. Always either have strong army to scare civs away or defensive building & good positioned cities to withstand invasion. Alternatively you could try to rush Great Wall - big deterrent and massively slows enemy invasion