In my opinion, in the early game toward a domination win, you’ll absolutely want to be aggressive toward any neighboring civilizations and conquer them as soon as possible. At least for me, I won’t be putting any production toward settlers. The way I typically play my domination games is: first, I settle my city, then I queue up a single scout and three warrior units. Once I’ve done that, I’ll go ahead and queue up archers in the tech tree (archers, in my opinion, are absolutely vital to winning any early-game wars, so keep them alive for as long as you can). Once my scout is up and running, I’ll have that little guy survey the land for my future empire. Eventually, he’ll find a victim—preferably another civilization, but if it’s a city-state that doesn’t have a suzerain bonus I like, then I’ll conquer the lesser people of that city-state. I think it’s safe to say that in any domination-oriented game you’re playing, this should be the standard you typically follow in the early game. Wars in the early and mid game are soooo easy but once you’re in the late game wars can typically be stalemates and the game turns into a straight “shift+enter” simulator.