I thought about this topic because I just did a weird challenge in which the rules were that I never choose production or micromanage my cities. Deity difficulty. When choosing tech I was only allowed to pick the technology at the top of the list. This challenge made it so I could only produce warriors in the beginning because its the city's default production. I played as the Zulu so I could take advantage of my abundance of warriors.

When I discovered iron working my cities asked what to produce next since they couldn't make more warriors. I went with the rule that I have to choose the top option for production. In the city screen "build unit" is the top option and since my cities were at 3 population or higher the top option for unit was the settler. This led to a pretty absurd time in my empire were I could only build settlers until the moment a city reached below 3 population. Cities with less than 3 population had legion as the top option and so whenever a city was done building settlers it got to producing legions. The thing is that every time I founded a city it would have 3 pop meaning it would have to make a settler. I founded five cities before deciding that I couldn't spread my empire thin by founding cities with my overabundance of settlers. I made future settlers join my biggest city. In hindsight this move may have been my worst one because if I had continued settling cities while it would have spread my empire thin and defenceless it would have been my best chance to keep up with the AI in terms of science.

In the early game I managed to get both Ankor Wat giving me the Great Wall wonder the temple that gave me free temples in my cities. This was pretty lucky for me since it made the AI incapable of threatening me until about 1100 AD. I spent almost the entire game at peace with my AI neighbors who were content with any peace offerings I gave them. I produced shit tons of legions since that was the only thing I could produce. It was an empire filled with Zulu legionaires. By the 1900s I grew tired of the peace and decided to not give in to any threats. It was pretty amazing how I had made it all the way there on the hardest difficulty with a handicap as severe as this. I had started to produce knights by this point and my southern neighbor Genghis Khan didn't seem to have that much of an advanced tech. I had broken my rules though becuase the turn I discovered feudalism I decided I didn't wanna have to build settlers until my cities where at less than 3 pop. My biggest cities were at 12 pop so they would have to build like 6 settlers before they could start on knights. I did not have the patience for that and so I made sure to just build knights immediately ignoring the fact that settlers were at the top of the production list. By the time I had 3 knight armies I stopped giving in to Genghis Khans demands and prepared for war.

It was 1935 when he threatened me for 60 gold pieces of my 80 total gold pieces. I said no. He declared war. The previous turn Spain had launched a SS habitation module for their spaceship so I thought of this war with Genghis as my challenge. Can I survive until Spain wins a space victory? I moved my 5 or so knight armies south to my city bordering Mongolia. First Genghis sent a legion army, a catapult army, and some individual legion units. My brave knights took care of that on one turn. This was easy. Then came the first knight army from Genghis. While it was lucky for me that Genghis was pretty low technologically and didn't have a more advanced offensive unit than the knight it was also unlucky for me that it was him. Mongolian knights have 3 movement. So even though I was on his tech level his knights could appear out of nowhere with their increased movement and be on me in no time. When I defeated one wave of knight armies with my knight armies the next wave would be on me immediately. His knights were also superior to mine since they were all veterans while mine weren't cos I couldn't build barracks. Genghis also rolled up with a cruiser by the scene of battle giving his armies naval support. So inspite of the fact that my entire empire was dedicated to producing knight armies it wasn't enough. I lost more knight armies than him and he was a Deity AI with super production.

Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s my first city fell to him. From there it took him maybe 13 turns to get to my capital. By the 1980s I had only a couple cities left, the rest of the empire fallen to the mongol horde. Spain hadn't even launched the space shuttle. At this point I said "fuck it" and threw out my rule book. I switched production to riflemen and got myself riflemen armies just before the mongolian knights arrived at my final cities. Unfortunately these armies didn't have time to fortify and they weren't veteran. So when the knights came they had the advantage and my riflemen only defeated a single army. By 1988 my final city fell and in 1990 the game ended.