DickTrickle
Definitely NOT Furor Planedefiler
I've enjoyed it but echo the other complaints about AI Difficulty. The scaling on it is super intense, I did my first play through on Prince just to get a feel for the new mechanics and because I hadn't played Civ in forever and I easily out-scaled all of the . I started my next game on Immortal and got my shit pushed in so god damn hard. I've just started yet another one on Emperor and that one seems to be going decently so far.
Still enjoying the game though.
For me, after two games on Emperor, I really struggled against religion because of their faith bonus scaling. I eventually managed to get my army, gold, and production up to good levels where, with some time, I could have defeated any particular civ. However, I lost both games from Religious victory because I wasn't able to found my own religion (fucking Saladin robbed me both times). If you can't found your own religion and you get converted to the dominant religion, there's not much you can do outside of full on conquest. And if the dominant religion has tons of cities or is across the map, it's unlikely you'll be able to move on them in time. I'm not sure what happens if you totally destroy the civ with the dominant religion but I know taking their holy city doesn't matter (I sadly thought it would). The apostle/missionary spam means there's very little chance of getting a science or culture victory before they've spread everywhere.
On my third game Emperor, I am completely focused on getting a religion just to be able to ensure I can control my destiny. I'm going to just play defensively with it by keeping my cities in my religion and stash some apostles with the promotion to remove all other religion in case I get overwhelmed. In fact, it might be worth it to stash those apostles and save your faith until the threat of religious defeat is near, then pop them and use all that faith to reconvert your cities and kill the other guys.