The REAL Way to Win

In order to win the game you must have sufficient resources to pursue a victory of whatever type you wish to have. Preferably, you will have resources sufficient to pursue any victory.
But the game will condition you away from that no matter what. It will confine you to one victory type or another based on the geography of your surroundings and the predilections of your civilization. You will have to struggle within these confines.

There's a way to soften the blow, to weaken the confines. You must utilize every corner of your map as a resource-generating machine in order to do so, and tilt the location of said resources toward yourself. You can't do that by relying on a map's Lua scripting.
You can only do that by taking charge of the setting on which the game is played. No, I don't mean playing on Settler...I mean making it unnecessary to spam settlers around the world just to gain an overwhelming advantage.

This was done while fighting with an OP AI civilization on Deity.

The truth is that your true potential cannot come about without time and lots of carefully curated resources. You need time.
The AI does not want time, it wants to grab up all the resources. Remember that the AI are secretly aligned with one another in a Brotherhood designed to overthrow the player. They will take your resources as quickly as they can grasp them.
So how can you stop them?
Well, you simply have to get them first and stop them from taking those resources.
And how do you get to them first?
You must be closer to them and your enemy must be further away. The game will not help you in this respect with its' mapping scripts.
You must help yourself.

The truth in the center of how to win is simple:

• Use only custom maps.
  
• Make all custom maps filled with wonders and resources.
  
• Have the greatest resource diversity in your vicinity.
  
• Use ancient ruins.
  
• Keep the AI far away from you.
  
• Play as Spain. This is especially crucial, you will become the richest civ in the world and all wonder bonuses are doubled.

Voila! You've won. No matter how hard the game...

EVEN OP MAX BARRY WILL BEND THE KNEE TO YOU!