First off, this run is indebted to Komodo and Nightmare's posts. I had about a hundred questions for the latter, but instead of shamelessly asking all of them I went ahead and reverse-engineered the save, optimizing the mid-game. Painful, tedious, sure. But, hey! No one ever died from wanting too much :)

When I first vassalized Black, they promptly came up with a mystery 1.6k of fame that put them back in first. The result was not pretty--ransacking the home continent while prioritizing a few more stars. There were a few "non-essentials" that worked in my favor: no Soviets, only two global conflicts before my push with neither directly involving my cities, and generous science from Osmosis Events. My only complaint was not getting one more territory in the initial land grab. There were no Independent Peoples on the starting continent, which I think factored into Green expanding a bit more.

Perhaps the little wisdom I can share is what the ideal Neolithic could look like in this scenario:

-At least 255 influence to claim four territories with enough remaining to declare war and do homage on the same turn

-Mammoths throwing themselves at you to snowball in population, net influence, and go coast to coast

-Meet an at least hesitant Red on the coast and do homage on T15

-Green does not pick Achaemenids (admittedly, hard to tell what factors into this)

-Ransacking/claiming Green's river territories/at least slowing Green down

-Accessible curiosities to shore up influence from the great hunt

-Ransacking outposts for gold/food

While obviously all of these together would require hard RNG, I can safely say from testing the Neolithic that each happens with some regularity (including two or more mammoths crowding your tribe). In this run, the limiting factor was meeting Red on T20, which necessitated waiting around on essentially an empty late Neolithic board for three turns. If anyone finds themselves with a Neolithic meeting the above, preferably with the river territories near Green settled, please share! It would level the playing field a fair bit.

And, of course, a big thank you to Amplitude for the challenge! It was pretty discouraging, but I had a good time figuring out creative optimizations.

Saxo T139.ctr