[Mightypeon]

A short recap on what worked well for me:
1: I got a very decent starting position for Ulm, I went with an asleep Crone with good scales, and my early army (after failing to expand in turn 2) expanded fairly quickly. I also had Jade Zons nearby which did a lot of magic diversity.
2: I first spotted Pan, saw his total lack of expansion and thought "Oh crap, he is propably going to gently caress somebody with stealth units soon", so I signed an NAP 3 border sharing agreement with him. Afterwards, I found Abyssia and Mari, and both of those only had a one province border. Following flavahbeasts old strategy of "sign NAP3s with number of neighbours -1, defeat other neighbour, repeat", I proceeded to attack Shinuyama. Funnily enough, my Guardians killed his pretender in a "scout clash". He was the only target I didnt have an NAP 3 with, he was SHinuyama and thus propably the nation with the best lategame, and I just killed his god. Invasion of Shinu immdiatly proceeded. I found out that Ermor bordered Shinu, and did not need much to convince him of joining in. The war against Shinu was fairly straight forward, I had an economy and castle advantadge, and while a Bakemono Sorc is much better than a Mage Smith, this is less important if you send 2 mage smiths for each Bakemono Sorc. Bonus points if the Sorcs are close to their archers and die to crossbows.
After dealing with Shinu, (and bribing him to go and annoy Ctis), I went after Ctis together with Ermor. Around that time I put up the forge, and, by trading heavily with Abyssia, I pumped out a retarted amount of 1 Fire gem lightless lanterns. This gave me a sizeable research advantadge, and propably disuaded other aggressions.
Going for Ctis was not particularly hard either, the only strong fight being the cap, and I had research advantadge when that happened. I initially wanted to go for Man immidiatly after, but got distracted with building up stuff, Pangea and Shinies. I think I actually got all artifacts...
My Blitzkrieg agaisnt Man went off well enough too, although I would have prefered to launch it while Abyssia was still alive.