The "Deity" difficulty level of Civilization V says that "the AI receives heavy advantages". In Civ IV this meant that the AI started with more units, 2 settlers, etc.
So my question is two-fold:
a) what bonuses does a "deity" level AI get in terms of units and resource production (hammers+cultures+food+gold+science etc)
b) any general suggestions as how to deal with the results of a? I know that you should generally try to expand as fast as possible and war with a neighbor sooner rather than later (before they can get a tech lead) to take advantage of their developed cities and remove their production.
Best Answer
Apparently there is a flawless strategy in civ5 and if you apply it correctly, winning on deity is rather easy. And you don't even have to make some special settings for the game. Just I have to warn that its much more fun if you discover it yourself rather than get it from internet, as in that way it kind of ruins your game experience as it did to me to some level.
The easiest way (as Irony Man correctly pointed out) is setting the map type to archipelago, as AI is totally hopeless on water. Just expand all the time, build some naval units to fend off any aggressive AIs, grab those resources, trade and develop. You should be able to get any kind of victory quite easily.
You can also use continents or Pangaea maps. You need to apply a flawless strategy to get a win on those. A strategy might be slightly different depending on which faction you are playing, but there are some basic rules which work for all of them. The specific faction strategy is to get the most of the special ability. That means if you are playing for English - build naval units, if you are playing for French - build a lot of small cities, if you are playing for Romans - build all that is needed in Rome, etc.
The most important bit is a good start. I would divide it into three phases:
Now if you still haven't lost your army at this point you should be doing rather well and can continue playing the way you like. Or if you want to be really effective and crush them all you can apply an ICS (infinite city sprawl) strategy. This strategy is genuine and it works perfectly, but honestly I don't like it myself at all, as it takes all the fun off the game. So if you enjoy Civ5 so far and want it to continue better close this post now, but if you want to further ruin your game experience read on..
The basics of ICS are explained elsewhere much better than I would be able to, so I'll just quote. Here's the theory behind Infinite City Sprawl, as written by alpaca in his Infinite Rome thread on Civfanatics:
You can find some great comprehensive examples of how it is applied here: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/liberteordre.html or here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=390302 and this one is very short and straight to the point: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388793