I used to love playing Freeciv, but whenever I touched it in the last few years, I found that it has become ridiculously hard. It feels like after a few rounds the other civilizations are already building King Richard's Crusade or whatever about 1000 BC, and a few rounds after that they get upset for no diplomatic reason, declare war, and wipe you off the map.

I'm sure some people like the challenge, but when I play games I do like to get a chance at winning :-)

So yes, it's really hard, which would be OK if there were settings that make it easier, but I for one can't find them.

I haven't played Freeciv in a while, but the AI only respects strength. Build lots of ranged units and a few mele units and a lot of mounted units to capture cities. AI is not smart enough to compete with a human player so they give it a lot of bonuses like more science points, etc. AI therefore cheats with rigged bonus points on dice rolls.

Not really as you can't play longer than like 100 turns because your browser will be so overloaded thanks to WebGL...

I want to like WebGL, but then I start comparing what I can do with it and the native languages I have on the same systems....

It doesn't even work properly on some OpenGL ES 3.x devices I own, while they work perfectly fine with the native games.

What exactly do you mean by the "one true strategy"?

Possibly infinite city sprawl (Smallpox): http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/City_smallpox

Not really. You'll also want to tweak the ruleset so that it plays more like one prefers.