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As for the other civs, your army was probably too small after the barb siege. Other civs will pounce on you if you are too weak, always have a few army units. Other civs will be much friendlier with you once they see you can defend yourself.
The randomness actually helps keep the game fun and harder to predict. Veteran players are able to deal with many of the things the early game can throw at them, and take satisfaction in overcoming the odds. But I can see how it also can give new players a very bad first impression, when the dice don't roll in their favor and every force is seemingly aligned against them in their first few games. Enough to make them want to quit playing altogether.
Scouting is very important early game, to know where the other civs on your continent are, where the barbarian camps spawn, and getting to tribal villages, city states and good places to settle before your opponents do.
You also want some military units to fend off barbarian attacks (if their scout spots your city, kill that scout before it returns to their camp to prevent them from launching a raid on your territory) and to discourage other civs from attacking you. They love pouncing on someone who looks weak.
Once the barbarians are dealt with and you have some defenses in place (and hopefully not a rabid warmonger as your neighbor), you should be able to pursue your science/cultural victory in relative peace. I've had many games like this, where everyone eventually is happy to be your friend, as long as you don't conquer any cities (free cities are okay) or convert a religious opponent's cities to your own religion by force.
Wiping another civ off the map is going to make everyone else hate your guts, even if that civ declared war on you first. There's a difference between defending your own lands and taking theirs in retaliation - try to force a favorable peace deal instead. Whatever you do, don't take their capital/wipe another civ out completely unless you are going for a conquest victory. If you want favorable diplomacy for the rest of the game, that is.
Good luck and have fun, if you keep at it :)
If you do go for a conquest victory, leave at least one city of your opponent, preferably a small one, so you don't get as much hate from other civs for a genocide of a civilization.
Whether through bad luck throwing a really unusual level of barbs at you, or being new at the game not preparing you to prevent and then respond to barbs, you had a rough start. However, as you say, the barb threat made you build a big enough army that you were able to get rid of Saladin. Those barbs did you a huge favor (in the spirit of "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."), because getting rid of Saladin early (especially if he's Sultan Saladin rather than the Vizier) is really good for you, quite aside from you getting to steal his land.
Doubling the amount of land you can exploit, early in the game, is a huge benefit, one that would let you win, if properly exploited, any sort of victory, even against Deity. You can still switch back at this point to your original intention to win some peaceful victory type.
You can and should continue to conquer civs that are near you who declare war on you, or present a serious threat of war, but the AI denounces a hundred times for every time it actually declares war. A denunciation is mostly only a serious threat of imminent war if that AI both hates you and has a sizable military strength advantage over you. Some AI civs are programmed to be more aggressive (Alexander stands out in that respect), but if they actually go on the offensive against you, without a crushing strength advantage, they are going to be annihilated, because you can do strategy and they can't. If they lose their field army in some reckless attack on your empire, that just makes it easier for you to conquer them.
If an AI actually goes all the way through to declaring war on you, you mostly only have to worry about that if their territory adjoins yours. If they are not a direct neighbor, the state of war will usually not result in any enemy action from them.
The AI tending to hate your guts is probably largely due to your having wiped out Saladin (and whoever else you might have wiped out that you didn't mention), which incurs considerable and lasting grievances against you, no matter who started the war. However moralistic the verbiage the AI animations use when talking about what a horrible person you are, the actual logic behind your conquest making everybody hate you is simple realpolitik balance of power. You disturbed that balance by ending up with Saladin's land, however the war started. Your ending up with his land puts you ahead of the other AIs in this goal you all have of clawing your way to the top. Even the AIs who hated Saladin are going to work against you however they can, because it's not about feelings and ethics and justice, it's about keeping you from winning.
Having all of them hate you will tend to go away with time, because grievances decay, except for those generated by taking capital cities. Of course, if you continue to conquer their cities, you will generate new grievances and keep them hating you. Having them hate you will make a culture victory harder, but won't interfere with a science victory. As long as you have an army strong enough to fight them off in case they actually try an invasion, you can change course after however much conquest you care to engage in and go on to your original plan of science victory.
That's what kind of crazy game this is, a game that tries to keep you from winning, to the point that it often makes you change your plans. It doesn't try hard enough for many peoples' tastes, at least after they have learned the game fairly well, so you see all sorts of complaints in this forum about the AI sucking. Treasure the memory of this game that succeeded to such an extent of keeping you from winning, because as you get more experience, that will happen less and less, at least unless you keep moving up in difficulty.
Pick on the weakest kid and steal his lunch money.
Your army is too weak.
And on top of that, if they're able to declare war, then their units have already met your units, thus they already know, where you are. If you don't know where your neighbors are at turn 200, i can only assume, that you've not really scouted your surroundings to begin with, which is a huge disadvantage to begin with.
They Always just ruin game by attacking you and no one else and making you weak and then other nations attack GRRRRR
Even if you plan to be peaceful you need a strong military, otherwise you make a very juicy target. Keep your military strong and other Civs will look for other people to bully.
They are less likely to attack you the better the relations you have with them, as you noted in your third game, and avoiding the grievances you incur in war definitely help them view your existence more favorably. You are not using your power to conquer others, so you are not showing a tendency to behavior that one day might threaten them. You are also, I imagine, making deals with them, including open borders and delegations/embassies, so they see your continued existence as actually helping them win. They are more inclined to be friendly towards you because the benefits they derive from you make them see less of an advantage in conquering you.
So far so good if you are inclined to peace. However, the benefit to the AIs of your behavior, of your not acting as a threat to them, is far from the biggest benefit they can derive from you. Taking your land would be a much bigger benefit, a game-winning benefit. A peaceful neighbor is nice to have, but a conquered neighbor is incomparably nicer, because it doubles the land they can exploit to get ahead. No benefit your peaceful coexistence could give them comes close to the benefit of doubling their land.
The good news here is that the AI is pretty bad at conquest. It's decently competent at static defense of its own lands, but it needs an overwhelming qualitative and/or quantitative advantage to take your cities. Because of this it is programmed to only attack you if your military strength is low relative to theirs. This may seem paradoxical, because you are less of a threat to conquer them if your military is small and backwards. It's more clearly immoral of them to attack the weak-- but immorality has nothing to do with it. They're trying to win, and grabbing your land is far and away the best means to that end, so if you make that seem a reasonable prospect by not maintaining a reasonably strong and up-to-date military, at some point even the AIs that like you will roll the war dice.
You don't need a military strength that exceeds theirs, just one that isn't too far behind theirs. If this deterrence fails (and it might if you have Alexander as a neighbor, as he is programmed to be a mercurial warmonger), it's nice to have built walls in your frontier cities. In your case, walls would have made the 8 cav units Cleopatra sent against you incapable of taking your city. The walls will slow them down enough that you can bring your economy to bear to defeat their attempted conquest. By not building a military you were able to prioritize your economy, so you should be able to catch up on military pretty quickly because your economy ought to be that much better than that of civs that did prioritize producing military units over developing their economies.