What Speed Do You Normally Play On?

It also takes longer to rebuild armies, and the human player is more effective at strategy, so while the AI sends in streams of units, occasionally a wall of units, that quickly fizzles and if you survive that, the AI won't be able to resist much when your counter-attack comes.

I usually play Marathon ,and have recently been playing at Standard. Same difficulty level (Emperor), and am finding the Standard pace games much harder. Probably because every turn counts, every little setback hurts a lot more than on Marathon.

Bonuses stack a lot more over time too on Marathon, optimizing research/money/culture/military ends up snowballing a lot more especially as a human player. Makes the game easier in my experience.

I think a slower pace gives some advantage when surprise attacking cities because the defender can't build extra units in the time it takes the attacker to walk from the boarder to the city.

Likewise you have time to do more conquering with a single army before key unit upgrades.

Another beneficial effect of marathon and epic is mistakes like sending a worker to the wrong tile don't cost you a large fraction of an improvement in lost opportunity.