Possible difficulty tweak?

I know there are a bunch of ideas like this out there, but a fair number of people seem to think the problem with the higher difficulty levels (Immortal and Deity), the starting bonuses that the AI gets, even if they aren't by themselves too much, limit your options too much in the early game, particularly when every AI civ gets them.

For instance, giving an AI an extra tech makes sense as a booster. Giving every AI civ the same extra tech (Pottery) makes it virtually impossible that you found a religion or build certain wonders.

I was thinking difficulty might be more interesting if the particular bonuses granted to civs at higher difficulties were varied a bit. Either random (every civ gets one free tech, but which tech is random), some bag of random starting units and boosts to science, faith, culture, food and happiness.

Pros: the human player is still pretty screwed at the start, but is screwed in an unpredictable fashion. It's a bit easier to, say, get the Great Library, but it's a little harder in that you don't start with the absolute certainty that it's out of your grasp. You might be able to found a religion, or you might not.

Cons: the actual quality of the AI civs won't be standardized. A civ might get a crap selection of bonuses, or one might get a lot better. Again, this could make the game easier by giving you opponents who don't have quite the oomph that a Deity opponent has now, but it can also make it harder by giving you an opponent who is that good (or better) and giving them a bunch of weak neighbors.

Thoughts?

Admissions/Caveats:

1. I'm not a Deity player, mostly because I don't like the idea of a game where I have to do everything by the book AND not get unlucky in order to compete; this might make me play it.
2. This is totally something I'd want to mod, but I have no experience doing that and don't know how hard it is.
3. Don't even say "higher difficulty should have a smarter AI" or anything like that. We've been down that road already.

Instead of starting techs, I would give the AI more bonuses that multiply throughout the game, and keep the entire game interesting. I noticed on deity that early wars are almost impossible (for me at least), but the game becomes easy once you catch up in tech. It's just a race to see if you can catch up to the AI starting bonuses before somebody wins. If you can do it by the Renaissance, the game is yours, but if you can't do it, then the AI wins.

Basically I would take out the starting techs, but give the computers higher gpt, production, science, happiness and all of that on the higher difficulties to make the early game easier but the late game harder.

Polisurgist said:

For instance, giving an AI an extra tech makes sense as a booster. Giving every AI civ the same extra tech (Pottery) makes it virtually impossible that you found a religion or build certain wonders.

Click to expand...

With the right start it's easy to found a religion even on Deity. The best way is faith induced pantheon with Shrine in your capital as your first building. (Tradition start)

Now the early wonders nearly impossible at that difficulty level, but for that matter building wonders wasn't that popular with Deity level players in Civ IV either. (With the exception of hoping for fail-gold in Civ IV; when if you had the 2X resource you could get more gold failing than you could by building wealth; Civ V greatly decreased fail gold making it non desirable in early game.)