Moved Greece and Carthage up one. Moved Ethiopia down one.
Heavily considering:
Celts - down
Egypt - down
Siam - up
Other ongoing discussions:
Sweden
Netherlands
Rome
Morocco
still of the opinion that civs should be rated by victory type but the list looks pretty solid. surprised that Carthage is not mid tier with its bonus to income and solid UU for land AND sea
Done, enough people have mentioned Carthage. They have the " marker anyway, so there was their weird impression that they were the 2nd worst civ on the list after Denmark, which is not true. I think it's less confusing all around if they're up a tier to bring up the rear of the lower tier.
If this is not for the AI as well, then why is Egypt so high?
Good point. For some reason, I thought it had a desert start bias, but it doesn't... I mean, not really. It avoids jungle and forest, so Egypt has a 50% chance at a desert/tundra start (both work for them very well).
Will consider moving them down. But, we did have an entire discussion earlier in this thread on them, and I think people concluded that Egypt was fine as 2nd tier (the old second tier, so they would definitely qualify for the new larger 2nd tier) and I'm not sure the fall patch changed anything to make them worse. I've never been huge on them, but the +2 happiness functions as a better Netherlands UA, and the UA saves hammers on not only world wonders, but also national wonders, which are unaffected by Deity difficulty. There's a list earlier in this thread of the approximate difficulty in getting pre Renaissance wonders. Only 5-6 are locked out of most games.
Anyone else think they're too high?
This whole list strikes me as a bit silly to be honest. Carthage, Iroquois, Polynesia, Indonesia, Sweden... All in the bottom two brackets. Meanwhile with the exception of Iroquois, these are a few of my most played civs in deity, Carthage and Indonesia being my absolute most favorites in the game. I'm not some superstar player either, so something isn't right here.
I don't think your most played civs have much to do with which civs are best... not sure what the argument is here. Carthage is one of my most played civs too (in fact, only one of my most played civs are in the top two tiers). Doesn't mean it's a very good civ. All civs are viable in that you can win with any of them. It seems that you just have a personal preference for water-based civs.
I feel like Sweden should be bumped up to middle tier if not upper tier - they have 1 decent and 1 extremely good UU and both come around the time you get Artillery which imo is the best moment to start going for domination. And their UA is simply amazing - in peace you can have a huge boost to GP generation without needing to settle on lakes or rivers, and during war you can gift excess generals/admirals to city states to keep your happiness up or just use them as proxies to wage war - my favourite tactic is to ally with a city state close to the runaway, DoW him, he'll take the city state and then everyone will hate him.
Tundra start means you get to Artillery slower than everyone else. That's bad, right? It's especially bad when your UA requires you to work specialists, which require more population, which you have less of. If you play all starts with start bias and don't re-roll, Sweden has one of the worst starts in the game. If you don't play with start bias, or play only good starting positions, then Sweden is amazing. But, this list assumes all standard settings, no reroll. Sweden's ability to generate and then gift GGs in the early game (and all game long) is the only thing keeping it from bottom tier.
This is just my experience with Sweden (I've played 5 games with them on Immortal/Deity and haven't gotten them to work well in any of those games; and I'm pretty good at tundra starts, since Russia is my favorite civ). I'm convinced people who think Sweden is any good on Deity are not playing with start biases, or they re-roll mediocre/bad starts. Sweden in my experience is incredibly hit or miss.
You can't compare a Sweden diplo victory with another civ's culture/science/domination victory. Diplo has to be compared with Diplo. I think this is also why Greece is overrated. Sure, Greece's diplo victory is easier than Babs science victory. But a Babs diplo victory is even easier than a Greek diplo victory. Etc.