.

That's a good point you bring up OP. I agree completely.
Myself I am both types to the extreme. I get my fun out of learning all the systems and testing every last theory I can think of to optimise my performance until I make it to, and eventually win at Deity. However, just as often, I build cities where I imagine beautiful landscapes are, I'll stop expanding at what seem to be natural borders. I'll rescue defeated civs I'd considered my friends take them under my wing and try to build up their empire. I'll try to maintain political alliances, just building up my own paradise and watching how the world around me develops, poking here and prodding there to see how it affects things, generally just directing my own historical fantasy.

One of my many complaints with Civ5 on release was actually how much I felt they'd abandoned the ability to roll-play. I didn't like how the AI was designed to "try to win". I came around though, and after BNW consider it to be far superior for both playstyles.

I really love the idea of these leader agendas, but I'd also love to have the option to turn them off and have each AI just do whatever it thought was best in order to win. I can't imagine this would be a very difficult thing to do either, I'd be surprised if it weren't added in some later patch, or modded in eventually as there has to be a base-line set of behaviours each agenda simply modifies.
 
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I'll rescue defeated civs I'd considered my friends, and try to maintain political alliances, just building up my own paradise and watching how the world around me develops, generally just directing my own historical fantasy.

Ha ha Abraxis! I always had thought you were a hardcore deity player! You're just like me!

In one of my current games, tsl, my main force, Greek, has been liberating cities all over the place because I hate Civs dying off, but in this game I can't settle and then gift cities fast enough. So it was a march from Athens to Paris, up to Amsterdam, back to Vienna, over to Moscow where Darius had built a castle, north to free Novgorod from Sweden, back down to the Black Sea to free Munich from ghengis, sail south to liberate two more cities from Persia - and repopulate/upgrade force since I was close to home, then head east to liberate Delhi and Mumbai. Jeez. Meanwhile I've settled about ten cities for Spain, Portugal, France, India, Germany, Austria, and William.

Happily, as Greece, Darius is my main problem. Waiting to see if my proposed embargo of him will pass. He's making over 200gp a turn, and despite my peace treaty bounties from him, still has almost 20k gold. And my point of this game is to be the wealthiest civ based on 'sea trade' - settling nearly only all single tile island cities.

It's the giant not yet another map too, so these are not short marches. Started off when I had engineering, on marathon speed, took Delhi 2 techs into industrial. And Darius is happily spamming castles in (strategically) inconveniently located (for me) cities.
 
Ha ha Abraxis! I always had thought you were a hardcore deity player! You're just like me!
Well I do both! I'd much rather play a game like Crusader Kings for the story than EU4 for the map painting and slider optimising, but I've enjoyed both immensely. I love league of legends too, I've been playing since beta and love following the ever changing wiki, looking for synergies and developing new builds to keep ahead of the current metagame and playing to absolute perfection. Dwarf Fortress is my ultimate love in this world though, nothing really compares to the stories you can take part in there, it's just a shame how much of a time sink it is, and how tedious the controls can be for long strings of repetitive tasks. The Civ series has always had, in my opinion, the perfect balance between depth, style, and usability compared to my other favourites. I think BNW was one of the finest games ever designed.

As for your story, it reminds me a lot of what I used to do in Distant Worlds -a wonderful game for roll-playing in if you can get past the intimidating learning curve. So much of the galaxy is simulated outside of your control, a whole civilian economy running itself in parallel with federal empires. As the expansion phase comes to an end (could alone take 40 hours) the galaxy develops into a huge star-trek like universe. So big that if you send a fleet to the other side... that fleet is pretty much there to stay and must find a way to sustain and maintain in alied bases. If it ever did come back it would need to be placed into a museum.

I'd always have huge foreign aid fleets all over the enormous galaxy fighting in wars so far away their outcome would likely never even affect me. But that wasn't the point. I just liked to help protect peaceful empires from the aggressive expansion of the less civilised races, trying to build my own federation of enlightened empires committed to mutual protection. Honestly it's the best experience I've ever had playing like that. I think you'd love it too! My only complaint with the game is its slow pacing (modifiable, but you need experience to know how to tweak the settings) and inaccessibility.
 
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civ is designed as a competition

i won't tell people how to have fun, but i hope different games satisfy different needs because one game can't do everything, especially when those things contradict (AI trying to win. AI trying to play a role)

firaxis can't even make the AI competent at a single thing. let's not make them try to do both...
 
I love doing a combination. I play to win, and I want to be a leading civ, but I do that because more than anything, its fun when I have influence over what happens in the world. I want to be a leading world power, whether its through the world congress, militaristically, diplomatically, etc. I will try to develop emotional attachments to my friends, and I'm trying to train myself to participate in world wars if an AI I don't like is starting to conquer the world.

For example, in my most recent game, I had more than enough military might and stored happiness to conquer my entire continent after I destroyed Egypt, but I bypassed Portugal in favor of only conquering Rome because Portugal was my friend and ally the entire game. It felt wrong to backstab them. We ended up in a kind of cool situation where Portugal and I dominated our continent as the only order civs in the game, Sweden dominated the other huge continent as the only autocracy civ, and Persia was in control of a smaller continent as the only freedom civ (Sweden and I destroyed all the other civs). While I had less production than Sweden because I didn't take over Portugal, I like to think that our natural alliance made up for that, and we were on par with the runaway Sweden put together.
 
I'm fine with what I've seen in the demo, I just don't want to feel (in the real game) that higher difficulty AI is letting me win. If I'm close to a victory of any type, I expect some player like reactions and I don't want the difficulty to just come from the fact that you need to do it faster. If I'm expanding faster than my defenses and infrastructure can support, I want an AI to go after my borders. If I'm threatening religious victory, I expect holy wars to push off my apostles. If I'm threatening a Diplo or Science victory that is faster than anyone else, I expect diplo relations to sour as they plot some way to stop me as I plot ways to delay them till I'm finished.

Maybe they make the AI treat Alliances like some form of victory so the whole world doesn't turn on the guy close to winning at the same time, but if I can sit in a corner and the AI doesn't try to slow me down because I didn't get any diplo penalties that would make them go after me, that feels stupid.

I'm perfectly fine if the AI doesn't do as much of that on lower difficulty settings though. Like if on prince or king the AI is a bit more passive but still plays and defends itself at a respectable pace. I don't mind. But on Emperor, Immortal or Deity, I expect that if I do something that is strategically unsound, I want the AI to know to punish it.
 
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Both I guess. Actually I wouldn't say I roleplay more like I just enjoy building my empire. So sometimes I build things just because they are interesting and I feel my empire should have them even if they aren't needed to win. In fact, I build many things not needed to win. At the end of the game I enjoy building up my modern naval fleet. I served in the Navy, so it's something dear to me. I like to create at least a couple of "fleets" on each coast if my empire is that large. I like to have a carrier fully loaded, a missile cruiser and nuclear submarine loaded with missiles, maybe battleships but the missile cruiser really replaces that, destroyer or two. I also like to develop a land army if I have time and resources, and I do diversify my army even if one unit really is all you need to conquer everything. But make no mistake I do go for the win and I stop playing once I get it. I just like to make my empire look impressive.
 
Role-play to win!
That is how they should design the game.

If it makes 'roleplay' sense for two civs to get a cooperative victory, then there should be a mechanic to do that. (you need to be strategic in how you implement it so that "lets all join hands for cooperative victory" is actually difficult, taking at least as big of an investment as just conquering the other civ would)

Right now there are things like Religion Victory where winning requires totally unintuitive actions. (for all non founders they need to carefully balance the religions in their empire.)
 
Throughout most of the history of the Civilization series (not all, but most), the rival Civilizations functioned more as obstacles than true rivals. Like an enemy in any video game, a Koopa Troopa in Super Mario Bros.. Sure, you can lose to the Koopa Troopa, but it's more of an obstacle than a rival to win, and you can even utilize it to your advantage in some situations (lobbing its shell at other enemies). This is probably okay for the core single-player experience. If you want a true rival to win, you play multiplayer against human opponents.

With that said, in theory there's little stopping them from adding some sort of "Aggressive AI" option which would, say, give all the AI an agenda to win at all costs. Some people might prefer that. That's not really how I view single-player Civ (I feel like if you want to play against a human-like player you should just play against humans), but it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to add to the game.
 
As the civilizations in the series become more specialized, your two options are merging. You need to play the civilizations a certain way, to take advantage of their special abilities, role-play them if you like, in order to win.
 
I enjoy mostly to role-play like managing an actual nation, which means expanding, securing resources, allying with some nations and competing with others (be it militarily, be it trading or with religion).

Pure competition games bore me. I never cared a dime about the game predetermined victory options, my end goal is simply to build a powerful civ using the real history goals of that nation, hence roleplaying its real history.

Although sometimes when my nation gets too powerful and the game becomes boring, I go berserker and remove all the other civs. :p
 
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I do not know if you guys play chess, but nevertheless, there is a nice book by a chess GM Jonathan Rowson where he raises an excellent point about playing games for winning. Coming to the question of "can you lose a game and still enjoy it", he gives opinions of his fellow GMs which basically answer to that with a firm No, and go on in that the very moment when you realize that you are going to win the game is the most satisfactory one. And I find this is a very deep and insightful observation, as exactly those moments were the turning points in my Civ II-V games. Up until that moment the game is enjoyable as a puzzle in your hands. Once you figured out that you can (maybe even easily) win this game and no AI can stop you it gets technical and even boring. This is why I rarely win by conquest (technically), as I tend to jump on strong guys first and leave the weaker ones for a final push but it rarely gets there because I know I can crush them.
And this immediately means that role-playing, as the OP put it, is much more important than just beelining towards winning, as long as the role you are playing does not mean some pre-defined role (like brazil in civ v -> tourism or mongols -> conquest) but rather evolves with the gameturns (and emotions). Obviously, this is a kind of behaviour I expect from the opponents. I have watched a few FFA games where basically as soon as someone got a clear edge in development other players started to cooperate and jump on them because taking down the leader was their only chance to snatch a win. People are doing crazy things from the point of view of "normal gameplay", but it was all justified by the competitiveness of the rules. It feels a bit like running a long distance race at olympics where once you got the lead others were trying to trip you at the costs of their own performance.
 
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