Are all those difficulties really necesary?

[shulec]

The 2 key aspects to a peaceful, "builder" game are diplomacy and who you draw for neighbors.

1. Diplomacy Your best results with diplomacy are to avoid committing to a religion. This may sound backwards, but a huge negative diplomatic factor is having a different religion then you neighbors. If they all have the same religion, you want this and they will like you a lot more.
Demands. I am usually happy when the AI makes demands from me. This is an opportunity to "buy" diplomacy points.
Attitude toward you. Several AI's will not attack you simply if you are at "pleased" status with them. The are very few situations when they will attack you if they are "friendly". So if you can get them to pleased or friendly, you can often neglect you military until you build your economy to the point where you can crank out some strong defensive units (longbowmen, rifles, infantry)

2. Neighbors If you draw a war-monger neighbor such as Montezuma, Shaka, or Kublai Kahn, diplomacy often times means nothing. Often times, you are better of killing them as quickly as possible.

I recently won my first standard size deity game. It was a culture win in which I built about 6 warriors and 6 archers. Nothing else. The opponents ended the game with infantry and marines. I stacked the game with a bunch of peaceful AI (Ghandi, Mansa Musa, Roosevelt, Hatshupsat, Frederick, and Jaoa) and smooched some serious butt.


Also try an early warrior rush. Build 6 to 8 (probably overkill) warriors right from the start. Then walk them all over to your nearest neighbors capitol and conquer it. This should work on warlord difficulty. You will very quickly have two cities with awesome potential. This should give you a huge boost over the other AIs and may allow you to play a peaceful game after this.

 

[Windsor]

It's much easier to play Civ as a pacifist than it is to play a FPS as a pacifist. Still, you are making the game much harder if you demand doing everything "your way" with no military but lots of wonders. Civ isn't a playground where you build a civilization like you think it should be in a perfect world. Civ tries to simulate a historically realistic world based on actual history and in that brutal and harsh reality military have always been important.

If Genghis Khan was a sweet and friendly guy in Civ the game would be horrible.

 

[Monsterzuma]

Warlord and Prince would be the first two difficulties to go as far as I'm concerned. I'd echo the suggestion that a level between Immortal and Deity would be interesting, too.

 

[w2w2w]

dont worry about it the AI cheat in the game any way.
1. they see where they are going.
2. they trade technologies with eachother
3.errr. I dont remember, BUT IT WAS SOMETHING BAD.


then again they are quite stupid

 

[cleverhandle]

You just have a lot left to learn, OP. Civ4 is a much deeper game than just about anything else out there - I've played it semi-regularly since it was released and I still discover new things in every game. Browsing the forums and strategy guides here is a good start, but the best way to drastically improve is to play in some of the Succession Games here. With enough time and effort learning, you can move up through the levels.

In regards to being peaceful, I just finished a ~1700AD Cultural Victory on Emperor with Gandhi, Standard Continents and default settings, without ever being at war. So yes, it's possible. It doesn't happen very often, though - I think that might have been my first ever Emperor win without ever being at war, out of 50+ games at that level.

 

[Badtz Maru]

I remember struggling to survive on Warlord and thinking I would never be able to play on Noble.

Now Noble is too easy for me, I can win most of the time on Prince, and I've actually been able to survive on Monarch (though at the bottom of the score table). I feel like I could never find Monarch as easy as Noble, but I know there are people who find no challenge two difficulty levels above it, and I will get there one day (I'm slowed down by the fact I can only find time to play maybe 2 games a week).