I've been working on specializing my cities a little more with the essentials + the victory districts and so far it's been working out much better. I'm considering jumping up to Emperor now. In my current game as Germany, I managed to pull ahead of a snowballing Alexander after a slow start and currently have the top score and 10+ cities. I'm starting to get the hang of the better strategies!
Though, there are just a couple of things that haven't been going as well. In my first Germany game (one I tried before the game mentioned above), Cyrus was my neighbor and he was at first very friendly. But then he declared a surprise war (I didn't expect him to do that, though it's my fault for not reading up on his agenda). I was able to defend myself the first time around (and got one of his new cities in a peace deal) but no long after he declared another surprise war, this time with more units. I'd be able to fend him off but I decided to quit that game. I didn't want to play a game where I had to constantly produce units and not get any infrastructure done due to an aggressive neighbor, especially since I didn't have any iron so his immortals felt like dealing with Shaka's Impis in Civ V. Ironically, in the next game I declared a couple of surprise wars on others and he denounced me several times for warmongering.
The second thing is one AI that ranges from being a minor nuisance to a major problem in several of my games, and that would be Peter the Great. He almost always seems to have all of the Culture/Tourism (so much that he sends spare artists around the map and it's very difficult to win a cultural victory while he's on the map) and it always puts him eras ahead of everyone else. In this game he was particularly stubborn and almost frustrating. He declared war on me on turn 95 and neither of us sent units towards each other (aside from some small stragglers such as a couple of field cannons). The war didn't finally end until Turn 327, and before then he didn't even consider peace. Also, he (along with Qin Shi Huang) somehow hyper-beelined into the Information Era even though I had more techs than them. This led to him to getting Synthetic Materials very early and was able to take down one of my city states using Helicopters. He then sent a Helicopter Army into my territory, which proceeded to one-shot most of my Modern and Atomic era units. It took a combination of city bombardments, unit sacrifice, and clever machine gun placement to finally take it down. It isn't a huge deal but it was a major headache in the late game. What should I do when the AI does stuff like this?
