Let me preface this post by saying that I love civ4 and it is really a well polished and fun game which I find to be a lot more enjoyable than my civ3 experience. However, I am curious to see if anyone else thinks that the latest incarnations of the civ series have turned into an all out war by conquest at the higher difficulty levels. There is no other path to victory without being an aggressive war monger which is quite different from civ2 and the original civ where even on deity, you could expand aggressively and then peacefully tech up in the game without getting into any major wars. In civ3 and civ4 it seems like early military action is your only option because even expanding and defending large swaths of land will not let you then switch over to productively building your empire. That was what ultimately turned me off to civ3 and I hope that it is not the same way in civ 4 so I would like to hear some opinions.
Here is my anecdotal observations about deity level in civ4. I just completed a deity game on a tiny pangaea map with 3 civs by (you guessed it) conquest victory. This after having lost 3 or 4 deity games in a row trying to peacefully block out large chunks of land and then competing with the ai in the tech race. What I discovered is that practically you can limit each of your computer opponents to about 4 cities if you carefully place your second one, however even with 4 cities the computer has such a major advantage in research and tech that I was left in the dust by about 1000ad. Part of the problem is that on deity, with only 1 health and 3 happiness, you are forced to adopt hereditary rule for much of the time to get your cities above size 6 or 7, but the major problem seems to be the ridiculous upkeep costs of maintaining an empire on deity. The second city you found will always cost you 2 city maintenance and 1 distance cost (on a tiny map) and the third is something like a total of 7 or 8 (depending on distance). This means the entire strategy revolves around blocking off huge swaths of land for later development with only 3 cities (4 is about 16 gold maintenance which pretty much means 0 research). Playing this out I eventually had an empire of 10 cities (only adding when I could put 60% into research, by the end of the game the city maintenance costs were in the 100s) to the 4 and 3 cities of each of the computer opponents respectively, and still lost in the space race very very badly.
So I stopped the peaceful diplomatic approach and decided to go aggressive early to limit them to maybe 2 cities each and then develop peacefully and play out the full game (one of my favorite tactics in both civ2 and civ3). After a while of figuring out the AI, winning wars against it wasn't too hard (horse archer + axeman setting up shop around their capital pillaging away is pretty unbeatable). Unfortunately even though this approach got me my goal of limiting their growth, it still didn't work because taking over computer cities cost far too much in the early game to maintain them. When I took York and London (both size 10 cities), I ended up having to sack them because the maintenance costs would have been more than the cities could pay for by themselves) i.e. each city would cost me 20 gold and could generate maybe 12 or 13. Anyway this turned into an untenable situation so I eventually just finished off the english and then the aztecs while running 10% research on 4 cities (I was still running a deficit but the pillaging and sacking of cities would get me just enough gold to get to the next city).
Yes a win is a win and now I have a way to beat the computer on deity, but it really isn't all that enjoyable. I prefer playing long drawn out games where I can beat the computer to the wonders and play in the space race, but it seems like this style of play is just not possible at the higher difficulty levels. Any thoughts on maybe something I am missing out on to make a more peaceful solution possible? Or am I doomed to picking the mongolians, aztecs, greeks, and maybe romans (civs I really don't like that much) for the rest of my deity civ4 gaming?
The board and the community here would benefit from it.
Hopefully I'll be able to return to a higher setting at a later stage.
