Apologies if some of this has been covered, I jumped ahead from page 10...
I started two games in the Exploration Age as Isabella of the Chola. I wanted to dominate the seas. The setup is interesting - selecting how many Cities, Towns, Techs, Units, etc. Definitely worth it to try several times to experiment, lots of flexibility. Unfortunately, the two Towns only sent food to my 2nd non-capital City... I had to spend 2 Merchants just to build roads that should have been set up Turn 1 on like Turn 50.
1st game on Immortal - fair amount of water buffer, very friendly with Machiavelli, so no immediate war. That came after a while as I started settling Distant Lands. 3 vs 1, and all that happened was a Knight and Melee unit threatened a Town right next to his Empire. A range unit and nearby ship killed them both, they didn't even hit my city. Not impressive. Plus one small naval skirmish involving only one of his ships.
Never saw any units from 2nd foe who was right nearby, the 3rd was Himiko quite a ways away. She managed to have a number of ships, but none were ever in a group or even near each other. As was common from VI, I never lost a unit and killed a dozen of hers. When I attacked a city from the sea they actually threw a Knight in the water. So nothing has changed that way. I took one city, and she gave me her 2nd largest city in a peace deal. I started hauling Treasure and was kicking butt but decided to restart on Diety.
This time more of a Pangea (Fractal). All 4 civs started being threatening, surrounding my territory in various ways. I was able to confound them for a while by fortifying in mini choke points, but some finally got through and 2 DOW'd so far. What is immensely frustrating is that you CANNOT build any kind of Walls until you reach Castles for Medieval Walls, which takes like 20-30 turns. Huh? I had selected a startup option to have Ancient Walls in my initial City and 2 Towns, but of course, those are not on the frontier. So even though I did a great job of using the terrain, and had an OK sized military strategically dug-in, they will likely both fall eventually due to no Walls allowed. What a design oversight. And I had only slightly forward settled one civ, and we were buddies until suddenly we weren't due to the IP BS below.
I've been selecting boosts to Influence, and have basically Suzed every IP in both games... Which means not enough to always make friends at home. But their aggression was immediate, VII's version of the immediate DOW in VI. And strangely, when THEY take out an IP, they get mad at YOU. It makes no sense. Every civ wanted me to pay like 90 Influence so that *I* wouldn't Denounce them or some such. The verbage makes no sense, they just back you into a corner. I'm just hanging out, but it's a -60 over 10 turns that you can't avoid. Huh? How does this make any kind of interesting decision. Maybe I could have kept one civ from DOWing as early if I'd saved Influence. Of course, none of them attacked each other in the early game. Sheesh.
Other than that I found many things interesting and enjoyable. I finally learned how Treasure Fleets work from the web, it's a somewhat fun mini-game. Exploring is alright, but it's a shame the maps are so small. It's pretty easy to start to snowball with Gold at some point. It feels like early hammers and science are lacking with my setup choices, so even with slow science I could never catch up just by building. But once my economy allowed me to buy there was no longer any sense of choice/urgency. I'm not sure what can be done about that, other than allow Building purchases only in Towns?
My plan is to restart a Deity game with at least 2 fewer civs, just to give more space. God I hope there's a way to build Walls soon! If you haven't tried this combo (Isabella/Chola) it's a really strong way to attack foes by water. You can get some nice Commander promos.
Other than Ibn, he was cool. Maybe because I spent so much diplomatic favor on city states in the beginning of each age, I didn't have much to spare early on.
