Greed quit

[Ansive]

I had this great start with Greece on immortal, fractal, large, epic.

Discovering a lot of city states for free envoys.
Getting the first prophet.
Conquering the 4 cities of my neighbor Kongo (with 2 districts) before Classical era (no warmonger) with a slinger to archer rush.
Having a good amount of luxuries and gold.
Building the Oracle.
Lost of good land to expand to with only 2 neighboring civs.
Was gearing up to liberate a city state on my border and then...

Rome built the Pyramids.

I greeded out and lost them on the last turn because I didn't chop a jungle to save a 1 charge worker...
(I had saved around 4 one charge workers for the pyramids bonus)

Curse you Caesar!

I won't reload because I decided I won't chop... and I won't continue the game without the pyramids, too salty (I also don't want to go against Rome's Legions).
I lost because of greed and because I didn't scout the Roman capital.

 

[eternaldude]

Conquer Rome and you will have the pyramids

 

[Ansive]

The next game turned out in a similar fashion. But this time I had more army, so I did conquer my neighbors (which built the Oracle and Pyramids among others).
The problem is I went overboard getting 4 capitals. And then the "You are winning" negative diplo modifier got activated for the rest of the game (which I didn't know about). Nothing quite like a -50 to ruin all diplomacy options.

 

[eternaldude]

The next game turned out in a similar fashion. But this time I had more army, so I did conquer my neighbors (which built the Oracle and Pyramids among others).
The problem is I went overboard getting 4 capitals. And then the "You are winning" negative diplo modifier got activated for the rest of the game (which I didn't know about). Nothing quite like a -50 to ruin all diplomacy options.

with only 4 ? how many players did you start with? anyway, ancient wonders are always a huge gamble, better to conquer early...and anything you do before the classical era won't be hold against you the rest of the game either...i had one game where i had just built my third city and my neighbor already had 3 and a settler ready to go for the 4th, and i thought to myself, ok there's no way he has as big an army as me then because he put his production in something else and sure enough he had like two warriors and i had 3 warriors and 2 slingers and kept building more units, and i made this decision all in a snap when i saw his settler and that i could capture it, i stole it and took his 3 cities and that gave me all kinds of eurekas and inspirations and gave me enough head start to stay in the lead the rest of the game without doing any more warmongering

 

[Ansive]

Large map. I had 5/10 capitals.
It's kind of sad that warfare is the best approach to the early game on higher difficulties. Especially since the AI is so bad at combat.
In this second game I never built a settler. I captured more than 5. Worker production cost eventually reached more than double that of a settler.

Compared to Civ 5... the balance is weak.
We'll see in a week if the expansion changes anything for the better.

 

[eternaldude]

The AI is also terrible at: keeping their citizens happy, which spawns barbarians that make a beeline for my trade routes every time, and they spawn and rob the trade route all in the same turn, which is grossly unfair, i can't make a unit that can start moving immediately after creation

the kongo built 100+ missile cruisers for some reason, and they don't move, they just sit there...I've been playing Civilization since Civ 2 and this is the first time I used nukes in a single player game (just to take out his ships tho)