Last night, I won my first ever game on deity, going 15 years all the way to Civ II! 
Napolean, Small, Continents, normal speed, other settings default. Won by Space race by turn 285.
First, thanks to all of you for the playbook I followed to win the game. I opened with Liberty, grabbed the Hagia Sophia with the specialist Engineer, got another one, and used him for Porcelain Tower, and promptly lightbulbed Astronomy, opening up Rationalism. I had 4 cities by then, and then rapidly expanded to 8, which caused a few problems but gave me some more luxuries.
The quotations are there because of two thing. First, Caesar, the runaway leader who had conquered two other civs built the UN about 15 turns before I won. Despite having 80,000 gold!!!, he didn't even try to increase the number of city states by the time of the first vote. That was silly. Also, he had finished 99 percent of the tech tree by the end (I had 95). Despite this, he didn't build any spaceship parts at all, though he did finish the Apollo project about 30 turns earlier.
The second reason is that I had to reload the game from about 5 turns back near the end. I had stupidly given open borders to Gandhi, who plunked down two units on a railroad linking a city building an SS booster to the capital. Despite the fact that I should have been able to move past Gandhi's units, the computer annoyingly decided not to treat those squares as roads, and I had to detour, upon which Gandhi declared war and blew up the spaceship part! That was partly carelessness due to late night, but it was also sloppy coding.
In sum, it was fun, it took a LOT of micro-managing cities, but some of the coding sloppiness on the part of Firaxis was annoying. But, I guess it would be impossible to win on Deity without the sloppy code. Ideally, they would improve the code and tone down the benefits to the IT. But hey, one can dream. I'll try again, possibly different maps, civs, and may be even victory conditions.
Thanks for reading.
Napolean, Small, Continents, normal speed, other settings default. Won by Space race by turn 285.
First, thanks to all of you for the playbook I followed to win the game. I opened with Liberty, grabbed the Hagia Sophia with the specialist Engineer, got another one, and used him for Porcelain Tower, and promptly lightbulbed Astronomy, opening up Rationalism. I had 4 cities by then, and then rapidly expanded to 8, which caused a few problems but gave me some more luxuries.
The quotations are there because of two thing. First, Caesar, the runaway leader who had conquered two other civs built the UN about 15 turns before I won. Despite having 80,000 gold!!!, he didn't even try to increase the number of city states by the time of the first vote. That was silly. Also, he had finished 99 percent of the tech tree by the end (I had 95). Despite this, he didn't build any spaceship parts at all, though he did finish the Apollo project about 30 turns earlier.
The second reason is that I had to reload the game from about 5 turns back near the end. I had stupidly given open borders to Gandhi, who plunked down two units on a railroad linking a city building an SS booster to the capital. Despite the fact that I should have been able to move past Gandhi's units, the computer annoyingly decided not to treat those squares as roads, and I had to detour, upon which Gandhi declared war and blew up the spaceship part! That was partly carelessness due to late night, but it was also sloppy coding.
In sum, it was fun, it took a LOT of micro-managing cities, but some of the coding sloppiness on the part of Firaxis was annoying. But, I guess it would be impossible to win on Deity without the sloppy code. Ideally, they would improve the code and tone down the benefits to the IT. But hey, one can dream. I'll try again, possibly different maps, civs, and may be even victory conditions.
Thanks for reading.
). However, from algorithms complexity point of view they are incomparable. And while you are right that there is no need to calculate every optimal move of every unit, sometimes there is. At the battlefield, for example. We all, including me, complain about how horrible AI is at combat. And I do not expect wonders in the future. With 1upt it probably wiil never be good. Time/space complexity of good combat strategy is beyond current AI ability. As simple as that. It's not just "If there is a unit close to my 5 then flank it". It's more like "if there is a unit close to my 5, let's assume I flank it. Now check all enemy units that my 5 would get in their range. Calculate all possible damages considering all possible terrain, resources etc modifiers. Now check if there is a road which can bring more enemy units into range and danger my flankers. If true, calculate all possible damages dealt to my units by those hypothetical units. Is killing that flanked unit still worth it? If true, span all possible combinations of new units arrived the next turn. Are terrain features gonna prevent a successful retreat of my units next turn? If they might, calculate all possible damages dealt by anyone in the battlefield to my units..." etc. It goes on and on. Human eye and brain do all this tactical 'computation' in seconds. It took me few minutes just to type it in a non-formal language. 
IMO, this nonsense shouldn't be existent neither for human player, nor AI. It's not a victory in my dictionary. Seriously. It's cheesy and stupid. Do you honestly believe the game would improve had AI used the same cheese players do? Regarding your example it wouldn't even matter on lower difficulties, b/c clever players make sure AI has no cash of its own. On higher ones AI will simply re-bribe and re-steal CS's one from another every turn, since all of them sit on thousands and in the meanwhile the human player will launch the spaceship/build Utopia the same way he/she does now. Another option - AI whose turn was the last one is declared a winner, then human would never win at higher difficulties which would lead to another nonsense.
