I usually play on huge as well, and in my current game it's 500 turns in and I'm in second (well, third) behind the Kuriotates (and Mercurians). They just got their cities rolling early and cranked out wonders like crazy. I'm going to crush them with waves upon waves of fully upgraded Iron Golems shortly, but it's not as though they've done poorly.
Look how you are dealing with them, by burying them with numbers, why because they cannot keep up with your production despite having significantly better cities then you
Well, I'm actually quite a ways behind in troop numbers. I have less than 100 Iron Golems, which is way behind the Mercurian numbers and barely on the level of the Kuriotates. I'm really just burying them in the awesomeness of IGs with Empower 5 and Fire 2. I'm winning with quality (and tactics), not quantity.
(also look at your scores, when using the meter it adds all members of a teams scores together for positioning, do you have a gold star next to your name? guess what you are in the lead)
My meter doesn't list the teams by score ever since I switched to Tholal's mod, but FWIW I was behind them in score until the war had been going for a while and I had captured/sacked a bunch of cities.
For obvious reasons, they are dependent on getting a good starting position, but they can do well on small maps where their empire isn't relatively small, and on larger maps if they have the Mercurians to do the expanding for them. This isn't the first game I've played where they've done well.
Except they should not have to rely on the Mercurians to be viable in large maps. They should be able to hold their own and be able to fight, not just be delegated to nonviolent victories when alone
First, they're not entirely reliant on the Mercurians on all large maps - I probably overstated that. They are helped quite a lot by them when trying to win by domination/conquest, but even those victories are possible without Mercurians - since their max city count scales with map size, the amount of land relative to the size of the map is a bigger factor than whether you're on a medium, large, or huge map.
Moreover, why should every faction be able to win every way on every map without it being a big challenge? I don't see why that should be considered desireable. If you play the Kuriotates on a map with lots of land given the map size, and you either don't want to win by nonviolent means or you turned those wins off, and you either lost the race for the Mercurian Gate or decided not to pursue it, and you didn't tap mercenaries or other approaches to augmenting your troop stacks, then that game will be harder than usual. That's OK in my book.
Even beyond that, I'm not convinced that 2 units per turn is really a solution to their problems. There's nothing wrong with cranking out the top units, and there aren't many cities that are going to do that in less than a turn. Centaur Knights and Crossbowmen are 240 hammers apiece.
and Aquibusiers cost 180 and champions 120 and unlike those "top" units there is no national cap and they both cost about half what Crossbow and knights do.
Well, the tier 4 units probably aren't the best example, although you could produce 4 each of several different sorts of tier 4 units, and keep yourself busy if you're actually in a war of attrition. Still, sure, you've got to settle for 180 hammer figures. As long as you don't overspecialize your cities, though, this really doesn't seem like such a drawback. And if you did make one city the big hammer producer, then maybe you should be building wonders or towers or something instead of troops, with that city.
I continue to think that allowing Kuriotates to produce multiple units in one turn is a solution to a non-problem.
and more generally up to 200-300
