the snowball or at least ramping up to beat down the ai IS the progression for a lot of players.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this.
(You can add me to the list of people who don't finish games but start game after game after game.)
I might go a step further and say that snowball is THE GAME.
What I mean is this. The other slogan besides "stand the test of time" that used to get bandied about was "interesting choices." I'll just focus on the choice from among buildings. So, as you're first learning Civ, early game, you can build a monument, a granary, a watermill, a shrine. (5 is my reference point). The game tells you what each one will do, but you don't really have a way of knowing, long term, how some extra culture, food, food and production or faith will help you. But it's a clear choice. Those are various strands of the game, and you can decide on whatever basis on which strand you'd most like to advance.
Once you've played a few games, you have a better sense of how those various things do benefit you long term, and maybe you've started to get the sense, well, nothing benefits me more than population growth. So you start to gravitate toward granary as your go-to choice in that early situation.
Once you play a little more, if you've got a certain kind of mind, you start to ask, "now, which one will help me
the most?" You start min-maxing, in other words. For every set of possible competing buildings, through the whole game, there
is a best answer to that question. Not one single best answer in all cases; it's partly situational. But you start to get the sense for what sort of situation has to obtain for you to deviate from the generally best.
As you get better at all of these things, you move up in difficulty level in order to keep giving yourself a challenge. You hit deity and the AIs start with so many advantages, and all through the game do everything faster than you that for you to compete at all, now all of those choices have to be absolutely optimal. You can't miss a trick. But if all of your choices are optimal, you can gradually chip away at the AIs starting advantages. Again, you can't do this unless you are making absolutely optimal choices, but once you do edge past the AI, all of that optimal infrastructure you built now lets you
keep building your lead over them (snowballing).
You have got to that point by getting particularly skilled at doing THE. THING. THAT. THE. GAME. MOST. FUNDAMENTALLY. ASKS. YOU. TO. DO. (make good choices).
So-called "snowballing" is actually PLAYING. CIV.
