So I thought I'd post my thoughts after finishing my game. The first game I abandoned after realizing that it would be a hopeless cause, mainly because I completely ignored districts. For my 2nd game (ever) I drew Aztecs on Shuffle map settings and had a no river start. The map turned out to be two big and 3 smaller land masses with lots of water. I had no close by neighbors and only one city state for quite a while so I decided against killing it and in the whole game I think I got 1 worker with 1 build left from an Eagle Warrior. What I did however was start tons of districts and then build the Pyramid and get the +30% to worker production civic and started to train workers for like 15-20 turns straight. After that I realized two things. 1st I should have waited for the 2 more build thingy civic and 2nd there was little my Emperor AI opponents could do at this point. I waited around till I got Cavalry and went into high production overproducing a lot of units. Then I realized that taking cities works quite differently from Civ IV and that by the time I could put all my Cavalry to work they would be outdated, anyways I killed off one of my neighbors and my few follow up new era units mopped up the other two. At this point it was very clear that I'd win reminiscent of Civ IV the endgame in Civ VI seemed to be boring. After getting some key wonders (Venetian Arsenal and Petra, but also the Colosseum, the Forbidden Palace, Ruhr Valley and a couple of others) I realized that the AI wasn't even challenging me on Wonders at all. Also the way the AI fought wars was horrible. If the AI fights like that every game there really should be no reason to ever lose a game, here is hoping. Some of AI did however out-teched, out-religioned and out-cultured me. They just didn't do anything with their advantage until it didn't matter anymore.
This ended up sounding more negative than I wanted to, I had a lot of fun for 75% of the game, the bad starting position gave me a challenge (the AI all had river starts btw.) playing with water was interesting and gave me a chance to try naval combat and I ended up winning by Domination backstabbing Alexander, my only friend this game and raining down a nuclear holocaust on France - bringing all their cites down to 0 within 1 turn and ended up taking both their capitals on the same turn 1852 AD. Not bad for my 2nd game.
I think I'll have quite a bit of fun with this game before going purely for PvP eventually, just trying all Civilizations and then getting into the two expansions is going to last quite a while, and while I'll definitely reach every victory once I'll probably do the same I did in Civ IV setting everything up in the early game with maximum efficiency to gain mid game dominance and once it's clear I'll win I'll just stop. The last part... the dominating the world without much resistance part never interested me. This game is much closer to Civ IV than to Civ V which in my eyes was a complete disaster, and I suspect that the multi player part of this game is going to be awesome and just as much fun as in Civ 4, even though the AI sucks considerably more than in a 14 year old game - which if you think about it is kind of an achievement in and of itself. Interestingly enough Firaxis apparently isn't going to fix that ever seeing how two expansions are already released without addressing this fundamental problem. Here is hoping the community has come up with some great AI mods. For now I'm gonna get into my next game: Random leader, shuffle map and immortal difficulty - and I'm going to have fun, and more questions =)
Yell0w
