I got this game a couple years ago, started with Warlord difficulty and worked up to Prince. But when I played my first Monarch game and saw the AI with an archer unit scouting around my base before I had time to pop out one warrior, that was enough cheating for me. I know it's hard for the AI to win without cheating, but the cheating still angers me, and when it's excessive, I feel like I don't even know what is a good strategy anymore because the rules have changed. Here are some things I did to keep things interesting without raising the difficulty:
Play marathon speed -- I like how this makes tech progression slower than building and building slower than transportation, as it ought to be.
Play all AIs vs the human (I usually play this on huge maps with warlord difficulty, but have won on Noble before).
Play permanent peace.
Put AIs on a team together (One game I role-played the Netherlands by playing on terra with handpicked AIs on teams, for instance, 2 or 3 AIs on a team each for England, Spain, and Russia).
Make the map crowded -- I have done stuff like put a dozen AIs on a small pangea map on prince difficulty -- this turns the game into a chaotic slug-fest from almost the first turn. The idea is to make it lucky to find a place for even 1 settler.
Play a sparse map -- play a huge map with few enemies, but raging barbarians. This will create A LOT of barbarians. It gets easy after you get the great wall though. But I sometimes die before getting the great wall on this map.
One city challenge (I didn't like it much though)
***
Mod the game. I noticed that the game seems to try to make you spend about the same amount of time on each era. I thought it would be more realistic to make each era of tech research about equally expensive, so that the early game was really slow and the late game seemed to fly by. I edited the game files on marathon so that each turn was 1 year, and multiplied tech research for ancient techs by 10, classical by 8, medieval by 6, renaissance by 4, industrial by 3, modern by 2, and future by 1 (no change). I also disabled inflation, since it is hard to crawl out from under inflation if it strikes you before you research currency (it also makes no sense to have inflation before you have invented paper currencies). This does several things -- one is that your starting techs actually matter a lot. It can take 300 years to research farming, for instance. It also means that you may actually fight wars with an army of warriors, which is something I'd hardly ever done before. This makes certain things really OP, like the pyramids (lets you skip to monarchy for unlimited city size hundreds of turns early), oracle (techs are more expensive than before), and alphabet (trading techs is again useful since they are so expensive), early bronze working (you may get it while some civs only have warriors, which makes conquering trivial -- but note you don't have any techs to generate income for large maintenance costs yet). Differences in techs also tend to accelerate more noticeably. On an archipelago map with England, I built the pyramids, great lighthouse, and colossus before a lot of other civs even had bronze working yet. It was prince difficulty. But I got owned my first game with this mod because I was the one left behind on tech. Once you do get rolling with 3k research per turn (you need a massive empire for that), you really feel like you earned it, because you struggled so hard to even utilize the food resources near your capital at the start of the game. But it makes you kind of dread starting a new game because of how much harder/more tedious the early game starts compared to the late game.
***
Imagine you are playing the sequel of a game you had previously won with the space race -- pretend that you are settlers on that spaceship landing on an alien planet. I made all the AIs against me (I figured they were hostile aliens), played on fantasy world with crazy resources (alien world), and gave myself free techs with the world editor. I actually made myself research some basic techs like agriculture and husbandry though, since I figured the flora and fauna are literally alien and you'd need to relearn those things. That was time consuming since I was still playing my slow tech mod. Also, I didn't let myself build any gunpowder units until I captured my first source of iron (how can you make guns without iron?) I think this may have made myself overpowered, but I let myself start with exactly 1 mechanized infantry. But I got owned on 2 previous games where I tried this and didn't give myself any extra military help. I think it's logical that the settlers could have brought some weapons with them, but would have been unable to manufacture similar weapons once they landed on the planet. I figured the ship they landed on could have been solar powered and had an onboard computer with encyclopedias, so that knowledge of tech would not be a problem for these otherwise stone-aged settlers. I added the max number of AIs on a huge map so that there would be lots of fighting and exploring. It was fun at first, but of course big maps tend to get tedious and I'm not sure if I will finish this game to a victory. It was challenging to defend my first few cities (I only had 1 super unit and 18 hostile AIs), but now I'm cranking out cavalry to kill hordes of archers, so victory is kind of a foregone conclusion. It is kind of fun to see how quickly it is possible to make a civilization expand though when there is little resistance.
Let one of the AIs be the alien -- Go into the world builder at the start of the game and make one of the AIs like a settling alien, and give him all the techs. Then play the game normally. I haven't tried this yet. I just had the thought that maybe the alien AI would immediately vassal everyone, so maybe you'd have to turn off vassals to make this work. I guess you'd have to be a bit lucky and expand against the odds faster than the alien AI, or maybe kill his starting city early if he moves his mechanized unit out to explore.
Play marathon speed -- I like how this makes tech progression slower than building and building slower than transportation, as it ought to be.
Play all AIs vs the human (I usually play this on huge maps with warlord difficulty, but have won on Noble before).
Play permanent peace.
Put AIs on a team together (One game I role-played the Netherlands by playing on terra with handpicked AIs on teams, for instance, 2 or 3 AIs on a team each for England, Spain, and Russia).
Make the map crowded -- I have done stuff like put a dozen AIs on a small pangea map on prince difficulty -- this turns the game into a chaotic slug-fest from almost the first turn. The idea is to make it lucky to find a place for even 1 settler.
Play a sparse map -- play a huge map with few enemies, but raging barbarians. This will create A LOT of barbarians. It gets easy after you get the great wall though. But I sometimes die before getting the great wall on this map.
One city challenge (I didn't like it much though)
***
Mod the game. I noticed that the game seems to try to make you spend about the same amount of time on each era. I thought it would be more realistic to make each era of tech research about equally expensive, so that the early game was really slow and the late game seemed to fly by. I edited the game files on marathon so that each turn was 1 year, and multiplied tech research for ancient techs by 10, classical by 8, medieval by 6, renaissance by 4, industrial by 3, modern by 2, and future by 1 (no change). I also disabled inflation, since it is hard to crawl out from under inflation if it strikes you before you research currency (it also makes no sense to have inflation before you have invented paper currencies). This does several things -- one is that your starting techs actually matter a lot. It can take 300 years to research farming, for instance. It also means that you may actually fight wars with an army of warriors, which is something I'd hardly ever done before. This makes certain things really OP, like the pyramids (lets you skip to monarchy for unlimited city size hundreds of turns early), oracle (techs are more expensive than before), and alphabet (trading techs is again useful since they are so expensive), early bronze working (you may get it while some civs only have warriors, which makes conquering trivial -- but note you don't have any techs to generate income for large maintenance costs yet). Differences in techs also tend to accelerate more noticeably. On an archipelago map with England, I built the pyramids, great lighthouse, and colossus before a lot of other civs even had bronze working yet. It was prince difficulty. But I got owned my first game with this mod because I was the one left behind on tech. Once you do get rolling with 3k research per turn (you need a massive empire for that), you really feel like you earned it, because you struggled so hard to even utilize the food resources near your capital at the start of the game. But it makes you kind of dread starting a new game because of how much harder/more tedious the early game starts compared to the late game.
***
Imagine you are playing the sequel of a game you had previously won with the space race -- pretend that you are settlers on that spaceship landing on an alien planet. I made all the AIs against me (I figured they were hostile aliens), played on fantasy world with crazy resources (alien world), and gave myself free techs with the world editor. I actually made myself research some basic techs like agriculture and husbandry though, since I figured the flora and fauna are literally alien and you'd need to relearn those things. That was time consuming since I was still playing my slow tech mod. Also, I didn't let myself build any gunpowder units until I captured my first source of iron (how can you make guns without iron?) I think this may have made myself overpowered, but I let myself start with exactly 1 mechanized infantry. But I got owned on 2 previous games where I tried this and didn't give myself any extra military help. I think it's logical that the settlers could have brought some weapons with them, but would have been unable to manufacture similar weapons once they landed on the planet. I figured the ship they landed on could have been solar powered and had an onboard computer with encyclopedias, so that knowledge of tech would not be a problem for these otherwise stone-aged settlers. I added the max number of AIs on a huge map so that there would be lots of fighting and exploring. It was fun at first, but of course big maps tend to get tedious and I'm not sure if I will finish this game to a victory. It was challenging to defend my first few cities (I only had 1 super unit and 18 hostile AIs), but now I'm cranking out cavalry to kill hordes of archers, so victory is kind of a foregone conclusion. It is kind of fun to see how quickly it is possible to make a civilization expand though when there is little resistance.
Let one of the AIs be the alien -- Go into the world builder at the start of the game and make one of the AIs like a settling alien, and give him all the techs. Then play the game normally. I haven't tried this yet. I just had the thought that maybe the alien AI would immediately vassal everyone, so maybe you'd have to turn off vassals to make this work. I guess you'd have to be a bit lucky and expand against the odds faster than the alien AI, or maybe kill his starting city early if he moves his mechanized unit out to explore.
