To me, the AI seems a lot nicer. I’ve since given up on my last game, being a standard size map, late game it killed my laptop with the dual-core 2.66GHz processor unable to keep up. A few things stood out for me in this game.
Firstly, I played the game as a single significant civ alone on a landmass. Playing at king level in Civ IV would make this a very hard game to recover from, essentially need to beeline astronomy in order to get the caravels out and get some tech trading happening. In Civ II, it was easy to recover - either Marco Polo’s Embassy would immediately initiate diplomatic contact, or sending a trieme across the ocean (with only a 50% chance of being sunk - thank goodness for save and load). In Civ V, having people responsible for research meant I wasn’t nearly as boned as I would have traditionally been. I’ve said it before, and I will say again, that has to be my favourite implemented feature of Civ V because it truly allows for both small and big empires (in theory). From a more practical sense, it is open to gaming the system from a player perspective, as has been documented frequently in this thread with the ICS strategy. But all things fair and equal, I love the feature, and when I made contact with other civs, I wasn’t exactly too far behind. I wasn’t going to be bringing sticks to a gun fight.
The unfortunate thing about my last game however was that it was a real sleeper for me, and contributing also to me giving up this game. I just took a backseat in the world political stage, and that meant path of least resistance by going into builder mode. My military was pitiful, a whole 4 ground units. I knew the AI wouldn’t mount a good invasion force, and I knew that having a few boats sitting in my borders would be enough. I could have made the game interesting by involving myself with the various conflicts going on, but I was under no pressure to do so.
That said, I was incredibly suprised to see that the Japanese managed to eliminate the Roman empire completely, and had the Siam empire on its knees, down to one final city tucked away in the mountains. Besides the odd invitation to join a war, no one made any demands of me, everyone was friendly towards me, and, well, as I said, no pressure to get involved. Diplomacy royally needs a kick up the bum.
Comments regarding the empty space on the map. With my game, basically everywhere was settled. Even though it was a continent map script, it looked much more like a archipelago - quite a number of small landmasses arranged on the map, with one large landmass housing three civs. The Japanese and the Russians had a tonne of cities to their name - very big empires, and looked like they were the dominant force in this game.
Finally, builder style meant I didn’t really care about my cities and how they were managed, just build another building that roughly suited the plan I had for that city, and that pretty much meant build anything, prioritising those buildings which increase production. I find it hard to see city sites on the map that stand out and say “this is a production juggernaut, or a commerce styled city.” If I tried, I could have made my empire run a lot more efficient with tile and building improvements, and scrounge together as much coin as I could, but I’ll let this be a win to the AI on this map.
