It's nearly 2200, I have nearly 40 cities, and I'm just bored to death. I'm about to discover Future Tech 9, which does nothing for me at this point anyway, and whatever chance the AI had of putting up a good game was lost long ago when I was vulnerable with my lower tech research, overstretched army, etc. I.C.S. is dead in the early game, that's for sure, but I still end up with cities coming out my ears. Of course, I chose the conquest victory, so what should I expect? Well, perhaps more of a challenge from the AI would turn this city tedium into something fun? I don't have it in me to slog through to the end on this one.

By the way, I never adopted a religion or agreed to open borders (unless the civ was already dead to me). I found that this, too, helped to keep the A.I.s in check because they had less of a reason to hate me (differing religion is a -4 on relations), and it seems that by not having open borders with me, they were less inclined to mount attacks (does the A.I. scout your territory when you have open borders or something?). Maybe I lost some commerce here and some chance at better diplomacy, but the game played out nicely for me by ignoring those elements completely.

Please End

GAME 3: “So You Think You Can Play CivIV?”
Spurred on by forum friend, 'Hexagonian', and my own sense of fairness, I decided that I couldn't let the Noble difficultly setting do all the talking. I tried several flavors. For kicks, I first tried this outlandish setup (Emperor, raging barbs and aggressive A.I.):

Emperor

First, take a look at these map elements scaled to my preference! Cool, huh? See http://apolyton.net/dir/index.php?id=4979&t=reviews&toprate=5.0000&tophits=5594&cat=350 if you are curious.

ColdFever Scale

O.K. Here's a tip: Don't turtle on a Raging Barbs setup!

Barbs

Push your guard units out to the perimeter, on hills, and let the promotions stack up! Oh, and actually enjoy the chance of keeping an improvement or two before a barb pillages it.

Perimeter

It helps when you get a shared border with an A.I., right? Because barbs can't come in that way, right?

Guards

Actually, that's not really true if that AI decides to attack and defeat you, I guess. The lesson here was that while it's possible to fend off the raging barbarians, a neighboring AI can come in a kill you easily.

Safe Nope

Defeated

Here's Emperor with aggressive A.I., regular barbs.

Emp. Reg. Barbs

O.K. I just saw something Biblical happen in Civ and had to give this new religious element a moment of appreciation.

Lion and Lamb

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