Playing Civ 6 made me nostalgic for Civ 4, so I made it my project to get better at it.  I’ve been watching videos from Sullla’s channel (a big Civ lp-er) and have learned a lot of good stuff that helped me in Civ 4

Now to start with this victory wasn’t exactly easy.  I took the most broken, OP leader in Civ 4 (Huana Capac) and used a map-type that the AI does really poorly in (highlands with dense peaks, AI pathfinding screws up).  Even then I did a tiny bit of save-scumming at the beginning to fight off the barbarians.  But once things were going, I found that a Civ 4 game can be really easy… when it acts like a Civ 6 game.  Let me explain:

The reason Highlands map is so easy is as I said the AI’s pathfinding screws up.  I never got war declared on me during my Emperor level game, my only neighbor was Charlemagne who loved me because I adopted his religion, and my other close neighbors fought inconclusive wars amongst each other with no territory changing hands.  This let me sit back and tech away, *and that’s also how I won my Civ 6 deity game*.  It’s made me definitely appreciate that one of the big things holding back Civ 6 difficulty is the AIs’ inability to conquer each other and snowball out of control.  In a normal Civ 4 game one or more AIs will declare war, conquer their neighbor, and suddenly roll right up to the player’s boarders with the world’s largest army in tow.  A successful conqueror loses relatively few units to gain a lot of territory, and unsuccessful one throws away all their production producing units.  This helps AIs snowball when they focus on conquest. I don’t know exactly why Civ 6 AI is unable to conquer each other (OK I do, it’s 1upt) but this failure is a large part of the reason why I think they aren’t able to challenge a player once you escape the early game and are in the midgame.  No single AI will be so far ahead of everyone as to be unstoppable, everyone is usually around the same size.

So that’s a bunch of random thoughts, but it’s what I thought of when playing Civ 4.