While Sirian's not likely to put an AI right on top of our heads here, it is a possibility (and there is an additional AI on this map, so it's slightly overloaded with civs). My gameplan here will be based around this concept, since the last thing I want to do is be struggling with unhappiness that I can never get rid of, short of conquering civilizations.įinally, don't try to be a hero at the start of the game. This also has the advantage of virtually eliminating war weariness from the equasion, since it will not accrue while fighting in your own territory. Instead of a slow and agonizing push through a sea of AI longbows with maces and cats, it's often more efficient to sit back and just defend until you have superior technology on hand (*cough* cavalry *cough*) which can then tear through the backwards AIs in rapid fashion. With a combination of maintenance costs and impossible-to-remove war weariness, Civ4 makes this a particularly acute problem for Always War. Secondly, just because you CAN push forward doesn't always mean that it's wise to do so. That can wait until later, while I expand and build up my own civ. I have no idea what the lay of the land looks like going into this game, but if there are any AI civs nearby, I plan to cripple them early on but not necessarily to worry about taking them out. It's enough to park a unit or two outside an AI capital in many cases, which will prevent them from ever improving any tiles or founding any additional cities.

For example, one of the critical things to remember about Always War gameplay (and this applies to Multiplayer games as well) is that you don't necessarily have to conquer a civilization in order to defuse it as a threat. 62! Obviously a lot has changed since then, but I do think there are some lessons that I've picked up which can still apply to the current game. I even took part in the first-ever Always War test of the Civ4 AI back in version. I have not played or written about any Always War games since Civ4 was released, but I have gone through no fewer than four different AW scenarios in the darkness of pre-release testing (three of them with Civ4 and one with Warlords). Most of you probably don't know this, but I have a lot of experience with Civ4 Always War.

Civ4 road to war patch