sooo I've just played the most fun and interesting game of Civ 5 in 15 years of playing. I decided to do something new, and boy do I not regret it. The settings are standard Pangaea map, 22 civs, 41 city states, immortal difficulty (I didn't want to extreme minmax to win against 21 deity civs lol), legendary start, standard time, raging barbs. It was my first time properly playing Shoshone as well. I had to share this run!
Off the bat my pathfinder spawns next to the French settler. Yoink, that's a free turn 1 worker. That's 1 snail eating civ down. I know I need to settle my 3 other cities quickly to grab as much of the map as possible. As soon as I settle my fourth city BOOM half the map declares on me. The Germans and Austrians in the north trying to blitzkrieg Te-Moak. The Celts and Arabs in the east, and the Babylonian's to the immediate south. The English, Spanish and Aztecs also all declared, but would do fuck all due to distance. I was in constant war on all sides for about 100+ turns. Huge coalition wars against me would continue until my science outpaced the ai and they couldn't compete. This is one of the reasons this game was so fun, I had to truly balance building an army, maintaining that army, and still allocating resources to get ahead on science. The sheer volume of units being sent at me made this game extremely enjoyable as I had to be very strategic with my units. I had 3-4 crossbowmen with +1 range and double attack. I was melting units. Every time 1 war ended another 2 civs would declare on me. This happened from the founding of my 4th city around turn 70 well into the 250 turn mark.
Another enjoyable part of the game was my devious use of citadels. I stole 4 wheat fields from Berlin and a salt mine from Austria early in the game. The constant wars were a bit of blessing in this respect. Te-Moak was a powerhouse with 3 salt mines, 6 wheat fields, sheep, and horses. The citadel shenanigans continued. I had no coal in my borders so I had to take Dublin from the celts. The Viking's called me into the war against the Celts, I let them take Dublin first so I could then declare on them and take the city with minimal warmongering malice. I then citadelled the Egyptians to get the coal. 3 more citadels would be plopped down to grab 4 uranium and some silver. Yes, this game was me continually trolling the Germans.
I won in the end via science. But, this game was soooo entertaining. The constant wars, ai vs ai world wars, being denounced 10+ times in 1 turn, the ai constantly backstabbing me and each other. The map was amazing so many fun choke points to defend and astonishingly good resources. Te-Moak being the GOAT of food production cities. So many of the ai's could only found 1 city forcing them to be extremely aggressive, even for immortal. If you haven't tried it yet, stick as many civs as possible onto a Pangaea map and watch the carnage unfold.