My brother and I have been playing this game all week online against people. It's tons of fun.
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Well, finished up my attempted cultural victory on Warlord. Lost due to turn limit (standard game pace) with 15 turns left on my Utopia project. Turns out, you can't hurry that with a Great Engineer, like I'd been planning to (I had two set aside for it because I knew I'd be cutting it close with my final policies coming at turn 493)...
Anyways, it was close enough that I think I'll stick to Warlord for at least the next game or two, as it seemed to be a good challenge for now. I was struggling a bit on my Prince game, though I ended up scoring better due to the microscopic size of my 2 city + 1 puppet empire.
The most important thing is to expand as quickly as possible at the beginning until you have at least 7 or 8 cites... having just a few is always a losing strategy. Every time we play online we face people who don't understand how to expand, and they can't keep up at all. Pump settlers out of your capitol until there is no space left to build cities on. Every other city should build stuff to kill barbs or workers.
edit:
About Steam... it used to suck up until a few years ago. Now it's actually a very easy and reliable way to purchase games and play them online. They have a pretty big library. I prefer Steam over buying games any other way. You can play any game the moment you purchase it. Also you'll never lose your games because you can just download them again. For example I cannot play Battlefield 1942 because I left the disk case with the serial code at a friend's house 4 or 5 years ago... although I still have the disks.