[akots]

That is confusing but I must agree with Kemal here as well on many points. At least there is a decent try to make AI more intelligent in civ4 compared to civ3 with more options which are more logical. Still some features of the game are very annoying and make it somewhat less playable for me personally compared to civ3. I'm also rather clueless as to how MP/PBEM is supposed to be played except that may be on the continents map. It seems based on my very limited experience here (a few MP games) that whoever builds the second/third warrior first and gets to the rival's capital basically has won the game. Same is true apparently for higher difficulty levels. I bet on Emperor and above AI can just walk in into any human capital for an instant kill around turn 20 or so and in many cases the city would be undefended. It seems that AI is just forced not to attack the human player early in the game. Civ3 had some pluses here because it was actually possible to play always war on Emperor level on continents/pangea maps.