The club rules are pretty good.
There are a couple of them I don’t really agree with though:
No trading with the AI
Good, but I think you should be able to accept incoming deals from the AI.
AI is in the game? The only city that can be captured from that point on is the capital. All others must be razed.
If a player suddenly surrenders, should I not be able to take the rest of his cities if I’m halfway there? I get that you shouldn’t declare war on the AI just because he’s an easy target and you shouldn
t abuse the fact that is an AI but there are cases where you’d feel really cheated out of cities if a player drops out in the middle of a war.
Casus belli is required to declare war.
No surprise wars? To give the other player a heads up or what? I guess formal war is allowed although it is not really a casus belli?
This may clear some things up: there are no city states and no AI.
Old habits from civ3 MP die hard.
The club rules seems okay, as well. Just there’s a bunch of options and I’m not sure I can be bothered, at least not right now, specifying which we’ll follow.
Friendly rules okay? Seems minimal but banning a couple obvious exploits.
Can you clarify what the difference is? I read through that page a couple times and couldn’t find a clear delineation between friendly vs club rules. I thought it was all one ruleset.
OK, sounds good. Are we all on board with the friendly rules? And then if somebody bails we can discuss adopting the AI rules at that point. Like @J_Dennis said, you shouldn’t be prevented from finishing a conquest just because the other player rage-quit.
The early game is painful sometimes. Just watching the countdown of turns until the unit is produced. Not much to do except trying to plan out my cities. All that will probably change as the fog lifts and better options become available.
I don’t have barb problems, I have isolation problems. I’ve got a civ with trading bonuses, but I have yet to meet a single other city-state. I got a bonus trader when I researched pottery, and then I got a second trader from a friendly village, so now I’ve got two traders sitting idle in my capital with nowhere to go!